[2020] Open source dedicated server?

Nope, I mean, yes, you can talk with me, but I’m not an actual member of the Exiles development team

From what I read, @eNTi clearly stated from the start that he was talking about the Game Server itself, not the Launcher Tool.

I do believe there was a Linux version of the server internally at some point, but that there was some issues with it.

Regarding why it’s closed source, well, it’s not just the game server, the game server is a special build of the actual game, so releasing the game server source code would be like releasing the entire game source, including a bazillion of things that Funcom would not be legally allowed to release anyway.

Regarding the performance issues, they are not Windows or Linux related, there are people looking at it, that has more to do with the fact Exiles was built on a now quite old version of the Unreal Engine, which did not benefit from all the optimizations introduced by Epic later, so even if you had the source code, I doubt you could find magical optimizations that make the game run much faster

That being said, if you are an experienced coder with a track record, I guess you could still contact the team with some suggestions, eventually even sign some NDA to see if you can put your hands in the engine - does not hurt trying, at worse nothing will happen, at best it will happen and you will find some good stuff in there

I think the use of the word “client” is totally misleading in the context.

The “Dedicated Server Launcher”, is a tool, that manages/updates/launches a “(game) server”.

The actual “Conan Exiles” game that people launch, is often called the “Game Client” because a “Client” is designed to connect to a “Server”.

I believe the following of words can be used without too much ambiguity

• “Server”, “Game Server”, “Exiles Server”, “Server Executable”
• “Game”, “Client”, “Exiles Client”, “Game Executable”, “Game Program”
• “Dedicated Server Launcher”, “Server Launcher”, “Launcher Tool”, “Launcher”, “Server Manager”

This is going to be my last answer on the topic

The “open source unreal” is just (as somebody wrote), the core of what Unreal is, but that does not include any of the following:

• Any modification made by a company (and trust me on that, if you are going to write anything significantly large, you WILL have to modify parts of the engine heavily)
• Parts provided by Epic to people who are registered developers for Xbox, PlayStation, etc… that contains integration with the SDKs of these platforms, even us, as developers, have access control on our own internal documentation and wikis to avoid leaking informations to third parties who are not authorized by Sega and Microsoft. Even disclosing that some specific APIs exists would engage the company’s responsibility.
• Third party code patches from middleware providers, like for example Granite Textures, VWise Sound System, etc… etc…

Regarding being scared about messy code, well, there are very few companies in the world that can spend years of cleaning, polishing and refactoring code before releasing the product and becoming instantaneously bankrupt.

Most games have terrible source code, the reason is that if you spend too much time on the game, you will release too late, either the market is crowded for the type of game you are doing, or simply the two years you spent refactoring everything mean that the game is just looking two years older than what players expect to see.

Cleaning and refactoring after launch is even more difficult: Any code change may break the live version of the game, and I believe players would rather see their financial involvement be invested in time spent for new features, new maps, new assets, exploits fixing and code stability, than actually making the code pretty (Which we try to do when we have to do some rework on a specific part of the code when trying to fix or extend something)

All Funcom employees have the small white and black flag on their icons, the same as what is on the top left of the forum page.

Well if he says there are legal issues there’s no reason for me to actually contact anyone else I suppose. Never mind. I guess this “conversation” has run its course.

That’s where NDA comes in: “Non Disclosure Agreement”, something you sign, forming a legal bond, if you disclose things under NDA, you get automatically teleported to the 8th level of Hell, forced to review code automatically generated from a StackOverflow crawler bot while having to listen 10 hours loop mixes ranging from “They Are Taking the Hobbits to Isengard” to “Never Gonna Give You Up”.