xrystal

The welcome message can be modified. Good idea, could put either a short explaination or a simple link there. I just have to get up my build environment for the lobby again to be able to actually do that. If I remember correctly, linebreak was not possible in the descriptions, but will have to check that again to be sure. Thanks for testing, glad to hear. Is CM that hard? I have to admit, the "normal" niob is already quite hard enough for me I added the silver and gold EE CM ones.

That PFP server was pretty much for myself I should probably add more difficulties for it. But yeah, the list has grown over time and it was always a back- and forth between keeping it short but supporting the mods wanted. And last week while trying to get running everything again I copied my serverlist from one file format to another and added even more errors to it. With the old server, I had less control about the ressource usage of single game servers which made some processes use more ressources than actually needed. On the current one, I can assign precise limits for cpu and memory which allow me to put up more game servers within the same amount of ressources as I can be sure that memleaking processes will now just restart if they hit a memory limit. For the higher player numbers servers however we'll probably have to test how much ressources they actually need under load to not restrict them too much. Especially considering superspawn probably causes more load the different configurations of game servers should probably also be treated different in terms of ressource assignment. Also: It's okay, I don't mind input, it's helpful. And technically, with everything new and fresh, now is a very good time for changing things. I also still miss some major mods... About the server names, I am still a bit torn about how much abbreviation would be good: It's not that rare players actually stumble upon the game servers without any outside knowledge. So they would have no reference of the abbreviations in the titles, try to join at random and consquently fail. That being said, not seeing the full title displayed also is no help to them, hmm... Sure. You'll have to verify tho whether they are working or not as I currently don't have a matching clientside EE setup to do so myself. I'll add the file for CM later today to my images and post again once adjusted (currently, the servers should now run in various difficulties for EE Alternate Spells but still without CM).

I put everything which matters into the description (aside from the fact that I did indeed forgot to put "alternate spells" into the alternate spell server... ) Superspawn, since it is just a serverside config file, is not a technical requirement from the client, as you already wrote, so I have not included it in the mod list. I tried to put it into the more informal server title, but yeah, not much space there for full titles. All I can say is that I made the same assumptions and it indeed seems to be that way - actual insight I have not. I have a short list of files which I need for running a server without a complete game directory, which for a vanilla game is the following list - maybe it's possible to remove even more, but this works well for me so far for standalone servers: For each mod, I replace the existing files or add new ones in the order of installation (for instance, first cm patch, then ee patch, then ee modules) ignoring the client side files. For alternate spells, the server side looks like this, so it's just a handful of extra files and some file content changes: Hu. Seems like I mixed that up with something else. Well, very good to know, thanks

Sure, I mean, you are also allowed to use more optimistic or heroic names, but that's up to you... I have not seen more than 5 players at once on a server so far, but that's the technical limit for campaigns only, free play mode allows for a maxiumum of 8 players (how have you done those 9 in your screenshot? :D). How stable that is probably depends a lot on the CAs spammed and the stability of Sacred2 itself... ;) You need all to have the exact same gamefiles/mods active to play together. If your gamefiles differ from those on the server, you'll have issues joining the servers (usually wrong mods crash on join) and probably all kind of undefined behaviour even if not. So you kind of are forced to decide on which mod you want to play, sorry By default, the servers have no passwords, but yes, can be configured - if you have a specific configuration in mind I can either add that one to the preconfigured list with a password for you or you could of course also startup a server via the s2gs.exe and register it to the lobby. The later requires setting up port forwarding/firewall, tho. Just wanted to clarify that even if it's a bit of a hassle to setup in general anyone is able to register any kind of server against the lobby.

Yes, the GoG version works fine - only important thing, but I assume thats only a thing one would have to check for old CD versions, is that the game is patched to the latest version of Sacred, I.e. Ice&Blood 2.65. In theory, older versions could work, too, but are untested and also all the hosted servers use the latest ones and would probably be incompatible should any game files differ in the older version. The lobby is not separated like it was originally - all regions connect now to the same shared instance, even if they are configured to connect to different sacred2 subdomains or ports by default. Depending on the game servers region and your respective local region for some people the latency might be worse than for others, but that's about it. If for some reason the lobby is not found for a player, it's possible to manually force a specific lobby ip and port in "%APPDATA%/Local/Ascaron Entertainment/Sacred2/optionsCustom.txt", for instance like this:

While I am not sure whether I want it that complicated (like, also for me, I currently don't even have a working build environment to do changes on the lobby side of code ^^) I do like the idea of tying the ability to create servers in the hosted environment to something ingame-related. Maybe just using the same credentials as for the lobby would already suffice as a decent barrier, I'll have to test that.

