photon-docker

This repository contains the configuration required to run Exit Games' PhotonEngine server under Docker on a Linux host.

It may be unstable, you are on your own.

Legal disclaimer

This project is not endorsed by Exit Games and does not reflect the views or opinions of Exit Games or anyone officially involved in producing or managing Exit Games properties.

Building

The build process is fairly straightforward, albeit there are some caveats:

• You must pre-configure most configuration values at build time.
• Any IPs that are by default set to 0.0.0.0 MUST be changed. [read more about this behavior]
• Performance Counters must be disabled. They are not implemented under Wine, and will cause the service to crash. [read more about this behavior]

To proceed with building the container, place the deploy folder of your Photon installation inside the photon-server directory, and run docker build

Running

An example docker-compose.yml file is included in this repository. It is configured to accept ./photon.license as the license file that will be passed onto Photon.

Setting IPs

Due to a bug in an undetermined component (seems to be related to how the low-level C++ socket framework Photon uses binds to IPs), you are not able to bind to 0.0.0.0.

You will have to change the IP addresses to bind on by editing the deploy/bin_Win64/PhotonServer.config file.

Please be aware that the included entrypoint.sh script will automatically replace any IPs that point to 127.0.0.1 with the internal IP of the Docker container (fetched using hostname -i), and will also replace the GameServer's Public IP Address configuration with the EXTERNAL_IP environment variable.

Disabling Performance Counters

Wine does not implement Windows Performance Counters, and as such, when Photon tries to register them, it crashes. The fix is to disable Performance Counters inside of Photon, which is hidden behind an undocumented configuration option.

In the LoadBalancing project, the EnablePerformanceCounters key has to be set under configuration.Photon.LoadBalancing for both the MasterServer and the GameServer as seen below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <Photon>
    <LoadBalancing>
      <EnablePerformanceCounters>False</EnablePerformanceCounters>
      <GCLatencyMode>Interactive</GCLatencyMode>
    </LoadBalancing>
    ...

The same applies for the NameServer project, only replacing LoadBalancing with NameServer in the key path.