Setting up an online server is overly complex...

I wanted to financially contribute and provide an 1Gb fiber server (to get low pings) to North American users (all good servers are in Europe).

Perhaps, I'm reading old info and steps and options changed since the last 1-2 year. Why can't we just download the server files from Steam, change a few settings in a .cfg files and hit Launch on Steam?

The steps and setup appear to be over complicated and not very clear between the Steam portion vs the AMS2 portion and where to put the .cfg files, etc... I understand there is no UI, but the directions and user guide PDFs are confusing. I just spent an hour searching, reading, and hit the executable...but lobby cannot be found anywhere

 

Hi, are you hosting it from home or externally, if from home make sure to forward all the appropiate ports, there are 4 ports in total, if u have done that, then you do get a http webconfig, default address is localhost:9000 if i remember correctly, then you can setup the next session from there, when you set servercontrolsgamesetup to false in the server.cfg you, or whoever jumps first in the server from within the game is able to set it up.

Bear in mind that there are issues with dedi servers not showing up for everyone, for me that issue occurs more since the 1.3 update, but others reported having the issue before that as well.

 

Hi @Roy Niessink... I'm hosting from home. Your response also confirms the current non-user-friendly steps that current required to host servers. It's too complicated for the average person. Too bad, since that is one easy way to increase the user base.

 

well, to be fair, this is one of the easiest dedi servers to setup, you can make it more complicated by diving more into it, but the base is quite easy, especially compared to almost all other sims.

for the average person the ingame lobby creation is there, the dedicated server is for the slightly advanced users, at least thats how i see it.

Every dedicated server requires port forwarding, thats pretty basic stuff.