Multiple MTA instances?

[garnet]

Hello guys!

To start off, i'm a lua developer that primarily works within the Half-Life community. I decided to join in on MTA to try and create something unique seeing as I love roleplay. However, I came across an issue.

I purchased the program Sandboxie in order to run multiple instances of Garry's mod so that way I can run up to 5 instances of it, all connected to the same server in order to test out my creations/monitor cpu usage. I would like to accomplish the same thing on MTA, however, it seems as if MTA is not allowed to be ran more than once, neither can I walk around this using Sandboxie.

I know running virtual machines off of my computer is an option, however, that'd take far too many resources (while using sandboxie i'd be looking at only 256MB of ram).

Any help will be appreciated, thank you.

[Mr_Moose]

You don't need sandboxie, virtual machines or anything like that. All you need is to use different ports for each instance so that they don't conflict with each others. Changing ports can be done in almost any network application available (never seen any that couldn't) and MTA is no exception. Locate this file: "mods/deathmatch/mtaserver.conf" then find and change these two lines:

<serverport>22003</serverport> 

<httpport>22005</httpport> 

These are TCP respectively UDP so you can use the same port for both of these. The query port is always server port + 123. As soon you done that you can run how many instances you'd like on the same machine without any additional applications. PS: changing ports in config files or as command line arguments works for Half-Life based servers too.

[garnet]

You don't need sandboxie, virtual machines or anything like that. All you need is to use different ports for each instance so that they don't conflict with each others. Changing ports can be done in almost any network application available (never seen any that couldn't) and MTA is no exception. Locate this file: "mods/deathmatch/mtaserver.conf" then find and change these two lines:

<serverport>22003</serverport> 

<httpport>22005</httpport> 

These are TCP respectively UDP so you can use the same port for both of these. The query port is always server port + 123. As soon you done that you can run how many instances you'd like on the same machine without any additional applications. PS: changing ports in config files or as command line arguments works for Half-Life based servers too.

Hey buddy, thank you for your response. however - it seems like taht response is directed at hosting multiple MTA Servers rather than client instances?

I'm speaking of running the program (NOT SERVERS) more than once so I can join in on a single server with 2-3 characters.

There is no such thing as mods/deathmatch/mtaserver.conf within my directory, however, I know servers have that.

[Mr_Moose]

You didn't mention clients specifically and if that's what you're planning to do then don't expect any help here. Virtual machines would be your only option. The reason for this is simple, if there was an easy way to run multiple client instances then people would use it to fake clients on their servers and it would be impossible to know if a server has players or not. However you can make bots out of existing objects like in this resource: http://crystalmv.net84.net/pages/scripts/npchlc_traffic.php

[MIKI785]

You didn't mention clients specifically and if that's what you're planning to do then don't expect any help here. Virtual machines would be your only option. The reason for this is simple, if there was an easy way to run multiple client instances then people would use it to fake clients on their servers and it would be impossible to know if a server has players or not. However you can make bots out of existing objects like in this resource: http://crystalmv.net84.net/pages/scripts/npchlc_traffic.php

That script is useless to him, he simply wants to test some stuff with more players than just himself present on the server. Simplest way would be to go for VM if you have only one PC available.

[garnet]

You didn't mention clients specifically and if that's what you're planning to do then don't expect any help here. Virtual machines would be your only option. The reason for this is simple, if there was an easy way to run multiple client instances then people would use it to fake clients on their servers and it would be impossible to know if a server has players or not. However you can make bots out of existing objects like in this resource: http://crystalmv.net84.net/pages/scripts/npchlc_traffic.php

That script is useless to him, he simply wants to test some stuff with more players than just himself present on the server. Simplest way would be to go for VM if you have only one PC available.

I don't really understand how VMs are to be installed, neither do I know how much actual resources they take up.

[Mr_Moose]

That depends on which virtualization engine you're using, VMWare is the most used one, available for both Windows and Linux, although it seems to use most CPU/RAM it also has 3D accelerated graphics which is useful if you want to play without lag. VirtualBox is another option, it's from Oracle tho and you won't get any good performance, especially not for gaming but just like VMWare it's multi platform.

If you're on a windows host then Hyper-V is the perfect choice as it's best to utilize system resources, especially RAM/CPU and disk, there's no hardware accelerated graphics but you can run many instances on the other hand. KVM is a lightweight option for a Linux host but that's a terminal tool which could be complicated for beginners.

Another thing you have to consider is what system you plan to use in your VM's, copying windows instances may conflict with their licence agreements while Linux requires some configuration just to make the MTA client work, I do know it works on Ubuntu 15.10 64-bit with latest wine and play-on-linux installed.

[Dealman]

I can confirm that you'd need to use a virtual machine and from my experience VMWare works the best. I tried Sandboxie but wasn't able to get it to work.

I think this is rather unfortunate as it makes testing rather bothersome, when we could easily have had a server-sided option for the server to be in development/testing mode or whatnot and as such enable multiple instances on the same machine.

Though they have their reasons for preventing it, as Moose mentioned. We'll just have to bite the sour apple.