[2020] Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher (Official Version: 1.0.47 / Beta: 1.0.48)

Normally, all you need to save is the content of the /Saved subfolder, specifically:

• The ‘game.db’ that contains the actual state of the game
• All the .ini files stored in /Saved/Config

In practice, there’s some dependency between the gamedata and the mods, so if you don’t specify the same list of mods, you may end up having data removed from the gamedb, etc… so you should probably also save the content of ConanSandbox/Mods/modlist.txt

And what odd tweaks will I need to make to integrate them for use with this tool?

The simplest way is:

• Download and save the Dedicated Server Launcher Executable in some location where your server will be installed (ideally on a SSD with enough room)
• Run the installation of the server directly (the big + button on the bottom right)
• When the whole SteamCMD/patching/updating is done, the server should now be running.
• Stop the server (same button, but now it looks like a ON/OFF switch)

At this point you can leave the Dedicated Server Launcher running, so you can see if you update is working fine (the UI will refresh each time you change something).

• Click on the blue icon at the bottom left that has a small gear on the icon, that will open the folder with the .ini files -> copy all your original .ini files there (the UI should now reflect that with the server name, passwords, etc…)
• Move up two folders, you should now be in the /Saved folder -> overwrite the game.db

If that was a non modded server, it’s all you have to do from an import port of view.

If you had mods:

• open your original modlist.txt file, and for each mod get the steam workshop ID
• add each of them in the “Mod List” field of the tool

Example, if you had that:

C:(…)\steamapps\workshop\content\440900\880454836\Pippi.pak
C:(…)\steamapps\workshop\content\440900\1382120864\LowerMonsterHPSolo.pak

you just need to add that:

880454836,1382120864

and press the Save Changes button, that’s about it really.

Press the Start button again, and normally SteamCMD will start to download all the mods you added, and then launch the server.

Side note: Considering that the whole client/server infrastructure has been having issues since last week, I would make sure to keep a backup copy of the original files - just to be safe.

There are unfortunately mannnnnyyyy warning and errors in the logs in a normal working Conan, so it’s always difficult to know what causes issues.

One thing you could try (just to eliminate some unknown parameters) is to disable the firewall on your desktop and laptop, see if you can connect: I’ve often seen a badly configured firewall block the return handshake so the connection never properly finishes. If that solves the problem, then try to add exclusions for both the server and client in your firewall.

You can run two servers on the same machine without using multihome: You can do that by just specifying different ports for your two servers, like for example 7777,7778,27015 and 25575 for the first one and 7779,7780,27016 and 25576 for the second one.

I personally use Multihome because I have multiple network adapters (with multiple IP’s) on my machine, and this way I can tell which specific card the game should use.

I found the issue. My provider had modified settings files to have command lines that the program didn’t recognize, as those lines referenced things that don’t exist outside of that provider.

Specific entries in the game ini files?

Is it with mods enabled?
If yes, please try to things:

• Make sure everything uses IPV4
• Temporarily disable all the mods (you can make a copy of your install so you can revert back) to see if that helps (sometimes mods create time outs that make connection fail)
• Temporarily disable the firewall on your server

If you are a server admin, you should probably join the Admins United Discord because all these things have been discussed there for the last week.

See here: Admins United: Conan - Discord for Server Admins!

Basically in order to handle the support for CrossPlay between multiple versions of Conan Exiles (Steam, Epic Game Store, etc…) it was necessary to re-implement a part of the features of the Steam API.

By playing with the INI files, all that happens is that you reenabled the Steam codepath, but that causes issues with the new server management backend, so that’s not the way you want to go, plus you will get no support from Funcom on having old configuration files working - the team is busy making the new stuff working as expected (which is getting all the required https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Server_queries commands - A2S_INFO, A2S_PLAYER, A2S_RULES - working properly).

Additionally, as I posted a number of time, this is the forum thread specifically for the Dedicated Server Launcher, not for the problems with the Game Client or Server itself, these should go on the proper support threads locations elsewhere on the forum.

I signaled an issue like that yesterday, the team was looking at it.

Apparently it’s a problem with getting the identity of players verified by the server: When a new player joins the server, it needs to be checked on Funcom side, and if that fails the player is not authorized.

I’m waiting for more data, it’s all I have so far.

I need a bit more details: Are you trying to run the game client and server on the same machine?

For the accessibility ports, you need both the ports to be open (using the correct protocol, usually the simplest is to allow BOTH UDP and TCP), but also all the firewalls (on the machine but also on the router in case there’s one active) allowing access on these ports.

If the port check is red, don’t even bother, that will not work.

Also be aware that some ISP (I know of at least one in the Philipines) are putting multiple customers on the same IP and use some black magic using tricked out ports to give back internet traffic to the right people, on this type of setup it is generally not possible to do port forwarding.

As I’ve said a number of time, there’s no link between the Dedicated Server Launcher and the game server: It’s just a launcher, it does not do anything magic other that launching and stopping the server in the same way you would do it manually from the command line.

What made the thing fail, as you wrote, is that there was a BEFORE and an AFTER the FLS deployment, and that has nothing to do with ports or configuration in general because nothing of that changed.

What changed, is that instead of using the Steam API, the code has been replaced by some new code which in some cases have been behaving differently as the previous code, leading to some specific cases (combinations of network configuration, windows version, etc…) to sometimes not work at all.

