[2019] Conan Exiles Dedicated Server Launcher (Official Version: 1.0.44 / Beta: ----)

Ok, thanks for the feedback, I moved 1.0.44 to be the new official version.

You can’t configure the launcher to do that, but it is very simple to import your existing installation:

• Install the Server Launcher somewhere where you want your server to be
• Press the install button, that will create a default installation
• When the server is running, stop it with the same button
• Locate the game install by pressing one of the blue buttons at the bottom left (that will open the config or log folder)
• Overwrite the newly created Saved folder with yours (that’s all the ini files, game db, logs, etc…)

Normally at this point the Launcher UI should have updated with all the right information, like the server name, ports, passwords, etc…

The one thing you need to do manually is the mods setup if you had any installed.

Glad to know that it worked nicely for you, and thanks for the nice feedback
Enjoy being the master of your own little private kingdom!

Ok, so, do you have some recommendation on things you have/had to do to make that work?
I tried on my own machines, and I miserably failed

I guess these few last answers clearly show the issue:

On one hand we have @Ashenda, @Rhomara and @drachenfeles who just did open the ports, making sure they were different for the client and server, and it worked out of the box.

On the other hand we have @Fryskar, myself and quite many other before us who did similar things, and it did not work.

I’ve tried a couple of time to find what was the setup difference, the root causes, could not find anything, but to be fair, sometimes you just need to sneeze to get Steam or Unreal to throw a tantrum in regard to being able to connect or not, which makes it difficult to diagnose things.

You should probably ask that on one of the other forum threads, that one here is purely for the use of the Dedicated Server Launcher tool, your issue is probably much more generic than that and other people most probably have signaled it and given answers?

Question for all of you people: Did you easily find the Dedicated Server Launcher when you were looking for how to manage your own servers, or do you think it should be more prominently placed (and if yes, where).

Bonus question: If you tried the launcher but eventually reverted to using something else, what was the main reason? (bug, missing feature, ease of use, etc…)?

The server part of the update system (server version, installed mods) is handled by the Dedicated Server Launcher tool, but the client side is normally a normal feature of the game itself: Basically when a client connects there is a negotiation between the client and the server to see if they have matching mods, and if not, then the client updates and retries - the launcher is not involved in this part at all.

That being said, you can try to use 1.0.39 again, but that would probably still do the same thing, if it does not, then there’s something fishy going on!

Is there anyone else having client side updates not working as expected?

Try to check the dayly restart option, it may unlock the auto update feature. I don’t know why but it worked for me as I had the same problem as you, and by activating the dayly restart at 6 am (in my case) the auto update worked again as usual.

I wonder if that could be a side effect of that change.

// 1.0.40:
// - Fixed the ModUpdate check to not trigger if the auto-restart has already displayed the first warning message

Could you try 1.0.40 and tell me if that still work? Basically trying to find out which version actually broke the feature.

Interesting…

@moses110 glad you figured it out

@TyrianHunter when doing configuration tests I often temporarily disable all the firewalls to check if the basic configuration works (obviously only do that on a fully patched machine and remember to put the firewall back just after the test).

This is this time of the year again, so let see a summary of what happened in the Dedicated Server Launcher in 2019.

We left 2018 with version 1.0.24 and we are now at version 1.0.44, so that’s another 20 releases this year alone (most of them being the struggle to get the mod update right!).

The big feature was the ability to check for updates of both the server and mods. This took quite some time and required many of you sending me logs and other details.

1.0.24 to 1.044 update1301×1552 358 KB

So 2019 changes in details:

• Implementation of the mod update check:

  • Detecting that there is a new version of mods
  • Detecting new versions of the game server
  • Making sure the version update work for both Live and TestLive
  • Possibility to manually force check for updates of servers and mods

• Improvements of the INI file parser/writer:

  • On a fresh install, the Launcher was not properly saving the first entry of newly created sections in ini files
  • Fixed a problem with the ini file parser not correctly detecting UCS16 file format (when using unicode characters in strings)
  • Fixed a problem with the ini file parser not de-escaping \, ', etc… characters generated by the GameServer on resave
  • Changed the default value of MAX_PLAYER to avoid it to reset when set to 40
  • The MaxPlayers parameter is now passed as the command line, should help keep it sticky

• UI tweaks:

  • Disabled the TestPort when the server is running to make it less confusing
  • Added an horizontal scrollbars to the log output window
  • Modified the warning dialog box when starting a server to allow the user to either “Save then Start”, “Start without saving” or “Cancel”
  • Hacked around a solution for the dialog being truncated if the screen resolution is smaller than 1205 pixels
  • Added the steam query port to the “copy connection information” button
  • Changed the “[could not find server executable]" message to “No Server installed: Please click on the install button (located bottom right!)” to limit confusion

