terox

Vanilla Server numbers are starting to die now, we need something new (Massive hint) and the best time for something new is when the DLC is released (Even bigger hint) I know you think RL is more important, family comes first etc. Well I am here to tell you as a completely selfish server admin, for you this is not true, you are being misled by your heart, be cold and callous There are 24 hours in a day, taking 1 hour out for food and family, 4 for sleep, and go off on long term sick, that gives you 19 hours a day and another 9 days (171 hours) at a payment rate of $0/hour to deliver this work of art Or you could be a morally decent human being and deliver when its ready at the standard you always deliver This is my way of saying, still around patiently waiting and eager to host the latest iteration WHEN ITS READY from Your most Psychotic fan

hope your a good scripter as well as a good community leader. It takes a lot of effort to try and get a server of the ground with no community to start with meaning that most of your time in the first couple of weeks will be attempting to get numbers up past whatever minimum player threshold is required to attract other players and keep it there for approximately 2 weeks before it starts to maintain itself. That first week is hell, trying to maintain a decent standard of discipline and create the precedence of how you want players to run the mission, organise themselves, cooperate, find admins etc etc During this time you will have no spare time to script your mission The biggest issue you will have at the moment is trying to attract enough new players and keeping them, Arma3 is now in its mid life stage meaning new players come in as a trickle. We may see a short increase in numbers when the new DLC returns but I dont expect it to last long. I would say you have until DLC release date to get your server ready to give it the best possible chance Good lucki

@Claws01 That is not necessarily correct, increasing the rate of updates also increases the amount of data flow across the network and if the data flow is too much for the pipeline/processor/resources packets will be lost and therefore updates are not received (UDP protocol) also causing rubber banding. So having too many updates can be just as bad as not enough and if you had too few the rubber banding would be consistent not random The values you stated are the default values. Good results can be achieved by manipulating these values along with others, hence the advice given by me for a small range. We actually use 0.04, 0.004 with up to 64 players in a coop environment and the only rubber banding we ever get is while in player vehicle convoys or the odd player avatar when he starts to lose connection Acoustic has not mentioned anything about his setup other than it would appear he is being hosted by a company leaving us to guess on the cause. There are so many unknowns and is/was so many additions of 3rd party content let alone the mission he is running. For example What is the connection speed the hosting company have defined for the server Is it in a datacentre Is it a dedicated machine or a virtual one sitting with another 10 on the same machine How much ram is available What CPU does it use Unfortunately BIS believe the information they have given us on the network system they use is enough for us to understand it. I have yet to see any post by any server admin that gives me confidence that any of us know what we should actually be doing. It would appear that we all guess (Me included), come up with some formula to calculate our bandwidth settings that works for 1 admin but not others, which in turn means its a load of cods wallop What I have learnt over many years of running arma servers is There should be a definite difference between bandwidth settings for PVP versus Coop servers There is no consistency or pattern of the actual values used when you compare the values each server admin reveals they use Meaning there is no correlation to the value even when you take into consideration connection speeds, processors, number of clients supported etc As for the bandwidth values you are seeing on your clients, this as far as I know defines the quality of their connection to you, so the better their u/l and d/l the better the bandwidth they display in the client list. To be honest I haven't really looked into it any more than noticed the values of clients on my servers. I have noticed my personal values change as my connection speeds from various ISP's have increased over the years. Basically the higher the value the better. The bottom line If you are seeing these issues with just a handful of clients connected, minimum AI on the mission vanilla environment, then you have done as much as you can to isolate the issue as something you have introduced and I would be putting pressure on your hosting company to sort it out and if they don't try another.

cant you just return a list of every rpt file and let the end user select which one they want to look at ? Surely there must be a way to run some php and return the latest rpt filename https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1491020/php-get-the-latest-file-addition-in-a-directory

unfortunately not, its set by the engine what you could do is Option 1: edit your call to start the server up by running a batch file and during your call to start the server up move all existing rpt files to an archive directory, that way once the server initiates you will only have the live rpt file in your arma game directory Option 2: Or use a batch script to find the latest file by checking file creation date and time I use the option 1 method and allow rpts to be read from both locations via web This may help https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31084858/find-latest-file-in-a-directory-whose-name-starts-with-using-batch-script

Not enough information This on the surface would appear to be a bandwidth issue This could be o/s network related or your arma3.cfg bandwidth settings found inside the profile folder Here are mine. MaxMsgSend=768; MaxSizeGuaranteed=800; MaxSizeNonguaranteed=400; MinBandwidth=107374182; MaxBandwidth=1073741824; MinErrorToSend=0.004; MinErrorToSendNear=0.04; The values for MinErrorToSend=should be between 0.001 and 0.004; MinErrorToSendNear=0.01 and 0.04 Other causes could be addon or mission related or poor client connections, allowing too high a ping etc You are basically not receiving / processing regular enough updates across the network to update the position of units in your 3d world.Instead you are missing some and then seeing the effects of the engine on your client teleporting these units to the location your client now thinks they should be at, hence the warping I suggest you roll back your install to a vanilla install and work from there proving a vanilla install and vanilla mission first, otherwise you will always be second guessing on the cause which could also be addon related

