Where to work on updates/connect to local system?

[YummySushi13]

Good Morning!

I am working on a private server for my own entertainment, and possibly have my friends connect later on down the road.

I have two questions that are leaving me to beat my head against the wall, and I cannot find the answers for the life of me.

I have the server created on a VM in my ESXI host on a different server in my local network. Currently I have my Sql databse left as 127.0.0.1 as instructed in the set up guide. I have updated the ashita launcher to point to my server from my local desktop (Main gaming system). I can launch the game perfectly fine, however none of the settings that I have implemented are being loaded.

Testing this I had it set the gil at start to be 1M just to ensure everything was working. Upon loading the game, I do not have the gil, and even worse, when i check the sql database under the char folder, the character that I created, does not show up. leading me to believe that I am not connected to the server. When launching the game, it says "connected to "My Gaming PC Name", instead of the server.

I ran the sql cmd to change the ipr route to the 192.168.XXX.XXX IP for my server, and that still did not update anything.

My questions are:

1: How do i get my desktop PC to connect to my server on the same network?

2: When working on settings/scripts in the server, do we use notepad, or can i work in visual studio, and then "build all" once i have finished making changes?

Thanks in advance!

[zach2good]

Hi there,

(Networking is my Kryptonite, but I have enough experience with this system, fighting with my NAS, running containers on my NAS, containers locally, and a very funky router setup to have some advice for this)

The IP entries in the zone_settings table mean essentially: "When the server wants to send you to this zone, that zone is available at this address+port". So when you log in and you're due to be sent to Carpenters_Landing, it'll look that up from zone_settings, find the IP/Port combo, and then send that to the client. The client will then try to connect to that IP/Port combo.

So if you are testing locally everything lives at and is listed at127.0.0.1:54230 (0.0.0.0 and localhost probably work too). If you're connecting to a computer on the same network (but not on the internet in general) you'll need to change the zone_settings entries to be that computer's address on your network. My router is 192.168.1.1 internally, my NAS is 192.168.1.112, etc.

When you eventually open your server to the wider internet and put your WAN IP in zone_settings and open your router's ports, you should be aware of the --hairpin argument while launching xiloader/Windower/Ashita, and NAT loopback: https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/stories/detail/1726

If you're running SQL commands live, I think we cache most data that we load from SQL, so restart your server after you send in those commands. Obviously make sure you're connecting and modifying the database on the correct machine, etc.

For settings (the Lua files in settings/, not the defaults in settings/default/) you can edit them with whatever you want. Depending on which settings they are, they may or may not hot-reload as you save them and the server is running, so to be sure you should restart your whole server between settings changes.

As general rules:

• Changes to .h/.cpp file: You need to rebuild the server
• Changes to .lua files (including settings): You can usually just save them and the server will pick up the changes, but if you're not sure just restart the server - no rebuild required
• Changes to .SQL files: You'll either need to change the SQL files and then re-run dbtool, or send your commands in through the CLI or something like SQL Workbench

[YummySushi13]

Thanks for the reply!

I'll have to check some of this when I get back home tonight.

Is FFXI able to launch locally without connecting to the server? Reason being, I had logged into FFXI on my game system, create a character, and load into the game. However, ashita said it connected to "mygamepc" instead of the server desktop name. which i found odd.

[zach2good]

Nope, the FFXI client can't do anything without connecting to a server. So, if your client came up it connected to something

[YummySushi13]

So it didn't connect to my server since it didn't create a sql entry with my char name correct?

[zach2good]

If you connected to a server and there was no character data on it, either you connected to one of your local instances that didn't have the information, or your changes were never written to the server you connected to.