The lobby and preconfigured gameservers are back up. While I still have some minor todos and some small things to adjust (chat window in lobby seems to not connect yet for instance), nothing of that should lead to any other longer duration downtime in the foreseeable future. ClosedNet ones, unfortunately no. "Normal" HC servers in OpenNet are working and can be configured, but ClosedNet is a different beast. While I do have a better understanding of the whole thing now thanks to other awesome people research and information gathering over the last few years it would still need a good amount of time to actually implement the missing functions in the lobby to support that mode, too. It's kind of amazing tho that in this point in time it's more of an issue of personal time than an issue of general technical possibillity, but that's still a limitation which prevents me from making any promises ;) Yeah, all the combinations are indeed an issue. Like, for multiple reasons: Even Idling servers cost a constant amount of the limited pool of performance and adding a lot of different combinations renders the server list ingame quite confusing. For me a bit more troublesome however is usually to actually put together the server files for a modded game version. Like, installing it on my own game, extracting the needed files for the server side and testing that it's actually running. The fact that I am - of course, my own fault - under Linux does not make such setups and tests easier. For some mods, I don't need to actually install them and can just manually extract the files and replace them in the vanilla server files, but it's a bit of an experiment every time. For the old server, I had docker-compose files with volume mounts for the different mods, for the now all new server, I have build the files directly into the respective containers and tagged accordingly which makes them a bit easier to use for me, current the list looks like this: Launching the server is good to automate once setup with such images: That being said, as shown, for alternate Spells, there is currently one image already and a server configured (with silver difficulty) which I added as a test to the list a while ago, so the general configuration is already prepared. If there is demand for that or another specific mode, I could also add that to the list. I know very well what I like to play, but I have basically no clue what most other people like, so I definitly do take suggestions for server configurations. I have also been thinking for some time about putting together some very basic kind of configuration website for temporary servers in a specific configuration. Like, someones wants to play, opens a website, clicks together from the list of supporteds mods a config and presses start and the server keeps running for a few hours before it terminates itself automatically. That would keep the server lists clean enough and the load low, but allow for players to also run very specific configurations without having to host them on their own systems (which absolutely does work with the current lobby, but is more technically involved than doing so for many modern games). The new server infrastructure would actually help with that. Only thing I have no good idea yet for is how to operate that without allowing a random person on the internet to break it for everyone by launching/spamming too many servers in a short time frame or preventing similar malicious intents. @Dax I've been in the german forum for a long time and liked it when it was active. I think, that's a general fate many forums share nowadays. I am always happy if I see one of these classic boards which is still in use, the modern internet is so damn bland. And regarding youtube, we'll, it would be fun, but the issue is, most of which I would have to show is pretty much only IT stuff, like DevOps or System Administration kind of things, very little of it would actually be related to Sacred itself (even if that was the goal all along)...

Well, generally speaking, yes. Right now however no, because it's takes me a bit more time to get everything up and running again than originally planned, maybe one or two days more... to cite gogo: In the under normal circumstances active server list are free and campaign servers of EE 3.2a with activated SuperSpawn.

Info: From today 11th 20:30 CEST to at most 14th OpenNet will be down for maintenance. I have to swap the physical server the lobby and gameservers are hosted on and update some related software and unfortunatly won't be able to do this without a rather long downtime. From the players perspective nothing will change and existing accounts will be migrated. I'll give notice here once it's back up, hopefully a bit earlier than expected.

Yes, the servers still reset once a week (every tuesday). But aside from these kind of issues also differences in mods/gamefiles could cause crashes like that and given my probably not-anymore up-to-date server files for some gamemodes it's worth to double check if the servers mod versions match your local ones. I intended to move the gameservers to another server and improve the infrastructure around the lobby for quite a while, but well nothing much ever happened. For now, I just maintain the current state although it could really be improved by a lot.

Perfect! Thank you, was just about to start a little session again and was delighted to find your mod - previously I only knew about the reborn-related one but that mod was no option as I did not like the other changes it did beside the resolution, so I very much appreciate your standalone option. Also love the fact you added the source code. And just in case someone else runs Sacred on linux, can also confirm there are no issues using this with proton.

Very nice project! Most of the code wasn't even written by me, but the original author also marked his code as public domain, so that should be no issue, feel free to bundle or alter it any way you like, especially for such useful utilities, everything which makes the usage easier is a wonderful thing

@GastonHOyarz250 Nice, I am happy you got it working. @gogoblender Just to be clear: The reverse engineering goes way over my head, that was other good people incredible work, if you look closer on the first page of the thread ;) Just a small service announcement: Since Hetzner (a german server hosting company) decided to move the Server I use for the lobby and some gameservers of Sacred 2 physically from one datacenter to another, there will be a scheduled downtime from 1. to 2. march, from Hetzners side round about starting at 22:00 going until to 6:30 (MEZ) and very likely plus some additional time before and after from my side, too, because that is a usual workday for me and if anything goes wrong with it I will not be able to fix it instantly but only after work is done which might drag that by a few more hours on march 2. edit: the server has been moved and the lobby and gameservers are up again.

