Jon's IDM Blog

Week 8 Building the server

For my reserach this week I primarily spent my energy building and launching my server. Having such a large team can be pretty daunting but I like the idea of giving everyone the option to learn and use UE4 since its becoming so previlent in the industry. Besides all that, I think this would be a very valuable process for me to experience. For the design of the world, I am limited to making it load nicely for the Occulus Quest which is where I think level streaming should work nicely. Using a follow the leader setup, with a pickup object probably shaped like a key and force teleporting when new levels load, I think should work nicely. To enforce a sense of exploration, I think having a little scavengery hunt where I hide objects in each world for a prize at the end would work well too.

I didn't want to have my work desktop running 24/7 since the powerful hardware would probably drive up the electricity bill and I always wanted a personal server. Luckily I've been building computers for years and was able to pick out some parts from the local MicroCenter as well as order a nice little case online and reuse a spare power supply I had in storage.

The learning curve on this stuff was pretty steep but after maybe 30 hours or something silly, I was able to emerge successful. I did a little research and found that Ubuntu server was a nice thing to install for this sort of perpose, little did I know that there was no graphical user interface. I had to learn a ton of comman line stuff, it was like stabbing in the dark for a while. After that I found out how to setup SSH so that I can access my server from my macbook or desktop and also made sure to add all the basic securities too. I then setup the portforwarding on my router with a DDNS so that my server could be access from the internet. I then went and got myself a domain name for pretty cheap and linked that all up which also took a lot of learning. It was pretty cool accessing my server for the first time on my laptop from my parents house and do some debugging from there.

I then installed Perforce on my server and got that all going, I went with perforce since it was compadible with my server as well as windows and mac. Turns out though that I need to contact their sales since I'm a little limited on user seats and number of files. I do plan on making a video tutorial to show my teammates how to use the software. Luckily communications have been going pretty well over discord, with me helping some of them trouble shoot things here and there. My plan right now is to get a server build prototype up and running so that I can test the functionality and make sure it all works well. From there I'll start collecting and connecting everyone's levels and make sure that works and then get to putting together my hub world.

Social Calendar

For my virtual socializing this week, I had to cut down a ton. I was so busy working on homework and getting the server up and running that I only had time to do my weekly web cam card games which I still look forward to each week.

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