Isai1a Posted April 1 Share Posted April 1 Hello fellow survivors, I've been a passionate fan of Project Zomboid for years, I have played singleplayer for hundreds of hours. However, as of late, I've found myself longing for a multiplayer experience. Despite my efforts to find a server that aligns with my preferences, I've struggled to find one that offers the level of enjoyment and immersion I seek. That's why I'm reaching out today with an offer that could be of interest. Recently, I found myself in possession of a powerful server that is currently sitting idle, and it dawned on me that I could put it to good use within our beloved Project Zomboid community. I'd like to extend an offer to The Indie Stone devs to utilize this server for official hosting purposes. why? Stability and Reliability: My server boasts high performance and stability (IMO), ensuring a smooth gaming experience within the constraints of multiplayer servers in Project Zomboid. It is also located in the Netherlands which I think is the perfect place for people playing in the EU. Improved Community Experience: While multiplayer servers in Project Zomboid are limited in player capacity and can be prone to lag, having an official server could provide a more consistent and enjoyable experience for those seeking a multiplayer environment. Cost Savings for Development: By offering my server for official Project Zomboid hosting, it would alleviate the financial burden associated with setting up and a dedicated server infrastructure. This would allow The Indie Stone to redirect resources towards moderating and maintaining it. A Good Testing Opportunity: Utilizing my server could also serve as a valuable testing ground to assess the feasibility and benefits of having an official server/multiple servers for Project Zomboid. It would provide an opportunity to evaluate how well it performs under real-world conditions and gauge player feedback, serving as a stepping stone for potential future developments in multiplayer infrastructure! The only downside I see is that moderating and maintaining it is still lots of work and would need lots of volunteers/workers. Server Specifications: ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ ┃ Operating System ┃ Linux - Ubuntu 20.04.6 on x86_64 ┃ ┃ Product ┃ AMP 'Callisto' v2.5.0.0 (Mainline) ┃ ┃ Virtualization ┃ QEMU_KVM ┃ ┃ Application ┃ Application Deployment ┃ ┃ Module ┃ ADSModule ┃ ┃ Running in Container ┃ No ┃ ┃ CPU Model ┃AMD EPYC 74F3 24-Core Processor ┃ ┃ CPU Layout ┃1S/8C/8T ┃ ┃ Installed RAM ┃64320 ┃ ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛ ``` My only question, I eagerly await any feedback or inquiries from The Indie Stone or fellow survivors. Let's continue to survive and thrive together in the world of Project Zomboid! Stay safe out there, Isai1a SilentLight 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilentLight Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 (edited) Well, I like the idea of a(n almost vanilla?) Project Zomboid server. Currently I can only see three in my listings, and every single one wants to download an absolute ton of mods. And to be honest, I don't trust the mods. I'm sure most of them are okay, but there only needs to be one backdoored bad egg for a bad time. I also question if it's truly an original PZ experience if it is heavily modded. Others can have mods, sure, but I'd just like to play on a server that keeps it as close-to-original as possible, with maybe only a handful of validated, Quality-of-Life mods (for example, for admin controls, disabling/preventing PVP, anti-cheat, you get the idea). Also, I see you're running Ubuntu 20.04 (like myself) - perhaps yourself and the PZ devs are interested in a localised AI voice generator? It would allow you to generate a ton of semi-randomised voice clips, and I got it working on Ubuntu 20.04, although my machine is extremely low end so it takes a long time for me. Edit: Massive Clarification: the accents are semi-randomised, not the speech. The AI usually generates speech to the text prompt given (it may sometimes 'disobey', though). It's capped at about 13 to 14 seconds in length as it is based on GPT2. It uses the publicly available Bark library and runs in Python. The audio clips are produced as .wav files. They're decent quality and could serve the purpose of producing sound files for use in the main game. Edited April 2 by SilentLight Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krazmuze Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 (edited) "The only downside I see is that moderating and maintaining it is still lots of work and would need lots of volunteers/workers. " This is why your offer is not viable - support is always more expensive than the actual hardware itself. Given that the game starts with a screen saying to play on whitelisted private or coop servers and not unknown open servers (as they do not want to deal with support issues complaining about hackers) - this would be even more of a moderation task than games that have official anti-cheat systems. Just look at ARK Survival Evolved despite being the most successful survivor game in the past decade - they stiffed an official server provider bill payments as they was already running out of money to provide moderation support even though they used BattleEye protection hackers became the norm on officals. It got so bad they did a remaster and sold it as a new game with a 2yr roadmap for remastering all past DLC - and the server provider funded development in exchange for an exclusive monopoly on providing unofficial/official servers (and of course