This is a step by step guide for installing and configuring a server It also explains everything you need to know about addons As for the map & mission questions. Maps aka islands are just another addon and installed the exact same way as other addons A Mission is basically a series of files packed into a special folder with the extension .pbo which is created in the 3d editor or you can download premade missions by 3rd parties from external sights such as armaholics If a mission requires addons, you will need to also host these, the tutorial explains all this The simplest mission will work with just the mission.sqm packed inside the pbo More complex missions have additional scripts that the mission developer has created himself or copied from others A very basic mission will comprise of the following files mission.sqm briefing.sqf init.sqf description.ext This is not really the correct forum to answer questions on missioin design. There are unpacking tools (eliteness by mikero is most likely the best) so you can open up existing .pbo's and take a look at the scripts that are used in them. (Google it) This is a massively steep learning curve if you've never done any arma editing before so I would suggest you concentrate on getting your server to run first My advise to you is prove your vanilla (non modded) server first before you even think about adding any 3rd party content and follow the tutorial step by step dont try to jump through loops or you will most likely end up tearing your hair out

why do folks constantly leap over obstacles instead of clearing the path and proving what they have done on each step ? FIRST 1) prove vanilla install 2) prove addons with original keys 3) then prove with your own keys if you prove 1 and 2 then your also prove you know how to install and run mods (We dont know that we can only guess). Again lack of information, so lets assume you have done 1 and 2 without any issues. (If you havent go back and do that first before we can continue debugging) Check every pbo has a corresponding bisign that is for the key you host in your keys folder Delete your existing key Delete all existing bisigns Create a new bikey pair (with a date stamp in it, (eg MyBikey_20170421.bikey) Resign all the addons Check every addon has a corresponding bisign with the correct bikey name in it (EG THE DATE TAG) Check the bisigns with the key verification tool that BI provides If your still having problems, clear out the mod folders, add a few addons at a time until you find the culprit you can quickly figure out which mod pack or addon is the cause this way Also what O/S. mod packs and binary are you loading (Or rather than answer that supply a full rpt file dumped into pastebin) SECOND What tool are you using to sign the keys ? and as Diesel stated why would you unpack the addons ? Take us through the actions you are doing to try and achieve this

prove a vanilla server before you start adding 3rd party content

verifysignatures=2; in your server config and place the bikeys for your white listed addons in your servers keys folder

if you can run a stable vanilla server then i suggest you take this issue to the scripting and mission design forums as this sounds very much like a coding issue for your mission, more specifically a locality issue such as "isdedicated"

typically the mods should be in your root arma3\ and the bikeys in your arma3\keys folder Inside each mod folder should be an addons folder inside that folder for every .pbo should be a corresponding .bisign I'd do that and prove it before you start symlinking to remote folders A complete .rpt file copied to a pastebin link would have been nice

am assuming your mission has 0 playable slots, or you made it in the Single Player editor. Due to the lack of information you have given, this is a best guess

I've had issues with arma updates from steam also, their file hosting process seems to be good at corrupting files. Glad you solved it, seems a bit odd though that you couldn't delete a file because it was locked by another process but you could overwrite it Happy days

Open Process Explorer, running as administrator. Enter the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F. Altenatively, click the “Find” menu and select “Find a Handle or DLL”. A search dialog box will open. Type in the name of the locked file or other file of interest. ^ Thanks to google if you cant find the process that is using it, restart the server then delete it

So am assuming you weren't using the default memory allocator then ? We almost always ask for the rpt file, it is full of information that can help us identify issues, so please if you have any issues in future, always copy the contents of all the rpt into a pastebin link The very start is really important, see the example below. It shows what mods you are actually running, the branch and version and............... the memory allocator being used

Clientiside mods: shac tac and any sound/sfx mods. For any others you want to allow, scroll through armaholics and see what else there is out there for players

servers only use 4 ports so have no idea why your setting it up for 8 Maybe you need to revisit the port section in the tutorial thread in this forum What I did find after the 64 bit exe came out was that I also needed to add a rule for the actual 64 bit binary as well (And I still dont know why)

