Startup Issue with Motor Town: Behind The Wheel - The server crashes within minutes after starting

Technical Support
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1

System Information

Field Value
Operating System Linux - Debian GNU/Linux 12 on x86_64
Product AMP ‘Phobos’ v2.6.0.8 (Mainline)
Virtualization Docker
Application Motor Town: Behind The Wheel
Module GenericModule
Running in Container Yes
Current State Failed

Problem Description

Issue

This is a fresh install, never been used running on Ubuntu 24.04. Sometimes the servers stays up for a couple minutes, but normally it crashes within a minute.
Unfortunately, there are no helpful logs.

Reproduction Steps

  • Create instance
  • Update instance
  • Start instance
  • Looked for logs, but didn’t find any
  • Re-ran update
2

from the discord:

Workaround for steamcmd users (when you see the server in the Serverbrowser and you are not able to connect) Windows/Linux

  • add the steam runtimes to your steamcmd cmd: +app_update 1007
  • reinstall the server with steamcmd

then copy following files to: /MotorTown/Binaries/Win64/ For Windows/Linux Users:

  • steamclient.dll
  • steamclient64.dll
  • tier0_s.dll
  • tier0_s64.dll
  • vstdlib_s.dll
  • vstdlib_s64.dll

may also help here

3

The template already installs the steam sdk into the binaries dir

1 Like
4

I see on their Discord that they tend to have better luck with Proton. I’ve only ever used Wine, but one of these days I was going to grab your config file and see if I could figure out how to change it and see if I can get it working

5

I probably already tried proton in my testing lol

6

What is your system running on? Bare metal? VPS? Proxmox?

7

Turns out I hadn’t previously tried Proton. Tried it now, server runs OK (but it also ran OK for me with Wine).

Anyway, have switched the template to use Proton, try it out

If that also doesn’t work, then it is an issue with your system

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8

Thank you for that, I’ll give it a try tomorrow, I really appreciate it.
It’s an Ubuntu Server 24.04 VM running on Proxmox with just a few tools (like Docker) and AMP installed (I created a fresh VM from a cloud-init template specifically for this)

9

Make sure the CPU mode for the VM in Proxmox is set to Host

Also a good idea to increase the vm.max_map_count sysctl in the VM

10

Thank you for that! I changed the CPU mode to Host and set vm.max_map_count to 2147483642 (I updated my playbook so that gets applied to all my VMs now).
I rebuilt the instance from scratch using your updated template, but it still crashes and it doesn’t appear in the server list at all (I was able to see and connect to it under the wine config)

UPDATE:
I tried running the game outside of the container, and it looks like the AMP instance manager service is now being killed rather aggressively for OOM.
I’m wondering if the issue is Linux being super aggressive about memory management since I have 19GB RAM assigned to this VM, and I have other processes using about 5GB at the moment. I’m giving the VM a little more RAM and I’m going to stop those other servers and see if that is the cause of the crashing, even though from all monitors I should still have had free memory

UPDATE 2:
It’s working now for over two hours.
The amount of memory shown as being used between Proxmox, AMP, and top are all different and apparently more RAM was being used than what I thought. Between that, and the fact that apparently they stopped using a swapfile by default in Ubuntu 22.04+ (Or 20.04+, I don’t remember at this point, so many numbers today.) meant that it was killing the container process for Motor Town.
After updating my Ansible playbooks, I now have swap enabled and I’m running fine. Time to research RAM upgrades!

11

Can you provide the template for your configuration of this server? I can’t do it and the module to generate a template is extremely complicated.

12

In your main AMP config, add Greelan/AMPTemplates:dev under “Instance Deployment-> Instance Management → Configuration Repositories”, then it’ll show up in the list under G’s (They start with Greelan)

1 Like