Hazeron Starship Server Raspberry Pi 3/4 Support

[Nightwalker]

From what I've read, Hazeron Starship will eventually support multiplayer again... When that happens, I'd love to see a sever released that can run on a Raspberry Pi 4, or even a Raspberry Pi 4 cluster. It would be great keeping a persistent world running on a 4 core 8 GB system with usb or network storage., and then add a few extra Pi's to offload more solar system simulations should a server get popular. It would also be good to have options to configure the number of officers a world generates, what planets can generate officers (such as population size based), and how many avatars a login can have as a configuration options.

As much fun as it is playing Hazeron Starship solo, it really is meant to be multiplayer. The game definitely has it's issues that need to be addressed before it is public on Steam (the whole chat/hail interaction needs an overhaul, and having to fly/walk into a transporter beam isn't very intuitive--especially when there is more than one beam).

[Rockinsince87]

From what I've read, Hazeron Starship will eventually support multiplayer again... When that happens, I'd love to see a sever released that can run on a Raspberry Pi 4, or even a Raspberry Pi 4 cluster. It would be great keeping a persistent world running on a 4 core 8 GB system with usb or network storage., and then add a few extra Pi's to offload more solar system simulations should a server get popular. It would also be good to have options to configure the number of officers a world generates, what planets can generate officers (such as population size based), and how many avatars a login can have as a configuration options.

As much fun as it is playing Hazeron Starship solo, it really is meant to be multiplayer. The game definitely has it's issues that need to be addressed before it is public on Steam (the whole chat/hail interaction needs an overhaul, and having to fly/walk into a transporter beam isn't very intuitive--especially when there is more than one beam).

I agree with this. Hazeron must support client/server configuration. The core game was designed to be multiplayer and it was designed quite well to accomplish this. I don't see why there would be an issue running the dedicated server platform on different hardware configurations. As long as the dedicated server can run on windows / linux then that allow for any potential setup.

As for Raspberry Pi clusters, I've personally had mixed results, I find them highly inefficient for large tasks. You would need about 10 compute modules alone to equal a single Intel i3 8000 series processor. It would cost quite a bit of money and require a significate sized cluster to properly run Hazeron. It would also not scale very kindly. I would rather use something like this,
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Intel-7th-Gen.../407765314
Price per-performance that would be perfect for a small personal server.

Larger community builds could use a decent custom built server or an old Lenovo ThinkStation from ebay with at least 16 cores/threads and 64GB of RAM with a nice hardware raid setup with SSDs would do the job just fine. Power consumption would be quite low too. Somewhere about 80 to 100 watts. It would cost significantly less then trying to build a Pi cluster of the same performance.

I would love to see the dedicated server software take advantage of GPU processors too. Oh man, that would allow for some serious scalability. It would make it so the community could grow exponentially as needed and easily.

[Nightwalker]

GPUs are only good for performing math, specifically matrix and vector math, but perform very badly with logic operations. What is great about a Raspberry Pi is that is is small, low power, and very quiet. It would be easy for someone to use a spare Pi to run a sever, then expand on it incrementally as the need arises. A CPU may be able to handle 16 threads, sure, but those loads will run faster if they are on 16 different CPUs.

Now, if you knew going in you wanted to run a sever that could handle 100 players at once, then sure, go and buy the hardware now for it. But if it is just you, and maybe a few friends, then a single Pi works great, $55 and you're good to go with a 4GB Pi 4 with gigabit Ethernet ($70 for an 8G version,  8086.net has some cool cluster support boards for the 5 I bought), and you've got a bunch of GPIO pins you could tie hardware to for whatever fun project you had in mind: LED load indicator, maybe even an asteroid warning light if the server produces that kind of logging. Have more people joining your server? Just add another PI or two to offload processing onto.

[Rockinsince87]

GPUs are only good for performing math, specifically matrix and vector math, but perform very badly with logic operations. What is great about a Raspberry Pi is that is is small, low power, and very quiet. It would be easy for someone to use a spare Pi to run a sever, then expand on it incrementally as the need arises. A CPU may be able to handle 16 threads, sure, but those loads will run faster if they are on 16 different CPUs.

Now, if you knew going in you wanted to run a sever that could handle 100 players at once, then sure, go and buy the hardware now for it. But if it is just you, and maybe a few friends, then a single Pi works great, $55 and you're good to go with a 4GB Pi 4 with gigabit Ethernet ($70 for an 8G version,  8086.net has some cool cluster support boards for the 5 I bought), and you've got a bunch of GPIO pins you could tie hardware to for whatever fun project you had in mind: LED load indicator, maybe even an asteroid warning light if the server produces that kind of logging. Have more people joining your server? Just add another PI or two to offload processing onto.

I was thinking too big   . Yeah for a very small private server a Raspberry PI 4 would be perfect.