• Messaging:

  • The name of the discord bot can be edited
  • Messages are now sent on Discord when the server is ready, being manually shutdown and restarted
  • Added fields for custom messages for restart, ready, shutdown, etc…
  • The content of the ‘Send’ box is now saved, and up to 50 messages are stored in a combo box for easy retrieval
  • Added some magic tokens ({servername} and {steamconnect}) to the Discord messages, allowing to insert the server name or steam connect connection string

• Automation:

  • Possibility to run the BAT scripts on Startup as well as Shutdown (either BEFORE or AFTER the backup) to allow various maintenance operations (like reboot of the machine)
  • Fixed the problem with SteamCMD starting twice now and then
  • Fixed the ModUpdate check to not trigger if the auto-restart has already displayed the first warning message
  • Added an option to kill the Steam Client automatically on startup to avoid the server showing blocking message dialog boxes
  • Added a “delayed” restart button which uses the same countdown that regular restarts do (eg. 10, 5 and 2 minute warnings)

@OneAdmin I guess that what you mentioned is going to be among the first 2020 feature update.

To everybody: Is there was ONE feature you’d like to have implemented (or a bug fix, tweak, …) in the Dedicated Server Launcher tool, what would it be?

And on this, I’m wishing everybody a nice end of 2019, and see you all next year!

I’ll be back at work tomorrow, I did a quick check on the messages, and apparently the issues to fix are:

• The check for update started failing on the first day of 2020
• The broken restart signaled since version 1.0.40

is there anything else I missed?

And to everybody: Happy new year, and sorry for the bug, I’ll try to see what happened!

@Fritzli and @Yipman could you both click on the [?] button at the right of the Auto-Check combo selection, and when the dialog box with the update information appear, press CTRL-C and then PASTE that in a message here? (or in private if you don’t feel comfortable with that).

I need to know if that happens to everybody, because I tried this morning, and it’s not happening to me, for reference here is what I get:

Bias: -60 
UTC  : 2020.01.06 10.10.55 | W. Europe Daylight Time:-60
Local: 2020.01.06 11.10.55 | W. Europe Standard Time:0

#443030 (Conan Exiles Dedicated Server)
Install=2020.01.06 09.26.28 Steam=2019.12.19 13.45.15
#880454836 (Pippi - User & Server Management - v3.0.5)
Install=2020.01.06 09.53.34 Steam=2019.12.12 19.23.00
#1382120864 (LowerMonsterHPSolo)
Install=2020.01.06 09.53.35 Steam=2018.07.13 12.38.00

Thanks

Technically it’s not a Launcher issue, it’s probably something you should signal in one of the support forums (I guess “server stuck when shutting down” or something like that).

I guess on my side, I could probably add some kind of option to “force kill” the server process if it is still running after some specified amount of time, but that comes with serious risks of corrupting the data.

There’s not much you can do for that one, I’ve seen it happening now and then, even on my own server when doing tests, that seem to be highly dependent on internet topology, time of the day, weather, active volcanoes and if some butterfly was flying around…

tl;dr: It’s just a minor feature used to rank servers, see when they are active, etc… it’s not something that has effects in practice when it does not work.

Now, regarding the ability to join I would suggest two things:

• Use the discord webhook feature, it really helps making 100% certain that the server is up and running, and with an impossible to misuse “click here to connect” link to the server
• Check the server logs to see if the server did see a connection attempt and just refused it, or if it was never actually received.

@Yipman can you confirm that it is fixed for you as well?

The issue was signaled before Christmas, try to use version 1.0.39 and see if that helps.
I unfortunately did not have the time to do any work on the launcher, there’s been a lot of things I had to help with.

Not appearing in the Server Browser and Steam? That’s a know issue, it will be fixed for the next games, but for Exiles there would be way too many things to change for this to be safe.

What I recommend is to setup a Discord webhook, with a “Ready” message set to something like “The gates to {servername} are now open, please join us on {steamconnect}”, as soon as your server is ready, Discord will receive a message with a clickable link, people just need to click on it to direct connect to your server with the correct password.

There is no actual fixed concept of what PVP or PVE is, that has changed since the game was originally launched, with settings coming in and out, so instead of implementing that in the tool as a permanently moving target, I thought it much better to leave it as is, which is, do it from inside the game:

The easiest is to connect to the server with a client, switch to admin mode (“insert” key, then “MakeMeAdmin” followed by the Admin Password) then go in the server settings and change what you want.

