Happy to hear! Love AMP so far, works really well.
Just noting my experience here so far so I have it written down.
Had a few little issues when I click to fast. Bulk starting instances or bulk creating instances. Doing all that with no disk space put it in a bad state.
Expanded my drive and recreated instances and all seems to work really well. Good fast startup and shutdown.
The Ark module could use some mod support so that its not a manual process. Its tends to be tedious when you have lots of ark instances.
(When using mods in server settings) The mods ask for steam login and steam guard. I got prompted 6 times for one instances (6 mods). If I had to do mods for all 12 instances, thats 72 steam authentication prompts, and then steam login as well. Can’t it download mods anonymously? After all this it doesnt download mods to the right location so have to configure some softlinks, game.ini, startup arguments, etc. Lots of work to do over many instances.
Had to disable docker to get mod support and transfers working. Not really a drawback. I will be happy when it works in docker.
Ah that makes sense. Wish it was easier to handle the workshop downloads.
What if you cache the workshop downloads in AMP?
I have 12 instances of Ark and they will all use the same mods so that people can move items between servers that are added by mods.
Brainstorming
Global steam mods in AMP cache.
Global ark mods folder in a cache.
Maybe a link to shared mods folder
Or maybe initial copy from cache to instance.
Link all Ark instances to a global mods folder.
Similar to the multimc mod management.
They can add and remove mods for minecraft in their portal. Which just adds the jar file or removes it from the mod folder.
Not sure if steam workshop items work the same. Can you add the workshop folders to activate mod and remove folders to deactivate.
Your setup sounds somewhat similar to mine, some info on how I’m running my cluster might be useful. Not exactly what you asked but saves a lot of diskspace! While I have my other game servers using docker containers, I did not for my ark servers. Feel like I read somewhere in AMP’s documentation recommending such. I have 12 instances setup in a cluster to share a single instance of game files using a symbolic link for each. I usually only have 2 or 3 of the servers running simultaneously but haven’t run into issues so far. I got the idea from and used a similar configuration with LinuxGSM. I am also using a symbolic link to locate my datastore on a separate virtual disk (as shown on AMP wiki). Commands run from AMP user home directory. Long day, hope this isn’t too much of a word salad.
Began by creating 12 Ark instances, didn’t start them. As mentioned above, setup without docker. Started the first server and updated to download Ark files.
Once downloaded moved game files into directory to symlink (/mnt/amp/.ark/arkSE/)
Create or copy GameUserSettings.ini and Game.ini (…/arkSE/376030/ShooterGame/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/)
Created links for each server (ln -s /mnt/amp/.ark/arkSE/ .ampdata/instances/ARK##/arkSE)
Under AMP’s configuration tab, setup Game and Server options. Changed ‘Server Name’ and ‘Map’ for each server. Selected desired settings and used custom flags (-NoTransferFromFiltering -clusterid=clustername -ClusterDirOverride=/home/amp/.clustername -automanagedmods)
Whatever you choose for --ClusterDirOverride=/home/amp/.clustername, create a directory to store cluster files. In my case, used symbolic links again (ln -s /mnt/amp/.ark/clustername/ .clustername).
I do not use AMP to manage the mods. Mods are downloaded/updated when server starts and configured by Game.ini and GameUserSettings.ini. Since most settings are in these files, all servers share the same settings minus ones adjusted by AMP’s configuration tab (Map and Server Name). Only run one copy of each map, not sure what multiple copies would do. Launch servers spaced out one at a time.
Could you add me to explain better how you did this?
I’m trying to set up a cluster on the AMP panel without docker, but I’m using 2 vps to run the servers.