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question-circle Setting up a PQ multiplayer server on a VPS

  • M@s
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17 Dec 2021 12:15 #1
Around two weeks ago I ordered a VPS to host servers of games which are easy to handle by the server (PQ Multiplayer being one of them, I believe), but I haven't yet figured out how to... remotely execute files on the machine and other things of this sort. :side:
That is in part due to my rough time in university at the moment, oftentimes I didn't have the time and/or will to set it up.

I should mention the machine is running Ubuntu 20.04 and it doesn't appear to support a graphical interface, just the Terminal. I know that's all you realistically need to access it and execute commands, and that you can just SSH into it with file transfer capability, but I'd rather download PQ straight into it than send the game files from my PC (which could take a few hours to send due to my poor connection).

I'd appreciate any advice on how to properly set up a PQ server on a VPS. Hopefully I can set it up within a week from now as I wanted to do it a while ago.
  • HiGuy
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18 Dec 2021 23:54 #2
The general process of running PQ is pretty simple: just install wine-devel (you may be able to use wine stable these days) and `cd pq ; wine ./marbleblast.exe`. The hard part is getting a copy of the game installed, since the java launcher is gui-only. I wrote this a couple years ago: github.com/HiGuyMB/TestLauncher and was using it to update the servers I ran, but you can just as easily scrape marbleblast.com/pq/where/yeahboii-1/ or marbleblast.com/pq/where/yeahboii-2/ (whichever is latest) and get a copy that way. Then just extract em all on top of each other and wine it up (tm). From there, server management is just a fun challenge of "which prefs file has the setting I want" and reading the source code to figure out how to make the game do stuff you want.

The only other hard part is keeping the game running after a crash/restart and maybe automated restarts. I made a pile of scripts for the ones I ran which makes that process easier. You can get them here: github.com/PlatinumTeam/DedicatedServerScripts
This signature is real code
Code:
function clientcmd12dothepq() { commandToClient(LocalClientConnection, '34onthedancefloor'); }
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