NBloodServerSupervisor

Web API and NBlood server launcher service in .NET Core

Purpose

Not everybody is able to open ports and host games. If you run this container on a VPS, anybody can play, because this will host NBlood servers automatically all the time! It also functions as a server browser, people will be able to see these servers and hop into one of them and wait until it gets full and then the game will start. (It is advised to start the game in windowed mode so you can do other stuff while you wait, when the game is started, you can switch back to fullscreen.) It is still not possible to join if the game has already started! But people can join to another server and wait until it gets full and after this the game will be eventually started.

How it works

After you start the container, the following will happen:

6 NBlood servers will be started, each will have a different number of maximum players, ranging from 3 to 8. Each server will have a player named SERVER which won’t do anything, you can kill it and it will never respawn. If people open the listservers URL, they will see the ports for all the servers - and to make it easier for them - they will also see the command line what they can just copy and paste into a command prompt if they want to join. They will also see how many players have already joined. The game will only start if the required (maximum) number of players have joined. In that case, a new server will be started automatically, so other people can play too. Let’s say 3 people joined to the 3 player server, then a new 3 player server will be launched automatically. It is possible to request private servers with the startserver URL with the desired number of required players. These servers are not listed by listservers. In the response of startserver you will get the port number for that server. Not anybody can start a private server, people need to know the API key for that.

Debug with Visual Studio

Publish WebInterface to a folder with Debug configuration
Create a new folder in the publish folder and name it blood
Compile NBlood with make blood NORENDER=1 or with mingw32-make blood NORENDER=1
Copy nblood.exe into the new blood folder and rename it to nblood_server.exe
Copy the following files of Blood 1.21 into the blood folder:

BLOOD.INI
BLOOD.RFF
GUI.RFF
SOUNDS.RFF
SURFACE.DAT
TILES000.ART-TILES017.ART
VOXEL.DAT

Start WebInterface.exe
Attach the debugger to WebInterface.exe and/or Supervisor.exe
You can call the following URLs with your web browser or Postman:

Deploy the server onto GNU/Linux

Install Docker and wget (if you don’t have already), for example like this: sudo snap install docker && sudo apt install wget -y
Download the Dockerfile: wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CommonLoon102/NBloodServerSupervisor/master/Dockerfile --directory-prefix=supervisor
Build the Docker image: sudo docker build -t nblood-supervisor:latest supervisor
Navigate to your Blood 1.21 directory where you have these files:

BLOOD.INI
BLOOD.RFF
GUI.RFF
SOUNDS.RFF
SURFACE.DAT
TILES000.ART-TILES017.ART
VOXEL.DAT

Run a Docker container from there: sudo docker run --volume "$PWD":/supervisor/publish/blood --network=host --detach nblood-supervisor
Optional: You can see the ApiKey here:

sudo docker run -it nblood-supervisor /bin/bash
cat /supervisor/publish/appsettings.json | grep 'ApiKey'
exit

Usage

You can list the currently running public servers via this URL:

http://your.ip.goes.here:23580/nblood/api/listservers

You can start new private servers via this URL:

http://your.ip.goes.here:23580/nblood/api/startserver?players=3&ApiKey=the_actual_apikey_here

The number of players must be at least 3 and maximum 8. The servers started with this URL won’t be visible publicly via the listservers URL. You can see the port and the command line command to join in the response.

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