This in general seem to happen when the attempt at connecting times out: Basically there’s some kind of back and forth between the client and the server to validate the authenticity, list of mods, version of the game, etc… and if all that does not complete in some amount of time, then the whole thing fail.

Known issues have been servers running super slow (because of a weak machine or too many people playing on it, slow hard drive, etc…) network issues (on the server or client side), firewall problems, routing issues with the player connection going through crazy paths (can be checked with “trace route” tools), etc…

The easiest way to diagnose if it’s client or server side, is to try to get other people to connect to the server. If they can join easily, then it’s probably the other player.

Are both the server and this particular player in Rio de Janeiro?

What are the errors you get? (You can generally just CTRL+C on a Windows standard error dialog to copy the message)

That could be many things, including your ISP (some ISP have setup their network infrastructure so multiple clients are hidden behind the same “shared” IP, which makes it not working).

I assume you tried the Test Port without anything else running on the machine (no game, no other server, etc…), tried with the firewall temporarily disabled as well, and that the ports are open on right machine’s IP ? (It happens with DHCP that ports change, it’s recommend to give manually a fixed IP associated to the MAC address of the machine so it does not change when you reboot).

Does that happen to ALL the mods, or only some specific ones?

Could you try to remove them all, and just add them one by one?

The actual mod download is not done by the Launcher, it’s done by SteamCMD, so if the same mod gets downloaded again and again, it probably means there’s something fishy somewhere, maybe there was some file corruption when download?

If you reference mods by path, they are not added to the list of things Steam tries to update.

Just for information, does it happen that the server name disappears when someone is modifying server settings in the game, or does that happen randomly?

The trick is to enable the “Launch program on login” option (Preferences menu), that will make the Dedicated Server Launcher to automatically start when you reboot your pc, and then if you have checked “Start server if not running” (Automatic Restart box) the server will automatically get started.

You can’t configure the launcher to do that, but it is very simple to import your existing installation:

• Install the Server Launcher somewhere where you want your server to be
• Press the install button, that will create a default installation
• When the server is running, stop it with the same button
• Locate the game install by pressing one of the blue buttons at the bottom left (that will open the config or log folder)
• Overwrite the newly created Saved folder with yours (that’s all the ini files, game db, logs, etc…)

Normally at this point the Launcher UI should have updated with all the right information, like the server name, ports, passwords, etc…

The one thing you need to do manually is the mods setup if you had any installed.

This would also allow for managing servers without necessarily launching a client in that world

Not sure what that meant, sorry

@Yipman I vaguely remember some issues with the server password from many months ago when the team tried to change how that was implemented, but they reverted the change. Not sure if they tried to bring it back, or some other unrelated change that causes issues.

Are they other people here losing their server password now and then?

Svenska och norska har inte många skillnader

Are you running a modded server?
There was a Exiles patch released yesterday for PC around noon (UTC), and for chicken and egg problems, mods are generally not yet ready to work with the new version and they often fail.
Could that be this?

Ha, yeah it’s a known issue, you can’t cleanly start the game server if Steam is running, that’s why there’s a “kill steam client” check box on the top of the UI.

Nope, that’s part of the original design: Each Launcher is 100% in charge of managing (installing, updating, …) the entire server content, but migrating an existing server is simple (copy paste basically)

Or at least choose install folder location?

That is already supported.
By default the server folder is installed just under where the launcher is running from, but you can use a command line parameter to change the place where the server data is located:

DedicatedServerLauncher.exe -basefolder D:\MyServer\ConanServer1

That being said, it’s an option I added for development purpose so I can have my Visual Studio compiled launcher to point to where the data is installed, for most users it makes more sense to put the server launcher executable at the right place, and run it from there.

No, there’s no API, but if you need to restart every three hours, you can just play with the “Automatic Restart” options in the center of the UI, with for example “Restarts per day” set to 8 (24 hours divided by 3 hours = 8 restarts).

Which type of API were you thinking of?

The Dedicated Server Launcher is managing the installation and update of the actual server itself, making sure to run SteamCMD to get the updates, etc…

If the launcher does not see the server, it probably means something wrong happens with the SteamCMD install… or were you trying to somewhat add the Dedicated Server Launcher to an existing server install?

Could it be somewhat related to the password reset bug somebody was mentioning a few weeks ago?

Have you tried configuring a Discord Webhook, and click on the link directly in Discord, see if that does work or fail the same way?

