Hey folks, please excuse my ignorance because I’m fairly new to the world of dedicated server hosting.
I’m working on a game that requires a persistent world. I’ve managed to get an EC2 instance up and running and I’m able to start my dedicated server process(es) and connect as a client.
I’m trying to figure out how to fetch all running dedicated server processes from all EC2 instances (currently just one, but the idea is to create a server list to show the client).
Ideally we also want to keep track of the server age and have our servers get “wiped” after X weeks (kind of like Rust).
My current understanding is that GameLift is still using EC2 Instances, it’s just managing them for you to spin up additional servers to handle the extra traffic. Like there’s no special “GameLift server”, am I correct?
If so, I guess I don’t understand the best way to go about it so my questions are:
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Is GameLift needed for a long term servers or is it specifically for session-based games?
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If GameLift can be used for persistent servers, what features does it provide that would prove to be useful? (I don’t think auto-scaling would be necessary as we’d have a “fixed” amount of official servers - although that might need to change if the game does well so it’s not completely out of the question)
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If sticking with EC2 and not integrating with GameLift is the way to go, is there a way to “fetch” the dedicated processes from an EC2 instance and extract some custom data that we need from them? (i.e. server name, region, age since wipe, next wipe date, current/max players, etc.)
Thanks for your time
PS. We’re developing our game using Unreal Engine.