Remote Console for Dedicated Servers

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hey guys, so I’ve setup a neat system where my servers are hosted on the cloud etc using a dedicated-server build of my game. Now I’d like to be able to send commands to those servers once they are running as dedicated. Is there such a thing built into unreal engine?

If not, when running a dedicated server, can I SOMEHOW communicate with it at all?

Thanks,
Oz

2

I was originally thinking that an ideal solution would be something like this:

  • Start the server process in a multiplexer (eg, screen or tmux)
  • SSH into the server whenever you want to issue a command
  • Reattach to the appropriate screen or tmux session
  • Issue commands to the running server process via stdin

I think there are a few issues with this idea. I don’t think you can issue console commands to dedicated servers via stdin (or even as command line args) and I believe the shipping builds of the dedicated server don’t take command line arguments.

It might be possible to issue console commands as the server like this:

  • join your server as a client
  • (somehow) authenticate yourself in-game
  • send console commands as text (in a manner similar to in-game chat) via RPC to the server, where they are executed as console commands

I’m not sure that would work, and even if it does it feels hacky and weird to run in production. You would also need an authentication step, which is annoying, and you would need to join your game as a client to issue server commands.

What do you think an ideal solution would be?