If you setup RCon (Remote Console) or/and Discord, you will get messages sent to indicate that the server will restart (Warning Messages), but nothing specifically about that it’s because of an update.

Is that important?

Weird, that’s supposed to be using the same code path.
Which version are you using, and which values have you setup for the three restart delays?

Whaou, weird!

Could you give me what are the current delay values and messages you are using now, and what you were using before?

Could you try disabling the firewall on both machines see if that helps?
If that does help, then it means your firewall rules are having issues, and basically the “handshake” does not complete: one machine sends a message, the other says “ok, I got it”, the first one send back something, if any of these messages fails to reach the other, then the negotiation never finishes and the connection attempt fails.

The server machine, is it a clean machine, with minimum amount of software installed, or is it like an older machine you refurbished, with old installs of other games, skype, gaming software, etc…?

Can you try to run (on the server) NETSTAT or TCPView (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/tcpview) to see if there are anything around that uses the network, reserved some ports, etc…

Do you have a list of the settings you are trying to write and in which files/sections exactly?

Normally the launcher ignores (and leaves there) any setting it does not know about, but obviously it could be buggy

That being said, the game server itself is known to rewrite the ini files and remove what it does not like, so one thing you could try (just to make sure) is to launch the server with the launcher, just to make sure it’s fully updated, etc… then shutdown the server, quit the server launcher, modify the ini files, and then manually (without the launcher) start the game server again, and when the server is running, check if your changes are still in the ini file, then cleanly quit the server, and check again.

The path is indicated on the top of the UI: Server 196231/23625 (Path\Of\The\Server\Win64\ConanSandbox-Win64-Test.exe)

You can also access it by clicking on one of the blue buttons to open the windows explorer on the settings or logs, move up to levels, then go down into the Binaries folder.

[/Script/Engine.GameSession]
MaxPlayers=36

[RconPlugin]
RconEnabled=True
RconPort=27104
RconPassword=StupidPassword!
RconMaxKarma=60

[/script/engine.gamenetworkmanager]
TotalNetBandwidth=4000001
MaxDynamicBandwidth=100001
MinDynamicBandwidth=40001

I’m not sure why it’s not working for you, I did modify my Game.ini and Engine.ini, tried with and without the launcher and in both cases the data stayed there.

Are you using some fancy text editor that puts weird characters, or some values out of range that the server rejects?

Unrelated question, The launcher seems to suck up a LOT of cpu time every few seconds. Is that normal?
Every few seconds the launcher loads an updated content of the log file, but that’s about it, on my machine it does use like 0.1% of the cpu when that happens.

What type of machine are you running on (version of windows, cpu, memory, disk drive model, internet speed) ?

Have you set-up separate sets of forwarded ports on your router for each of the server?

When Server 1 is running, does the “Test Port Accessibility” properly shows green lights for all ports (when Server 2 is not running)?

I had no problem running two, three or four servers on the same machine, as long as they had correctly set-up ports.

Have you tried disabling the firewall to see if that helps, have you looked at the game server logs to see if there was some messages showing that there was at least some attempts at connecting? (using Direct Connect. Don’t trust the steam list of the server browser: It’s not because the server does not appear on the list that it is not up and running)

I’ve never actually encountered this issue, but apparently it has happened now and then since Conan Exiles was launched, and apparently the suggested solution seem to be (unfortunately) the good old “have you tried turning it off and on again?”

If that does not work, could you provide the client version number as well as the server version number (the two numbers on the top of the launcher UI on the left of the server executable path)?

That’s indeed what I needed, and from that I can tell you that you are trying to run the Normal (Live) Conan Exiles Client (Revision (#196231/23625)) with the Test Live version of the Server (Code Version: 202855/23931 (testlive branch)) instead of the Default branch (Code Version: 196231/23625 (default branch)).

So, either play with the Test Live version of the game client, or change the Server Settings on the top left to “Use the Default branch (Stable Release)” instead of "Use TestLive branch (Bleeding Edge)

That may be related to the general flackyness of the way the game gets the list of existing servers, there are so many servers, that the system kind of drop some of the servers.

As far as I’ve noticed, the longer a server has been running continuously, the higher the chances that it will appear in the server list (both in game and in steam), but that’s not guaranteed: My own server launcher test server is rarely visible, which is why I implemented the Discord webhook: It’s a 100% certain way to be able to connect to the server automatically in a reliable way.

Can there be implemented list of players from the launcher? It would be good if we can see who is online and who not. Even if you can kick/ban from the launcher itself would be very good.

