Archive 17/01/2023.

Setting up standalone kNet server on VPS

Lumak

I’m not sure if VPS is something that most developers setup, but I repeated this setup again today for the second time in months and forgotten what steps I took to do it, so I thought I can share this.

Setting it up
For starters, I use DigitalOcean’s VPS service. It’s cheap and you can setup multiple Droplets, which is really a nice feature.

Here’s a reference video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8PNJfDjFQg for those not familiar with setting up VPS.
Unlike the video, I didn’t setup ZPanel but do use Putty and WinSCP.
I chose Ubuntu 14.04.3 64-bit for my Droplet.
You do need to install camke, gcc and g++ before you get started.

Standalone kNet library
The kNet library found here https://bitbucket.org/clb/knet/downloads is not up to date and didn’t build.
I’ve made a few corrections clb-knet-2441ea01b46a.zip, and it builds HelloServer that uses port 2345 that can be tested with 16_Chat demo.

Lumak

My plan was to write a master server next, but I just discovered Unity’s master server API here http://unity3d.com/master-server.
It might be easier to adopt their strategy.

rasteron

Hey Lumak, this is quite interesting. You can also have a look at Torque3D’s masterserver implementation. The popular version that I know of just uses PHP and already tested to be still working. The code is also short and simple enough (~300 lines of code) but there’s some work to be done on the urho client side.

Here’s the link of the source for reference:

garagegames.com/community/re … view/14857

Lumak

Oh wow, that is really short. Thank you for this.

I did end up writing up my own master server using kNet for the sake of writing one, even after seeing Unity and RakNet master server samples. I’ll probably use what I got for now, but it’s good to know that there’s something that I can fall back on.

rasteron

[quote=“Lumak”]Oh wow, that is really short. Thank you for this.

Sure thing and sounds great!