1) There is no launcher needed.
You can start the starmade.jar directly with the desired commands, use the starmade-starter-linux.sh as a sample to deviate and try different options to adjust it to your system. (Like garbage collection, parallel garbage collection, "-server" variable for java before the -jar and so on.)
2) Its not a single command, unless you download the zip file directly and manually extract it into your directory.
There is no real way around a small script.
(Please note: versions in this example are outdated, wrote this a long time ago.. ^^°)
Version a)
Get last line from
http://files.star-made.org/releasebuildindex
replace the "." at the beginning with
http://files.star-made.org
and append .zip
Last line example for current release:
0.19320#20150711_191815 ./build/starmade-build_20150711_191815
resulting releasebuild-url:
Version b)
If you are experienced in writing code,
you can use and recreate the full functionality of the launcher.
Get last line from
http://files.star-made.org/releasebuildindex
replace the "." at the beginning with
http://files.star-made.org
and append /checksums
Last line example for current release:
0.19320#20150711_191815 ./build/starmade-build_20150711_191815
resulting url to checksums file:
This file contains all checksums and files that are part of the build,
so a script could walk through every line,
and enqueue a download for every file that has a different checksum.
(This allows even a "smart-repair" and optimized downloads from version to version like the launcher does.)
Installing
Once you have the zip downloaded, shutdown the server, extract the contents over the current installation and start again.
3) Cannot be answered right away. Depends heavily on the way you want to use it.
And if you play mostly default settings you should be fine with 4-6 players at around 2GB ram, 2 cores at 2 Ghz each and roughly 50gb disk space. (add some more disk space when creating proper backups and alike.)
If you go to increase sector size, build area or movement speed settings, your hardware demands grow exponentially, and its really hard to give any estimate on the actual demand.
Another factor is the sanity of your players, if they build a sector-sized station in every sector, without leaving at least a sector gap to prevent loading multiple of those large stations together all the time, you can also save a lot of hardware demands.
- Andy