Showing a list of the players is probably not complicated, I can probably get the information from parsing the logs and would reliably work. The alternative is to use the RCon api, but then the player list would only work for people who have setup RCon, which is kind of “meh”.

Need to think about it (and then get some time allocated for the feature!)

It’s all in the main game log, and there are multiple possibly lines to parse:

LogNet: Join request: /Game/Maps/Startup?S (…)
LogNet: Join succeeded: Toolguy
ConanSandbox:Display: Character ID 3 has name Toolguy and guild ID 0.

that being said, I realize that there is no clear “player has left” entry in the log, other than the ones from the BattlEye module, maybe we shoyld add that, else it’s going to be hard to know when player left

Glad you figured out (and for the ones wondering, you basically need to run one server launcher for each server), and thanks for the thanks

I guess I need first to ask the game programmers if they can add an additional log entry when a player/character leaves, else the launcher will keep reporting players that have already left.

I thought the CPU Affinity on the right already supported 32 cores/cpu machines?
Is it not working?

Or do you mean I should expose 64 entries in the CPU Affinity UI:

(I’d have to remove the “CPU” word if I want to keep the UI at the same size)

If that’s what you mean, it’s doable, but I’ve no machine available to test if that would work, so you would have to be the tester for it (Basically the code is just calling GetProcessAffinityMask and SetProcessAffinityMask under the hood).

Also, it would be a nice addition if you add a tab for separate servers being hosted.

Sorry, but that will not happen: A part of the original design was to have the thing simple: One server is managed by one launcher, that makes it easy to test new versions, problems with one server don’t cause issues with another, etc…

Basically the core target of the tool was not the power users, but the people who were struggling getting their own servers up and running. After, I added features that made it also attractive to power users, but any new feature has to fit in the original design enveloppe

Ok, I’ll try to see if I can find some time in my schedule to squeeze out a new version with the support for 64 cores

Just to reiterate. To utilize multiple instances (servers) you need to launch the launcher for each instance? Basically a folder for each instance?

Yup, one folder for each instance, each one with its own launcher program, managing its own game server install.

If the port testing does not show green, it means it’s not going to work.

Is it the first time you are trying this type of thing, or have you already managed for some other games?

I’m asking, because there are some internet provider on which it is not possible to do port forwarding without paying extra: Their router support the feature, but the ISP infrastructure gives the same IP to multiple customers, using some internal trickery that makes it impossible for games (or software in general, like webservers) to be hosted on user’s machines. (we had some player from the Philippines having such an issue a few months ago)

Just to eliminate an unknown parameter: Could you quit the DedicatedServerLauncher as soon as the server is started, just to see if it’s the server itself getting fubar, or if it’s somewhat related to the presence of the launcher being present and running.

Also, could you provide some information about your server configuration (operating system, processor model, amount of memory, internet line speed, and possibly the type/brand/model of network connection (wifi, dedicated ethernet card, motherboard card, …). Some low cost network adapters happen to work ok when doing light networking but then completely fail when the network load increases, sometimes just updating the network drivers help, sometimes you need to install a proper network card, but it’s kind of hard to diagnose remotely

When people are connected and playing, this is just between the game server and the client.

The actual connection procedure on the other hand is much more complicated, involves some bi-directional handshakes, and possibly some Steam API accesses to check the credentials of the player, etc…

When you manage to get it running again, please make sure to quit the Dedicated Server Launcher to make sure it’s not the reason of the issue.

Thanks!

When @loudwater asked about the 64 cores issues, I did look at the code and noticed that there was actually an issue where the launcher would fail to reapply the affinity mask on the Server process after it restarted the game server, so I took the opportunity to fix that and extend the UI to expose all the 64 supported core/threads. I don’t have such a machine around, so I was not able to test if that did actually work, so I you will have to test yourself!

1.0.45 (10 March 2020)

• Extended the CPU/Core list to 0-63 instead of 0-31
• Fixed a bug where the affinity mask would not be reapplied after the server was restarted
  Dedicated Server Launcher 1.0.45

DedicatedServerLauncher10451207×663 99 KB

The UI is starting to look even more like the control panel of a nuclear power plant, but hey, sometimes it’s what we have to do.

Good, good.

I have in my “todo” notes somewhere “add code to make the launcher detect if the firewall is correctly configured”, but last time I checked how to do that I realized it was not just like a one or two days task, it seems quite complicated to make it work in any situation.

I fear I have no idea at all.

I would suggest that you post a message about it in some of the other sections of the forum (mentioning that the issue is not launcher related because there are some people who love to add me to these messages even when I don’t have a clue about it!)