Devlog KAG Official Modded Server - USA Beta

Hey Folks!

The Official Modded Server is entering public beta; while this beta is on we'll be looking at system load, any (extra) stability issues, and how much use it gets. The server is under the name "Official Modded Server - [mod name]" and is hosted on the same machine as the other USA official servers.

We're hoping that by reducing the friction of joining modded servers, and providing a potential showcase for community talent, that we can help keep the modding scene going and increase new player's exposure and acceptance of mods.

The server is on 2-hourly rotations of the following mods:

• Attack and Defense
  An asymmetric gamemode - a defending team has to protect the princess from invading team of barbarians, using mechanisms, cunning, and a lot of arrows.
  This mod features player heads! You can upload new heads at http://makvps1.mooo.com/heads.php - we'll look at getting this under a nicer URL once we know everything's working right.
  
• Shiprekt
  Build ships out of random junk and sink the enemy - then team up with them against other enemies! Last team alive wins.
  Vanilla version for now. Please let us know your favourite community version of Shiprekt and we'll try to host it!
  
• Laser Wars
  Soldat meets sci fi. CTF with multiple classes, futuristic guns, building, grenades, jetpacks and more.
  This mod has had a few edits to make it smaller and avoid potential abuse from the developer on official servers. I tried renaming it but there's a lot of dependent paths and unravelling it was a headache, so we'll just deal with the name clashes for now.

A warning - Currently there's no warning from inside that the server is going to restart - this is very much "on the list" of stuff to fix ASAP :)

For those playing along at home, yep, we had some trouble getting Factions working - it'll come soon if everything else works.

For people hosting servers on GSHost, I'll release python source soon for interfacing with the API and automating your servers - just not tonight!

Note: At the time of writing the server will not have a gold name in the list - this will be remedied soon but it requires a new build, and it's after hours here.

Thanks to @jrgp for hosting them and setting up an API that made automating the rotations simpler, to @makmoud98 for helping with compatibility, to @Verrazano for attack and defense, to @Aphelion for laser wars, and to @Furai for sifting countless people's opinions on viable mods.

So - Jump on! Have some fun, let us know what mods you like, what mods you dont, and any issues you have getting it working!

Cheers,
Max

 

VANILLA SHIPREKT RETURNS

That's a pretty great rotation. Can't wait to play on it!
But I was expecting it to be yellow on the server list, or green or something. It might not get a lot of use if it's just another blue server.

 

The mods for the official modded servers have already been decided. A poll was put up a while ago asking what mods people would like to see on the server which can be found here.
Maybe in the future @Furai will ask for more mod suggestions once more mods are made.

 

Does the server have admins? I don't seem to have admin on it

Edit: I also worry about how it will stay populated if it has to kick everyone and restart every 2 hours. Is there any way to do a switcheroo so that the players wouldn't just be booted from the game? Like "start another instance with different mod, invite all current players to it, and then close in 1 minute" or something like that?

Outta date? Are they somehow worse because they're older :?

My guess is the server is geared towards objective focused mods rather than sandboxy ones, because of the rotation. I don't know a lot about RoS but it's pretty sandboxy iirc

 

I'm actually open to hosting pretty much any or all mods as long as they don't require super persistent hosting (sandboxes are ok but if they require 2 days (or even like 5 hours really) of levelling and building to "get good" then they're out). The main thing is that it's stable and works out of the box, doesn't have many dependencies, and it's a bonus if the custom heads mod works with it.

We were at one point requesting that they be uploaded to the API, as this makes them 100x easier to install - but since then I've kind of had second thoughts about that, because we need to be able to guarantee that some 3rd party (you) can't change the code and content that we're running on official servers without warning. So zips are fine.

The aim is to have a diverse set of mods in rotation and provide an ever-changing, stably hosted showcase of community talent and what can be done with the modding engine, to drive people's interest.

If we get more than like 14, we can shake up the rotation each fortnight and announce it ahead of time, and potentially decide it with a poll. At this stage we're pretty far from having to do that though :D

No offence, but I wanted to get the modded server working before running yet another poll about the lineup :)

The rotations will likely be more like 24 hours once it's out of beta - I just want to make sure the rotation system doesn't have any issues and this way all the mods can be played sooner, and we can see what works and what doesn't.

Doing a "soft switch" is really not easy at all, and unloading/reloading mods between joins isn't something that I'd like to rely on. The plan is more to have a warning 30, 5 and 1 minutes before it goes down, and bug the players to rejoin, rather than just kicking them all. I'm waiting for a secure TCPR bridge for that though as I don't want to do remote raw TCPR on joe's machines if I can help it.

Er, apparently not. I'll ask Joe how to set that up because I don't want to break things :)

 

Good idea! /queue will require doctoring the gamemode of each mod or injecting a script with tcpr but that's probably do-able tbh.

Also, as a result of the work behind this - for anyone using GSHost to run servers, here's an open source python wrapper that lets you manage servers remotely.
https://forum.thd.vg/threads/gshost...pper-for-managing-kag-servers-remotely.26527/