Spend the money on the fastest cpu you can afford (Its all about the cpu and a fast clock speed) I know AMD are trying to make a comeback, and have no idea what their latest cpu's are like, however for me it would be Xeon all day every day and at least a hex core if you can afford it (You can run 2 fully loaded servers on that and have a backup test server with enough resources left to run much more I would trade an ssd for some enterprise class western digi disk drives, space is more important here than speed of loading and for a server, the only noticeable effect an ssd will have on performance is boot up times And I would recommend having at least 2 and mirrorring them using a hardware raid card I haven't looked at the rack servers you have linked. Tyan are on the cheaper end but they do their job and from my experience they are reliable enough so you should be okay with them. I would recommend however if the M.board on that doesnt support two cpu's get one that does. Its better to have a spare cpu slot and never use it than need one but dont have it and in a couple of years time that extra cpu will be a lot cheaper and a worthy upgrade. Thats what we did, started off with a quad core xeon, when they got cheaper upgraded to a hex then eventually got another hex for our spare cpu slot. We have two (Old by todays stabdards) X5675 clocking at 3.07Ghz, 24 Gb ram and with that we run 4 to 5 servers continuously 1 x vanilla server co op capped at 64 players 1 x addon server xcapped at 64 which runs ACE, TFAR, Alive and all the other normal goodies etc 1 x (Either special events server, training server) 1 x test server and we also host for another small coop community plus throw the oddball server iup every now and then (Currenbtly Blackwake when we can be arsed) I believe we run around 300 active AI with that on any missions and since the various patches and the latest 64 bit upgrade that possibly can be increased although I haven't looked at the performance cap in a while Hope that helps

I dint know about that, thanks

You havent made it clear what you have actually done, so ..... if you have created a new key set deleted all the old bisigns and keys resigned the addons Then there are only 2 possibilities Your key signing method is flawed or the tools you are using are There is something wrong with the addon (I doubt this, although not sure exactly how the signing is done or authenticated, I wouldnt imagine the content of the addon matters). You can verify your signatures, there is a signature checking tool, if you'd adopted my batch file system, it does that automatically so if you haven't used my system, then you need to verify the signing you have done

You haven't provided any of the information that the first post in this thread asks for. Firstly you need to prove a vanilla server works. If you can get it to that stage then you have just proven it is an Altis life mission/database/addon issue and therefore need to be then figuring out which one of those three is the issue

delete all instances of the public and private key and all the associated bisigns and then create a new key set and resign the lot I do this via a set of batch scripts This is what I run to create a ZClient_(DATE).bikey This first batch defines the Bikey name and adds a date tag to it The second deletes the older pair of keys creates a new one deletes all the older bisigns and moves the key into the appropriate keys folder The following files should also be in the same folder as the second batch file for this to work DSCheckSignatures.exe DSCreateKey.exe DSSignFile.exe You should be able to edit the scripts to your own requirements, they are well commented edit the keys folder paths to your arma keys folder Open the spoiler (Hidden content)to see the batch files

Pure PVP servers can run more player slots than an equivalently specced coop server I am not quite sure where we are at, as far as quality of service and player slots on a PvP server but I would imagine its going to be around the 100-120 player mark Some servers try and promote themselves by stating high player slots in their configs, eg 200 but physically restrict that by running lets say a 125 slot mission. This way they attract some players who filter by player slots (Its more of a bragging right than actually being able to host that amount of players) The actual performance cap is caused by network traffic congestion and the ability of the cpu on the server to process the data A coop server has to process the AI and all the AI update data packets that need to be sent to the the player nodes, whereas pvp servers just need to process the network traffic on players which is a hell of a lot less

Scenario, squad of 8 to 10 men at least 2 fireteams (RED & BLUE) + Squad leader (Or something similar) Teamspeak in use but not an addon server, so no TFAR, ACRE etc Public server This is a typical public server, which are the first servers newcomers are introduced to in the ArmA world and are the gateway for newcomers, without these, the new blood dries up quite quickly There are 2 elements missing that would nicely tie up both the VON channels and the roleplaying of fireteams 1) Fireteam VON Channel 2) Fireteam leader indicator (Much like the Squad leader 3d indicator, but specific to a fireteam colour As of right now, the role of a fireteam leader is not fully supported. In a VON environment it is not possible for them to only communicate with their fireteam. Group chat is the only option and in the case of the example scenario I described at the start of this post, group comms gets very confusing as the 2 fireteam leaders try and coordinate the players in their fireteam over the same von channel at the same time. The solution to this is to have a "Fireteam" channel. The player would automatically belong to this channel once the squad leader has assigned him a fireteam colour. Meaning within a group, anyone in "RED" fireteam could speak to anyone else in "RED" fireteam and only them This would also mean that up to 4 "Sub" groups within a squad could have 4 conversations at the same time without interrupting the other fireteams. Before anyone comes up with "Direct Chat channel can be used for that....... Then No not really, it doesn't solve the problem and adds to the spam This would be immensley useful in both PVP and PVE where fireteams are working independantly of one and other or have different tasks. And to polish this up even more, ideally the Fireteam Colour leader should be selectable by the Squad Leader via the GUI interface and that fireteam leader should have some form of 3D indicator viewable by his fireteam, similar to the 3D squad indicator. This would allow the Fireteam to be more cohesive as they have a fairly distinctive icon to follow or form up on. As it stands right now, the fire-team leader's role is diminished from what it should be and made more difficult that it could be. It would be very well appreciated by a lot of communities that do not rely on 3rd party addons on some of their server (I.E their public server) to help create immersion, cohesion and control if you could see your way to implementing such functionality. That would polish up the VON and group set up perfectly.