I am sure they have their own stuff to do already, considering all the mods they release and update. Also, I got a bit of help a while ago with the default settings of some mods to ease access to the multiplayer by bringing a previously patched out button - that one for opennet - back in ;) Had a quick look into the database table for raw numbers, did not really kept track: the account table has currently a bit more than 4k entries. Considering that some people might have created multiple accounts like me for testing, forgot their credentials or had a quick look but found no one to play like Shinryuu mentioned for example the real number of users is obviously way lower than that and there are no statistics kept on how active any of these users are once they created their account. But I do see the list of recent logins or server starts whenever I check the state of the lobby and some names I keep reading, so some do return. Anyway, I am still happy with that amount. It might be a niche, but whenever I want to play with someone, I can just play my usual previously singleplayer sessions online and see if someone joins me, worked often enough. Many players I met were quite nice and communicative. Also I'm sure quite a few of them don't even know they are using this solution because they just bought and started their game without visiting any forums explaining them there is a 3rd party involved which is oddly satisfying in it's own way. Nah, no doggies jumping arround in my workplace currently. But who knows, I was often amazed how small Germany actually is when talking to random people on the internet about places so irrelevant no one should know them; also seems like quite a few live here in the northern part of it...

Hello. Sorry, for all the confusion. Let me try to at least clear that as far as possible. To be fully honest: For the most time I actively avoided here, Discord and other similar platforms. I noticed I don't find the time and motivation to do the support I'm actually supposed to do for my own infrastructure. That is on one hand codewise a few much needed improvements to the stability of the lobby, and on the other hand rather ordinary support on questions which are asked either repeatedly or are indeed unique but instead would require quite a bit of time on my side to be answered satisfactorily which kind of frustrates me. I had a lot of fun tinkering and getting the supplied code running in it's current environment, but I wish I could also say it would get much better than that which it probably won't. Turns out once you get a bit older paying the money for some servers becomes way less of an issue than actually putting time into maintaining it and the stuff arround it properly. So you can be sure this will continue to run as it is, but probably support will stay on the same miserable level, too . Even today I was originally here for a rather selfish purpose only, namely looking into the information about Flix's upcoming Purist Fixpack I read about in hope to be able to play that myself during a few finally upcoming days of vaccation in case it has been released until then. Kind of could not postpone any further looking into my own thread at that point so here I am... Only minor thing I changed on the server side at last is, that now weekly each Tuesday 7 PM EST (like steam) the lobby will do a scheduled restart for both itself and my servers hosted on it, which is a rather unrefined method to tackle hopefully most simple issues with servers sometimes not beeing usable or stuck after a few weeks of continued runtime. I don't like this solution, because there is no warning in-game for servers running active sessions during that time which is the reason I did not setup it that way even after thinking about it a few times already in the past. But I have the feeling especially with me not doing anything, automated "rough" maintanance at a constant time is still better than my random maintanance every now and then or none at all. Following this, way to late, but for the sake of completeness: @GastonHOyarz250: I would check the channel table in the sqlite database - might be it's empty because their initialization was not executed for some reason which would be: INSERT INTO channels (channel_name, channel_subject, channel_creator, creator_id, channel_protected) VALUES ('System', 'System Channel', 'Admin', 0, 1); INSERT INTO channels (channel_name, channel_subject, channel_creator, creator_id, channel_protected) VALUES ('Lobby', 'Lobby Channel', 'Admin', 0, 1); Otherwise it could afaik only fail for the port not beeing reachable. @wade-newb: You can enter anything into the create account formular - server side nothing is validated, so you don't need your key. And yes, the .txt should have been all you needed assuming you have not changed the lobby url from the default in your games config file. @IronxLungs85 : Error 61 is firewall or portforwarding, since you crossed out it beeing a blocked port on your system, it should be either missing unblocking on your router itself or NAT there not mapping incoming requests properly to your host machine. If the one you want to play with is on windows, he could install "telnet client" from the Windows Features and test with it if your public IP address has Port 7011 open. If it has and still does not work, the port is only open on the router but not forwared to the host of your server. @Dax Thanks for declaring that "fluent" And no, at least until now, the new right owner of the franchise did not complain (I doubt he even knows or cares ;)) and I hope it'll stay like that at least until he himself brings out something offical again.