If you are a server admin, I highly recommend that you join the Admins United discord, because you basically spent hours doing things that would not have helped: There was nothing wrong with your server launcher, port forwarding, firewall or the fact you were running the client and server on the same machine.

The server launcher just shows lots of “ LogHandshake: SendConnectChallenge. ” spam when anyone connects unless I connect through direct connect with my local ip info.

That’s actually the server log.

You can access the full log by clicking the bottom left blue icon, and search in it if you have "LogFuncomLiveServices:Error: VerifyIdentity Failed: Request Timeout or null response ", if yes, the solution to your problem may simply to enable TLS 1.2 on the machine as indicated in a post.

If not, then I need the full log, ideally from a server and a client - screenshots are rarely helpful on this type of problem.

Can you check the same thing I suggested @bloodred and check in your server logs if you have this error line:

LogFuncomLiveServices:Error: VerifyIdentity Failed: Request Timeout or null response

Could you give me the exact line(s) and which files, what was the original content

Could you look in the log of the server at the top, and check what you have in the line that starts by
LogInit: Command line:

I need more details:

• I assume your friends are connecting over the internet
• Are you trying to play on the same machine, or same local network?

what happens when you try to direct connect, is it slow, does it fail, do you get some specific error code?
I would need the full logs of your server and client to look at the problem.

Could you post a screenshot of the UI (you can hide the password, name and IP, but please leave the rest visible so I can see all your settings)

The launcher supports these options:

• Never update
• Update on startup
• Check while running and if updates found then send messages and restart for update

Do you get any .dmp file generated and saved in your Saved/Logs folder?

The FLS patch of the game has quite many changes, so it’s possible a bug was introduced there, but normally when a crash happen the crash handler is called, a memory dump is generated and sent to Funcom for analysis and the crash is fixed.

When this particular dialog appears on the other hand, it’s possible the crash handler was not actually called, or that it was called but that something else crashed again, if you have a .dmp file in a subfolder that could help finding the root cause.

Seems normal.
I guess the next step is to open your DedicatedServerLauncher/logs folder and look at the content of DedicatedServerLauncher(1.0.xx).2020.07.*.txt log files and search for lines like “Starting to check if the server and mods (…) are up to date”

I’m thinking about it, just not sure how to actually test that in code.

I can’t do anything with a partial log like that, try to PM me a full log of your server

It looks like the launcher is not managing to save files, did you put it somewhere special, like at the root of your C:\ Drive or something like that, or in a super long path with plenty of spaces and subfolders?

If yes, please give me the full path so I can see if I can provide some better error message, and then try to create a folder somewhere on your drive that has normal read and write access, and put the launcher there and try again.

Hmm, I thought this issue had been fixed about one week ago already.

At least you have a temporary hack to pass that, hopefully this will be properly resolved soon!

I see a bunch of time outs and “UNetDriver::TickDispatch: Very long time between ticks.” which could explain issues connecting.

Is your server located in China?

I believe there are still a bunch of fixes coming in, related to multihome and local play on the same machine, other than that, not much I can offer you as solutions unfortunately :-/

At the moment I’m not sure, I sent your log to a colleague who noticed a few things regarding the KDS connections and thingamagic I do not know about, but if they find something concrete you will know.

Right now it’s all I can say, sorry.

What type of configuration do you have on this machine (cpu, memory, internet line, hard drive)?
I know this line appears in the logs, but I’ve never seen it impact performance before.

Would be interesting to know if it’s a like spike caused by the network sending of data, or by the actual logging to the log file on disk that cause the issue.

Could you try to add to the command line parameters:
-LogCmds="LogServerStats off"

By “We”, do you mean the client machines?
It’s the dedicated server which needs to have TLS 1.2 access to access the FLS backend.

Another thing you can try is to open the “resource monitor” (task manager -> performance -> “open resource monitor” at the bottom) and check if you have processes that are doing heavy cpu, memory or disk operations - a common culprit are things like antivirus deciding to scan files that get written)

There was two patches released since yesterday, did you see any change?

C++, not really a problem to access the page, but internally I’m using CUrl which uses its own internal TLS libraries I believe (need to check that), so that would not work, that being said I can probably explicitly call some of the IE based Win32 functions

Thanks for the exhaustive list of pages, much appreciated.

Thanks, I added to my issues list.

Running the server with Wine has never been officially supported, and I myself does not use it like that so I’m not the best person to ask.

That being said, there’s some information on the Exiles Wiki: https://conanexiles.gamepedia.com/Dedicated_Server_Setup:_Linux_and_Wine

And regarding the reason it shuts down, I would suggest to look at the log file for the server, it probably contains useful warnings or error messages.

What’s the configuration of your server? (operating system, memory, cpu, internet line, storage type, etc…)

few updates back it worked just fine, even with firewall and lots of mods

Well, there’s been the big FLS update, so probably related.
Do you have any specific log messages appearing that somewhat match the stuttering?

Please check my answer 4 days ago to @TwistedZB who seem to have a similar issue, I suggested disabling some log messages to see if that helped

I guess I could probably parse the file and find the workshop id of each entry and populate that automatically… need to see, added it to the list of requests.