they incrased unofficial pricing blaming it on the unoptimized game hittting the server hard). The official server experience is so bad that rumours say it must be intentional solely so they can push the cost of moderation onto unofficial hosters and lessen their official server costs with reduced population. Official servers are the fastest way for devs to go broke in other words! You would be better off just listing as a vanilla unofficial server no mods. Since it is not official it will get less traffic, mostly because people expect mods on unofficial and only expect no mods on officials. So your support load should be manageable, even more so if you are a streamer playing unmodded as you will attract like minds that seek the same experience with other channel members. Edited April 2 by krazmuze SilentLight 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
puppers Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 I have ran a few servers for some people in the pz discord and although it was a blast it was still a headache, no matter what i did i could not please everyone and people constantly complained about miniscule things like respawn being on or this mod not being added. I cannot imagine what it would be like managing a huge server with varying playstyles, ages, griefing etc. I think it would be detrimental and just cause too much problems in the drama-factory and just be annoying to manage for them lol. Have to remember a lot of people play with mods, respawn on, and sandbox settings and a majority of those people I highly doubt would be able to withstand vanilla settings. SilentLight 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krazmuze Posted April 2 Share Posted April 2 (edited) 1 hour ago, puppers said: I have ran a few servers for some people in the pz discord and although it was a blast it was still a headache, no matter what i did i could not please everyone and people constantly complained about miniscule things like respawn being on or this mod not being added. I cannot imagine what it would be like managing a huge server with varying playstyles, ages, griefing etc. I think it would be detrimental and just cause too much problems in the drama-factory and just be annoying to manage for them lol. Have to remember a lot of people play with mods, respawn on, and sandbox settings and a majority of those people I highly doubt would be able to withstand vanilla settings. I was a map admin helping create a new map for a modest private server run by an IT guy who hosted a handful of survival games for dozens of regular players. I ended up needing help from the server admin though because some noob griefed my base out of existence somehow even though it was on the tutorial PVE island (mapmaker privileges got to pick bases first). Why? Because I was only on that account for farm chores, usualy I was on my map admin account and it blocked his view even though he put his base in months after mine he justified it as never saw me on despite knowing the server covered time zones and allowed alts. The server admin who provided the servers wanted nothing to do with moderation issues, and relied on volunteer players to moderate as his cost was in the broadband bill even though his IT hardware/support was 'free'. Needless to say I never stayed on the new map I helped make as I was done with volunteers not knowing how to do a job that they do not actually have. I finally learned the only way to enjoy survival games is solo or known friendly coop, much easier to agree on settings and mods and no moderation issues. Moderation is a skill set that requires professionals, it is a mix of babysitting, grade school teacher, and therapist to deal with the insanity that exist on socials and gaming if you go beyond your known circle of friends - especially survival games that attract griefers and exploiters due to the genre itself. Shame because the IT guy had become a good friend and they would do well with PZ if they could get some decent moderators. Edited April 2 by krazmuze Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krilton Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 (edited) Isai1a, Is this server actually physically touchable by you or is this some cloud machine somewhere? If true, then set it up how you see fit. Getting a dedicated server running isn't hard, you just need to forward 2 ports and "blam!!" you are good to go. There is 2 mods I'd suggest using being 1) mod manager 2) mod manager: server. With these, you can configure the DS from a "host game" like adding what maps you want and other things. If you go the route of a DS, then look up steamcmd. The steam based PZ DS didn't work for me. I would be willing to assist you in getting it going should you decide. Only downside is if\when the game gets updated, the client (player) will update while the DS will not which has to be manually updated. Upside to a DS is you dictate what mods are used whereas a hosted game (I could be wrong) anyone can run whatever mods they choose. Edited April 4 by krilton Wrong name on post Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krilton Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 On 4/2/2024 at 3:15 PM, krazmuze said: I was a map admin helping create a new map for a modest private server run by an IT guy who hosted a handful of survival games for dozens of regular players. I ended up needing help from the server admin though because some noob griefed my base out of existence somehow even though it was on the tutorial PVE island (mapmaker privileges got to pick bases first). Why? Because I was only on that account for