Ark Server Manager: Ascended

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Changelog: Changelog

Discord: Server Mangers

Overview

This is the official repository for the Ark Server Manager: Ascended project - a tool used to configure and manage dedicated servers for the game Ark: Survival Ascended (tm) game by Studio Wildcard and Snail Games USA. This tool is not an official Studio Wildcard tool, nor do its developers have any association with Studio Wildcard, Snail Games USA or their partners or affiliates. This product is provided free-of-charge to all users. This product is not packaged with Ark: Survival Ascended or any of its assets - these must be obtained through normal means (e.g. Steam, Epic, etc.), which may require an account with various services. The tool endeavors to make this process easy and automated for the end user.

Goals and Rationale

This project aims to re-create and update the Ark Server Manager originally written by HellsGuard, myself and Bletch over the course of many years, with contributions from many others in the form of testing and translations. Ark: Survival Ascended (tm) brings many changes that make the original ASM incompatible - simple things like data changes and more complex details like how to interact with the server as an administrator. While it is of course possible to extend the ASM to cover this functionality, Bletch has decided to stop supporting that project and I do not wish to spent any more time writing C# and WPF code on my personal time. Further, extending the existing code base would require maintaining compatibility with Ark: Survival Evolved (tm), or a fork and surgery to remove that which no longer applies, which means the code base stands in a confusing and indeterminate place for an arbitrary period of time. Add to that the fact that it is built on a very old version of C# and WPF and you can understand why doing that as a personal project might not seem fun.

Technologies

This project uses Rust and iced. This change from .NET brings some benefits and drawbacks.

Benefits:

Rust makes it easy to produce robust and performant applications
Easy integration with native libraries
No extra runtime to install

Drawbacks:

Can't re-use existing code
UI libraries are not as rich and complete as for .NET
Fewer developers who can develop and maintain the code

Personally, I just enjoy writing code in Rust compared to most other languages.

Discussion and Participation

You can get involved in discussions about development on Discord as well as submit Issues and PRs to this repository.

Translations

If you are a native speaker of a language other than English and wish to assist in translations, I welcome your support. Translations will be handled with .po and .pot files, which are used by the gettext tool. There are editors available for these files, such as:

I do not quite have the infrastructure set up for this yet, but if you wish to help, keep an eye out for updates here, or ask in the Discord.

Comments

Support basic install

The application need to support basic server installation. This includes: [X] Acquiring SteamCMD ✅ Downloading the ASA project [X] Setting critical server values such as ports and passwords [X] Starting and stopping the server
enhancement

opened by ChronosWS 3
FEATURE: Remote server management

Through things like Powershell remoting, we might be able to relatively easily administer remote servers, assuming the user is savvy enough to enable remote administration through Powershell.
enhancement

opened by ChronosWS 0
Setting Pinning

It's annoying to have to always search for parameters. Allow users to pin parameters for their servers so they always show up without needing to search. Should be able to default-pin in the metadata, and override the setting for each server.
enhancement

opened by ChronosWS 0
Use friendly name rather than guid for server folder names

It can be hard to see in File Explorer which server you are dealing with outside of ASM. Also guids are long which could lead to path length issues in some circumstances.
enhancement

opened by ChronosWS 1
Better support for complex-valued vectors

Many options, like ConfigAddNPCSpawnEntriesContainer have more complex nested formats. Entering these by hand is tricky and tedious. The config editor should be improved to support definition of these complex types and the settings editor should support editing them in a user-friendly way.
enhancement

opened by ChronosWS 0