This guide shows exactly how to make official servers for ThreadSpace: Hyperbol. The first part of this guide shows you how to make a Starport account. Then it shows you how to add servers to the account, and how to configure and run them. This guide may change to take into account various methods of updating servers.

Note that you only need to follow this guide if you want to make "Official" servers which contribute stats (credits and xp). Unofficial servers can be made via the game's GUI, and have no limitations or requirements...

First, you actually need to obtain the dedicated server!

You might already have this. You can get this either directly from steam, or by using valve's Dedicated Server Update Tool (recommended). If you have steam installed, you can install the dedicated server by going to your 'tools' tab. If you have hyperbol, it should be there. It will install the dedicated server files (hbds.exe) into your hyperbol steam folder.

If you'd rather get it from steam, you can install it by copying and pasting the following URL into your web browser:steam://install/2740 ... or if you installed Hyperbol already, then you already have it in your steam folder, under steamapps/common/tshb

The most reliable way, though, especially if you want to install it on a computer without steam, or a linux machine, and just want the smallest possible cleanest install of it, is to use Valve's HLDSUpdateTool. For it to work, you'll need to first install the HLDSUpdateTool from Valve Software: You can get it here Its a self-extracting installer.

Then, open a command prompt and navigate to where you installed the tool. Since I installed it for example in my c:\games\hldsupdatetool folder, I typed the following commands.

d:
cd\games
cd hldsupdatetool
HldsUpdateTool.exe -command update
mkdir hbds
HldsUpdateTool.exe -command update -game tshb -dir ./hbds

This set of commands go to the hldsupdatetool folder, tell the tool to update itself if necessary, make a blank folder called hbds in it, and then download the latest, up-to-date hbds into that folder.

Note: If you have access to an existing hyperbol installation, you can 'cheat' by installing valve's HLDSUpdateTool on the target machine, and then copying the file "serverautoupdater.exe" from the existing hyperbol folder, into a blank folder into the target machine. server auto updater automatically types in the various command lines required by hldsupdatetool, downloads and verifies hyperbol server installation, and even sets up and runs a default arena server for you.

Making your Starport Account

To make an official server, you'll first need a Starport Account that it belongs to. Making a Starport Account is free and quick, and its a good idea to put all your servers under a common account, since it has the ability to administrate them.

If you've already made a Starport Web Account, you may skip this step.

You can also make an account from directly within the game itself, entering Starport and choosing "Starport Web Site" from the character selection screen. This guide assumes you do not have a web account yet. So first, go tohttp://starport.hyperbol.com and click the Login button.

You will be presented with the login screen. Click the "Create an account" link.

After being presented with an EULA (Sorry), you will be able to fill in details:

Explanation of the more odd fields:

• Security question and answer will never be altered once you make this account. Choose something pretty secure. You can use it later to reset the account password if it falls into enemy hands!

• Show Custom Portraits, if unchecked, will hide all custom portraits folks might upload. Demo and Stress Test folks can't upload portraits, but you never know when someone might upload something offensive. (You can report them for doing so, though).

Once you've created your account...

Click continue

A verification email has been sent to the email address you supplied. You should check to see if you can find the email there.

You can click the 'send verification email' button again, to send another.

PLEASE CHECK YOUR SPAM FOLDER.

For some reason, some providers consider the verification mail spam, probably because it is very brief. Here is a screenshot of it in my gmail account

Notice that yes, it ended up in the spam folder! Once you click on the link in the email, you'll get this:

Clicking continue and hooray, you're logged in and verified.

Now lets set up some servers!

Notice that now I'm logged in (yellow highlight). At the bottom of the page there is SERVER ADMINISTRATION. Click it to reveal this screen:

Click "Add a Server" to create your first server. Please make sure you read and understand the server agreement, as the rules are there to keep it fair for everyone.

The following screen lets you enter your server details:

Notice the IP Address. The IP address should be your external facing ip address, ie, of your router, not your local machine. To find out what this is you can visit for example http://www.ipchicken.com or http://whatismyip.com

• You can run many servers on the same machine or network, as long as they use different ports

• Please don't run large servers on a modem. In fact, modems are generally unsuitable for servering

You can also make a MOTD here. The MOTD can be plain text, but you can spice it up by beginning each line with a special sequence of symbols:

• r, g, or b in square brackets means the line becomes red, green, or blue

• l or w in square brackets makes the line light blue, or white

• plus or minus in square brackets makes it use the larger or smaller font.

• Note that you can only use these once per line. You cant do plus plus plus. And making a r, g, and b in the same line will simply make the entire line r, g, or b, whichever it finds last

Once you click Register server, the following is shown:

Using this link, you can download the config file. Its saved as hostoptions.cfg. You'll need to move it into ThreadSpace: Hyperbol's data folder to use it.

Note If you used the standalone dedicated server installer, the location of the data subfolder will be in the location you chose to install when you installed it!

Otherwise, if you're using the steam install, This file needs to be placed in your hyperbol folder, in the data subfolder, like so:

Advanced stuff

New info: If you'd like a clean, easy way to keep your servers automatically running and up to date, please see

Auto Update Guide.

If you'd prefer to do it the old way, though... keep reading here:Notice that in the above screenshot, I have not just hostoptions.cfg, but hostoptions-skill1 through 5.

This is because I run multiple servers on occasion, and I also don't like to overwrite hostoptions.cfg, which the game also uses. So instead of saving the downloaded hostoptions.cfg over my data\hostoptions.cfg file, I renamed it toHostOptions-skill1.cfg and saved it there. I registered 5 other servers and did the same thing.

Then I made a batch file called StartServers.bat and placed it in my hyperbol folder:

See how I run hbds.exe with the configfile option, telling each instance to load a different config file.

This way my original hostoptions.cfg is not overwritten, and all servers start.

Each server uses adifferent port, obviously... I simply put the batch files in my hyperbol folder:

If you run a server, it looks like this:

You can click theGoto Starportbutton to go administrate, add, remove, alter your servers anytime. Note that the dedicated server may report errors from time to time during operation, as maintennence is performed.

Most of the time, they become unofficial for brief periods of time, then re-synch automatically. New version notifications will occur here too.

Troubleshooting

• The primary reason a server doesn't show up properly in the Join Game list is that its behind a router and the router hasn't been configured properly to feed the ports to the particular machine serving.

• To configure your router, make sure that port 12129 (or whatever port you chose when setting the server up) is routed to the server machine. There are many guides on "Port Forwarding" as its called. Check the internet

• You can use the -serverip <ip address> command line parameter to bind it to a specific IP address.

• For example hbds.exe -serverip 0.0.0.0

• This would bind it to ip addresses on the local machine instead of just the primary card

• For example hbds.exe -serverip 32.14.151.23

• This would bind it only to the network interface with that IP address.

• Note that if you attempt to bind it via serverip and you don't own that address, it will not properly host, and it will write an error out in the console log telling you that it failed. Keep your eyes open for that error.

• This option is NEW and has not been implemented as of June 27, 2007. It should be available next update, so by the time you read this, its probably there if its been a day or two...

Interesting Server Console Commands

• dumpcmds - lists all commands. You can use a filter. Like this: "dumpcmds ban" - will list all commands with the word ban in them. This is recommended as it will tell you how to ban people.

• "dumpcmds ban" - list all commands related to banning

• "dumpcmds kick" - list all commands related to kicking people out

• "help (command)" - gives you help on a particular command. Like "help banid"

• "msg (message)" - sends an admin message to all players connected. like "msg hello folks" Its recommended that you surround your message with quotes: msg "hello folks"

• There may be other useful commands. Use dumpcmds to find them

linux information

can be found here