farm chores, usualy I was on my map admin account and it blocked his view even though he put his base in months after mine he justified it as never saw me on despite knowing the server covered time zones and allowed alts. The server admin who provided the servers wanted nothing to do with moderation issues, and relied on volunteer players to moderate as his cost was in the broadband bill even though his IT hardware/support was 'free'. Needless to say I never stayed on the new map I helped make as I was done with volunteers not knowing how to do a job that they do not actually have. I finally learned the only way to enjoy survival games is solo or known friendly coop, much easier to agree on settings and mods and no moderation issues. Moderation is a skill set that requires professionals, it is a mix of babysitting, grade school teacher, and therapist to deal with the insanity that exist on socials and gaming if you go beyond your known circle of friends - especially survival games that attract griefers and exploiters due to the genre itself. Shame because the IT guy had become a good friend and they would do well with PZ if they could get some decent moderators. Me personally, I HATE zombie respawns because of how the respawn system works. My thought would be is set a population amount and no respawns. Then have the "admin" go in and set X # of zombies to respawn in a 1000 tile radius, that way, the respawns are person controlled and not by the game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
krazmuze Posted April 4 Share Posted April 4 (edited) 14 hours ago, krilton said: Me personally, I HATE zombie respawns because of how the respawn system works. My thought would be is set a population amount and no respawns. Then have the "admin" go in and set X # of zombies to respawn in a 1000 tile radius, that way, the respawns are person controlled and not by the game. If zombie respawns was done by map edge migration, with the lore that it increases with time due to the quarantine being violated and off map towns have got infected, that would make lore sense. Combine that with more frequent helicopter that circles the entire map to keep things moving will help. I think migration just controls when zed cross borders within the map. I turned it off. It makes zero sense for a building with no broken entry that you already cleared to have new zed hiding in the closet. Clearing the map is the 'win' condition. If things get boring then change towns. While I generally do not care for mods unless they stick to lore and fill in the gaps or fix the horribly bad UI, settings are there because different people have different playstyles . If you run a vanilla server good luck getting a discord to agree on which of the default vanilla settings to use - and forgot trying to get them to agree on which sandbox settings to use (even if they did agree there will always be the one that says well they missed the chat or nobody would let them talk so you need to change things to what they want). You would end up having different servers for each of the default settings, which increases your bandwidth/moderation costs especially with the hackers that know how to exploit moving characters and loot and dupe from easy servers to hard servers (bringing up ARK officials again...). But lets say you can outsmart them, you then find out that trying to appeal to every just splits your population limiting your growth potential from friend invites, but if you say I like survival setting then you restrict your population limiting your growth potential from friends saying I wanna play on builder mode. Say you agree on coop PVE only I guarantee you will get PVP griefers that cannot win on a PVP server that knows how to exploit PVE into non-cooperative warfare because they know at least there they can win. Bottom line if you got hardware, make a server that you want to play on with your rules. Start a social streaming to attract like minded to your server, theorizing that if they watch your channel they will come play nicely together. Edited April 4 by krazmuze Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZombieHunter Posted April 5 Share Posted April 5 (edited) I doubt they will do an official 3rd party server. Simply messy legally. ( not same as licensing official 3rd party host ) They also have their own internal server for testing Edited April 5 by ZombieHunter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isai1a Posted April 6 Author Share Posted April 6 On 4/4/2024 at 3:51 AM, krilton said: Isai1a, Is this server actually physically touchable by you or is this some cloud machine somewhere? If true, then set it up how you see fit. Getting a dedicated server running isn't hard, you just need to forward 2 ports and "blam!!" you are good to go. There is 2 mods I'd suggest using being 1) mod manager 2) mod manager: server. With these, you can configure the DS from a "host game" like adding what maps you want and other things. If you go the route of a DS, then look up steamcmd. The steam based PZ DS didn't work for me. I would be willing to assist you in getting it going should you decide. Only downside is if\when the game gets updated, the client (player) will update while the DS will not which has to be manually updated. Upside to a DS is you dictate what mods are used whereas a hosted game (I could be wrong) anyone can run whatever mods they choose. Yes I am able to touch my server. I have hosted many games on it but finding trustworthy people to help with maintaining it was hard/never possible. When build 42 comes out I think I'll give it another shot. Hopefully some friends of mine will be more interested with the new update. