Hosting Tribes Vengeance on Linux

This guide is a high level overview on hosting tribes on Linux. I will not cover again what is said in Server Setup Guide. I assume that you are sufficiently familiar with Linux and terminal. This guide is written for Ubuntu server 18.04, however all commands can easily be translated for other distros.

TLDR: The server is run via Wine. Tribes needs GUI output, for which we use Xvfb.

Setup

Install prerequisites: wine, p7zip-full, xvfb

sudo apt install -y wine p7zip-full xvfb

Create Tribes installation folder, I will use /Tribes
Either

Install Tribes via Wine GUI
Download ReadyToRunServer.7z and extract it to /Tribes

Configure xvfb systemd service.
Experimentally start game server on xvfb display DISPLAY=:1 wine /Tribes/Program/Bin/Beta_Dedicated_Server.exe. Make sure that it works properly.
Configure game server systemd service.

Systemd services

Systemd is a Linux equivalent to Windows services. Systemd service can be started/stopped/enabled/disabled and set to autostart and autorestart. For example to configure xvfb:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/xvfb.service Service are placed into this directory
Paste/edit (service config)[#Xvfb]
sudo systemctl daemon-reload This makes systemd load updated config
sudo systemctl start xvfb This starts a service
sudo systemctl status xvfb Print status (running/dead) and last logs
sudo systemctl enable xvfb Enables xvfb service to autostart

Xvfb

[Unit]
Description=X Virtual Frame Buffer Service
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -ac

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Game server

[Unit]
Description=Tribes Vengeance Main server
After=network.target
After=xvfb.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/Tribes/Program/Scripts/main.sh
Nice=-20
User=tribes
Group=tribes
Environment=DISPLAY=:1
WorkingDirectory=/Tribes/Program/Scripts

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Tips

You can use low-latency kernel
You can use tuned-adm profile network-latency to tune for low network latency (at the cost of power consumption)
Set Wine process to be high priority. You can also use path your kernel with a deadline scheduler and use deadline priority
You can set WINEDEBUG=-all environment variable which disables Wine debug information. This could help with performance.
Make sure that you optimize settings for your system like buffer sizes and so on
Network connection or network card seems to be more important than CPU
You can configure a VNC server to show your xvfb display, you can then see game log via VNC. This does not work very well hovever.

Useful scripts

main.sh

#!/bin/bash

name=main
map=MP-REV-CanyonCrusade
mode=GameClasses.ModeCTF
mutator=antics_v5.antics,promod_v1rc7_b3.promod

CONFIG_PATH=/Tribes/Program/Config/$name.ini node /Tribes/Program/Scripts/shuffleMaps.js

export WINEDEBUG=-all

cd ../Bin
wine Beta_Dedicated_Server.exe "${map}?game=${mode}?maxplayers=32?mutator=$mutator" -server "ini=../Config/${name}.ini" "log=../Logs/${name}_$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S).log"

shuffleMaps.js

NodeJs utility that shuffles maps in TV config.ini. On our server it runs every midnight via CRON.

var fs = require('fs')
var filePath = process.env.CONFIG_PATH;

console.info('CONFIG_PATH =', filePath);
if(!filePath || !fs.existsSync(filePath)) {
        console.error('CONFIG_PATH not set or pointing to nonexistent file');
        process.exit(1);
}

// load all the lines from CONFIG_PATH
var lines = fs.readFileSync(filePath, 'utf-8')
    .split('\r\n')
    .filter(Boolean);

console.info('Maps in:', lines.filter(function(line){ return /^Maps=/i.test(line) }).map(function(line){ return line.replace(/^Maps=/i, '') }));

// find all lines matching ^Maps= regex
var shuffleAbleLines = lines
        .map(function(line, i){ return { text: line, lineN: i } })
        .filter(function(line){ return /^Maps=/i.test(line.text) })
        .map(function(line){ return line.lineN });

// randomly select two lines and switch them in lines array
for(var i = 0; i < 100; i += 1) {
        var sourceLine = shuffleAbleLines[Math.floor(Math.random() * shuffleAbleLines.length)];
        var targetLine = shuffleAbleLines[Math.floor(Math.random() * shuffleAbleLines.length)];

        var acc = lines[sourceLine];
        lines[sourceLine] = lines[targetLine];
        lines[targetLine] = acc;
}

console.info('Maps out:', lines.filter(function(line){ return /^Maps=/i.test(line) }).map(function(line){ return line.replace(/^Maps=/i, '') }));

// save lines back to the CONFIG_PATH
fs.writeFileSync(filePath, lines.join('\r\n'));

updatePriorities.sh

This sets proper priorities to the server process. We run it every second via CRON. You need to have sysctl utility that can set processor affinity and a chrt utility for deadline scheduling.

#!/bin/bash

id=$(pgrep -f 'Beta_Dedicated_Server')

sysctl -w kernel.sched_rt_runtime_us=-1
taskset -pca 0 $id
chrt --deadline --sched-period 1000000 --pid 0 "$id"