More Cobbleverse Chatter
The makers of Cobbleverse recently released a new update to their mod pack with a range of new features. The update focuses on fine tuning server performance and adding some QoL features to the game.
Weeb’s Web’s server is now updated to the latest release (1.7.31) and the performance benefits are HUGE! Lumyverse releasing a performance update right after we set up a new server is absolutely wonderful timing. Players have reported that they can fly on a Killowatrel at full speed without ever breaking past the chunk rendering.
Ragnarok Infrastructure Upgrades
I talked about this in the past but I plan on making major changes to our wRO server. I want to be able to make a permanent, grindy long term progression server based on Pre-renewal and then set up some high rate seasonal servers for different events. This means it’s time to get our Ragnarok infrastructure up to snuff for the changes. I need a solution that meets the following criteria:
- Modularity and easy creation of new servers
- Shared login between all wRO servers
- Ease of management for simple tasks
- Ability to give other moderators management capabilities
The solution to this is to utilize our Pelican server infrastructure. Pelican containerizes game servers and uses a template system to server creation. This makes it simple to press a button and spin up a new server. We’ll create variables in pelican to specify where the Databases are for each server thats spun up and we’ll point every server to the same login database so that a users account works for all servers. Pelican also supports file mounting which we can use to keep config persistent across server reinstalls. Also, my moderators are familiar with Pelican since we use it for our other games and can help manage the wRO servers. This frees everyone up more to keep working on features for Weeb’s Web!
So What’s the Status of this?
Good news! I have successfully created a template (Pelican calls these eggs). That lets me spin up an rAthena server in one click! This was SIGNIFICANTLY harder than I thought it was going to be. At first I tried creating a simple debian docker container, using git to download rAthena and then compile the server binaries inside the Pelican install script. This takes way too long and Pelican eventually shuts the process down due to a hardcoded timeout.
So if compiling the binaries in Pelican is a no go, we’ll just have to precompile the binaries. This was a TASK! I tried doing it from a debian container in Proxmox but that container had different versions of the libraries than the debian container that Pelican uses. So I pulled that debian container via docker and compiled the binaries on my computer but the debian container I used was missing a library. This meant that I had to make my own docker image of a debian container with the right libraries installed.
To do this I forked the container images from Pelican’s github, cloned them to my computer, made a copy of the debian container’s dockerfile, added the libraries I needed to the dockerfile, modified the workflows to include this new image, then pushed these changes to my own github fork. What a mouthful.
But wait! There’s more! I then had to pull that new debian container image (dubbed debian-rathena) down to my computer via docker, fork the rathena github, clone it to the docker container, compile the binaries, then push them to my forked github repository.
And the result? A one click solution to spinning up rAthena in Pelican! With this, we now have the groundwork to make MASSIVE upgrades to wRO way faster than we would have before. We still have some work to do though. I’ve got rAthena spinning up with default values. The next step is to configure variables in the egg to point the servers and databases to their respective locations. We’ll also need to mount config files so that they persist but we’ll do that after spinning up the servers.
Thanks again to everyone for showing me your support! I love building these projects and the joy I see in the Weeb’s Web community brings joy to my life.
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