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilentLight Posted April 15 Share Posted April 15 On 4/6/2024 at 9:29 PM, Isai1a said: Yes I am able to touch my server. I have hosted many games on it but finding trustworthy people to help with maintaining it was hard/never possible. When build 42 comes out I think I'll give it another shot. Hopefully some friends of mine will be more interested with the new update. Can I still try to convince you to use it to generate AI audio? Here's what my potato laptop managed to generate: https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/71009-peace-offering-generated-audio/ But it took easily several days, with about a 40% discard rate, for about 53 files, and that's using it in the small models format. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hellol Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 On 4/2/2024 at 2:30 PM, SilentLight said: I like the idea of a(n almost vanilla?) Project Zomboid server. Currently I can only see three in my listings, and every single one wants to download an absolute ton of mods. i personally feel that anything that is not officially released by the devs , is just a way to cheat the game SilentLight 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilentLight Posted April 16 Share Posted April 16 28 minutes ago, hellol said: i personally feel that anything that is not officially released by the devs , is just a way to cheat the game I share a similar sort of viewpoint (less about 'cheating' and more about 'changes the experience'), however it is worth bearing in mind the devs intended for modding to be part of the game, otherwise they wouldn't have added LUA scripting. I'm also not a fan of the idea of having my own installation modded by a third party server, because if the server scene were to grow, there's a risk this could be exploited by bad faith actors, or alternatively, novice modders who simply accidentally implement code poorly. I know some might say the mods are limited in what they could do, but if you're able to perform a while loop and if statements, fork-bombs and perpetual resource loading traps are already a possibility. I don't exactly have the cunning of mind to 'break out of the sandbox', but just because most folks can't, doesn't mean smart folks can't. One merely only has to look at the Minecraft hacking scene to see the talent in programming some of them have. I already know Project Zomboid has people with 'sort of hacks', such as tools that automate experience grinding, and whilst I get those are out of frustration with the slow-grind mechanics, they're already entering that territory. This means mods have a two-way risk: A) Bad faith servers attempting to download mods that engage in some sort of foul play, and B) Bad faith users with installed mods that give unfair advantages over other players I personally think for servers, certified mods or some sort of vetting process/signature ought to be used. If a mod turns out to be bad faith, it is then very easy to revoke the certification if it turns out the mod is bad (bad actor bad, not bad quality bad). Client side hacking is harder to address as the client can spoof their file contents, any sort of hashes etc, and it requires server-side resources to 'keep tabs' for anomalies (I used to build a custom mod to detect hackers in Zombie Panic Source a very long time ago). I personally believe hacking originates from two things - either frustration with gameplay mechanics, which is fixable with tweaks to how the gameplay works (automation best works if a task is extremely repetitive, boring, or non-novel; so don't do this as a gameplay mechanic), or because there's some ulterior motive, such as profit (bot farming, E.G. Runescape), personal validation (E.G. cheating to win). Observant people will notice that highly competitive games will nearly always have far more hacks than cooperative or low-competition games, and games where you can translate items into money (whether legally or illegally) will nearly always be rife with bot farms. hellol 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirrus Posted April 17 Share Posted April 17 We've sponsored, provided hosting & hardware for, and helped run MP servers before, but we don't do that now. We don't need any additional server hardware currently, don't have any plans to run official MP servers, and we're quite happy with our suppliers if we need any more servers than the ones we have, but thanks for the offer! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hellol Posted April 18 Share Posted April 18 Btw , just for the record, im not againt modding,.... On 4/16/2024 at 10:26 AM, SilentLight said: I share a similar sort of viewpoint (less about 'cheating' and more about 'changes the experience') Thats how i feel. Perhaps, that's how i should have written. For exemple, vehicles. When i go on utube, i've seen people with an RV, driving around with a portable house, semitrucks that can carry almost my whole base in its back, etc. As a "vanilla" player, whenever i find a car with truck capacity of 160, i go nuts. SilentLight 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilentLight Posted April 18 Share Posted April 18 9 hours ago, hellol said: Perhaps, that's how i should have written. As our discussion is about Vanilla/Mods, I've written a reply for you in a separate thread: I don't want to derail these nice folks thread about their server. hellol 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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