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Why ark server hosting is so messed up?


cyrax76

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Few years ago, i was abble to host a dedicated ark server for me and for my friends to play. They were abble to join and everything went fine until an update (can't remember which one). After i updated my server in server manager, my friends unable to join to my server. I tried eveyrthing, my port forwarding was ok, i used the same when it was worked. Disabled the firewall, download the server manager again, i even reinstalled my pc. and nothing helped. After a few years i tried to play with one of my friends again. I Hosted a non dedicated server, and my friend was unable to join. She get these messages: connection timeout, and unknown error. We even tried with hamachi with the same result. The only way she was able to join is to start a singleplayer game after i started the non dedicated server, and type: open "my hamachi ip"
Now i started to create a dedicated server again using ark server manager. I folowed countles tutorials step by step, but my server only shows up in lan, and my friends can't see it. I literally tried everything to fix this problem, nothing helped. And i'm not the only one. A lot of people have the same issue when hosting a dedicated server, and looks like nobody knows what causing the problem and how to fix it, which is very frustrating.

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I followed every single tutorial of creating dedicated server step by step, but can't make it work. I opened the correct ports, disabled the windows firewall and antivirus just in case, and i can't even see my own server. Also, i checked my ports that i correctly forwarded and it's say it closed. What did i do wrong?

manager.jpg

port.jpg

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Map Name - You shouldn't have a space between "The" and "Island".  I don't use ASM though, so I don't know if that's an ASM thing.

Check that your ISP's router still supports NAT Loopback.  I'm with Virgin Media and they decided at some time to update the BIOS on my Virgin Media router and completely disable NAT Loopback.  I had to drop the VM router down to modem mode and buy a third-party router.

Checking your ports from a third-part website will almost always show them as not accessible because those web sites don't understand Ark's protocols.
Try searching for your server on Battlemetrics.

 

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9 hours ago, cyrax76 said:

Also, i checked my ports that i correctly forwarded and it's say it closed.

This is a problem! You have both TCP & UDP forwarded, so any 3rd party port scan should see 7777, 7778 and 27015 as open! (Even if it does not recognise what "service" is running behind those ports) So the first thing to do is maybe check with your ISP if they ALLOW incoming ports from the www to your WanIP address. I know that some ISP's block incoming connections, especially to non standard ports (i.e. not web port 80, not mail and etc.)

Secondly, as @Larkfields sez, if your router does not have NAT loopback enabled, you might get it right to create and host a server but that server will not be accessible from your LAN. It will be visible on the internet and battlemetrics, but from the LAN you will not be able to join (or even see) it.

From personal experience, I find the published 7777-7778 data ports and 27015 query port to be not so useful, they tend to conflict with a bunch of different games - so I rather run with a 7789-7790 and 26900 set of ports for my first map.

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17 hours ago, cyrax76 said:

Few years ago, i was abble to host a dedicated ark server for me and for my friends to play.

The "ease" of hosting was well busted when Ark changed the way networking was implemented. I think this was just before Epic version of the game was released? But the "rawsockets", "bIsLanMatch" options were removed, and networking ONLY worked over Steam protocols - it was no longer possible to run a client / server setup using the underlying Unreal networking.

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40 minutes ago, DirkInSA said:

But the "rawsockets", "bIsLanMatch" options were removed, and networking ONLY worked over Steam protocols - it was no longer possible to run a client / server setup using the underlying Unreal networking.

It's the other way around.  The Steam networking protocols were removed/disabled from Ark - otherwise EPIC players (without access to the Steam APIs/Libs/DLLs) wouldn't be able to join a server.

The "rawsocket" command line / ini file option was removed because WC made it the default (and only) way of networking.  Rawsockets was meant to be a faster network protocol than Steam's.  I tried it and didn't see any positive benefit - but the negative aspect was that it introduced the "a player with that name is already connected" issue.

I haven't been able to find the patch notes for this change - maybe someone here knows where they're archived.
 

 

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2 minutes ago, Larkfields said:

So WC no longer use the Steam library

The only difference is that now ARK uses, by default, an OSS that combine both; EOS and Steam subsystems. You can configure it by editing your Engine.ini file as mentioned into the following thread:

Possible values are;

  • EOS - Epic Online Services only
  • Steam - Steam only
  • SteamEOSComposite - Epic and Steam (default)

 

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11 hours ago, Larkfields said:

Seems my memory was wrong...

Patch notes v311.78 - 06/11/2020 November 2020 (at the link below) says they disabled rawsockets because they were not compatible with the new networking code.
So WC no longer use the Steam library, nor rawsockets.

 

11 hours ago, invincibleqc said:

The only difference is that now ARK uses, by default, an OSS that combine both; EOS and Steam subsystems. You can configure it by editing your Engine.ini file as mentioned into the following thread:

Possible values are;

  • EOS - Epic Online Services only
  • Steam - Steam only
  • SteamEOSComposite - Epic and Steam (default)

 

Yeah - my thought is that no one outside of wildcard knows what they actually done with the networking stuff.

I do know from personal experience that in the past is was possible to host and join an Ark server on the local LAN with absolutely no internet connection. And that is a function that is provided out of the box by the Unreal Engine (bIsLanMatch is an unreal engine parameter, and has (to my best knowledge) never been documented by Wildcard). Further, when you got this kind of server running, and you had internet with a bit of port forwarding, It was possible for internet Ark game clients to connect to that server by means of a direct IP connect on the client launch parameters. Sure the Ark game browser did not pick it up, but also there was no "cannot connect" / "Timeout" and etc. And a last bonus of that setup was that this Nat loopback that gives a lot of people(including me) gray hairs was not a thing - internal LAN clients launch with ShooterGame.exe 192.168.x.y:7777 (lan IP) and internet clients launch with ShooterGame.exe 101.y.y.z:7777 (wan IP). The only time steam was accessed was for the server to validate that SteamID of the connecting client was indeed a good ID with possesion of the game. And this commutation was initiated by the Ark server - so no arbitrary "open ports" needed there either.

 

Somewhere and somewhy over time this functionality has been killed. In other words Wildcard has adopted an "overlay" to the networking functionality - either provided by Steam or Epic or both. And this "overlay" prevents the underlying engine from doing what it does quite well.

In all events - the "detail" don't matter - the current day impact is that Ark networking is very very finicky :( Those were the good old days before Wildcard broke it!

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7 hours ago, cyrax76 said:

so where is this rawsockets and how can i disable it?

Don't worry about it - the switch is "redundant" to Ark and no longer does anything in the modern Ark incarnations . So putting it will do absolutely nothing - Sorry! I was just kinda "venting" in my 2nd post, that stuff is all history.

My 1st set of comments around ports are relevant though!

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