[2021] Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher (Official Version: 1.3.8 / Beta: 1.4.0)

Easter Bunny special version for you people.

1.4.0 (24 march 2021)

• The “Launcher” log tab now has the date and time displayed for each entry in the log (local time)
• The RCon connection now has a 10 seconds timeout, to avoid the tool to stay stuck in case of bad connection (or server stuck), and the error messages are now properly sent to the launcher log instead of being printed to stderr
• A new “Zombie Check” checkboard and delay has been added: When enabled it will automatically try to kill the process if the monitored input/output data has not changed for a specified amount of time
  Dedicated Server Launcher 1.4.0

First, a warning: I’m not able to get the server to freeze or get stuck like some of you got on shutdown, so all I did was to “simulate” using tools like SysInternals “Process Monitor” that has a “Suspend” feature, or getting the server stopped in the debugger, so that may or may not be representative of what happens when the server is stuck.

How’s it’s working:

• I regularly call a Win32 function called ‘GetProcessIoCounters’ which returns how many IO operations have been done by the process
• If two consecutive calls contains different values, then it means the server is at least “doing something”
• It the content has not changed in more than a specific amount of time, then it’s considered as a zombie.

Obviously this approach will fail horribly if the server is only half broken, like for example it still writes to disk, or still answers on the network, while being otherwise “not really working”, so we may have to work on the heuristics if that does not work.

So, how do you enable that?

DedicatedServerLauncher_1.4.01207×865 98.2 KB

So first, the “Start server if not running” has moved from the “Automatic Restart” to the top of the UI, and instead you get two new controls:

• A “Zombie Check” box
• A “Time Selector”

Using these two you can enable the automatic zombie check.

And in the “Launcher” tab, you have the messages that indicate when a Zombie process has been detected, and when the execution is planned for.

This information is also repeated in the status bar.

I wanted to spend more time on it, but since a long easter break is happening, it made sense to me to try to get you the version as fast as possible so you could enjoy a “stuckless” experience.

That’s assuming it works, and that’s where you come in: If you are one of the persons who had their server get stuck, please test the version and tell me if it works, and if not, then please tell what the problem is, if it’s the timing not working, spurious detection, or if simply the launcher never flag the process as “Zombie”.

Thanks!

I signaled the problem, not sure what’s happening.
Thanks for the report (and also to @sthanleym and @bobojim a few weeks before that)

Apparently it’s a problem with http/https protocol, it looks like Chrome is trying to access every resource of a https page using https protocol, unfortunately the CND link does not seem to work with https, currently looking at an alternative.

For the ones who had problem downloading with Chrome, could give a shot at that one?

https://dl.conanexiles.com/exiles/DedicatedServerLauncher/DedicatedServerLauncher1400.exe

Ok, if it works for everybody, I will push the new releases to that one instead.
Thanks for testing.

See: Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher (Official Version: 1.3.8 / Beta: 1.4.0) - #1959 by Toolguy

If you want an older version, you need to copy the link and use something like Internet Explorer, or any other browser that does not try to use HTTPS everywhere, because for some reason the place where the files are hosted is failing at answering HTTPS requests (works in HTTP).

Damn… guess I’ll have to check that next week: Is it “tends to” or is it “always” skip?

Maybe I fumbled when adding the new settings for the zombie checker, like overwrote the same entry in the ini file, will have to check that.

Anything special in the launcher log, compared to normal restart?

And Easter is behind us, back to work!

Since apparently the new https CDN links are working fine, I edited the top post to fix all the URL to use the new link, which means the current 1.3.8 and 1.4.0 links should now be working fine for everybody:

• The current official version: 1.3.8 (released 22 January 2021).
• The latest beta version: 1.4.0 (released 24 March 2021).

Regarding the server crashes, please don’t ask me to look at them, I simply don’t have the elements or knowledge to answer these, and in most cases I’m going to ask you to either post on the support section of the forum, or join the Admins United Discord where you will most probably find an answer to your question.

Regarding the Zombie Killing feature, it looks like it did not work. Or more exactly, it works, but the way the game server most often dies, it’s the wrong type of Zombie.

So, if you have the 1.4.0 Zombie enabled, and your server get stucks, or crashed, and does not get killed, before killing it I would appreciate if you looked at the bottom right of the UI and checked if the numbers at the bottom change, and which ones:

The idea was to monitor all the writes, reads and network traffic done by the server, and that if they stopped changing then it probably meant that the server was dead, but obviously this is not working for everybody, so I need to know what happens when the server is stuck.

Thanks!

Apparently since this week-end the Discord Webhook messages sent by the Dedicated Server Launcher are failing to appear on Discord, I managed to diagnose the issue as being related to the formatting of the time stamp which used to just accept “embeds” and “timestamp”, but for some reason it looks like the “description” field is now mandatory, and if not present Discord returns a {“embeds”: [“0”]} error message.

Until I find what exactly is the issue, you can just uncheck the “Time” check box in the DSL.

The system is unfortunately complicated, but being green is good: It means you’ve done the setup correctly, your machine can be seen and accessed from the outside.

Regarding the ping and age, it means that somewhat the communication between the funcom servers and yours is having issues, but that’s quite hard to diagnose, generally speaking, the longest your server is online, with the same IP, the more chances that it is going to be visible and accessible.