Allow us to connect to Dedicated Servers via DDNS

[Joseph]

My WAN IP changes from time to time so I use no-ip to have an easy to reach address for my friends and I to connect to so I don't constantly have to be looking up what my IP is. Works fine in every other game I've hosted with, but this game specifically wants you to connect directly with an IP address. Why is that?

[TaintedW]

+1 I use DuckDNS to facilitate hosting various game servers for my friends and I. Allowing the use of DDNS addresses would make it so much easier to play together.

[Spork Witch]

Haven't tested, but does saving a favourite through steam itself not work? In the main steam window, go to View → Servers and you can add the FQDN of a server. You should then be able to connect to that from Steam. I assume it is supported, since Steam rich presence is enabled.

[Joseph]

Originally posted by Spork Witch:

Haven't tested, but does saving a favourite through steam itself not work? In the main steam window, go to View → Servers and you can add the FQDN of a server. You should then be able to connect to that from Steam. I assume it is supported, since Steam rich presence is enabled.

This doesn't work. It seems like this was intended for valve games for one as it doesn't report any servers responding there because it's looking at a port I'm not using and secondly and most importantly, it resolves and affixes itself to the current IP that the FQDN references which defeats the purpose of the DDNS in the first place.

[Spork Witch]

Originally posted by Joseph:

Originally posted by Spork Witch:

Haven't tested, but does saving a favourite through steam itself not work? In the main steam window, go to View → Servers and you can add the FQDN of a server. You should then be able to connect to that from Steam. I assume it is supported, since Steam rich presence is enabled.

This doesn't work. It seems like this was intended for valve games for one as it doesn't report any servers responding there because it's looking at a port I'm not using and secondly and most importantly, it resolves and affixes itself to the current IP that the FQDN references which defeats the purpose of the DDNS in the first place.

It's not Valve only; MOST games that support dedicated servers support the Steam servers list (notably, ARK: Survival Evolved, where it reliably adds the server to the favourite list in the in-game server browser, while trying to mark favourite in-game doesn't always work, heh).

As I said, I hadn't tested it, but it seemed like a good thing to try. But yeah, it's definitely not a Valve-only thing; if anything, the games that have dedicated servers yet DON'T support it are the exception.

As to how it works, that was going to be an issue regardless, since your computer will cache DNS lookups so it doesn't have to do another EVERY time (fortunately, even really aggressive ISPs usually won't change your IP more than once a month or so, and even then it usually takes restarting the modem to end up with a new IP). As to port, you simply add it at the end, e.g. my.server.com:1234 for port 1234.

One other thing I noticed is that in the menu when playing single player, it shows a SteamP2P address. It might be worth checking if this value changes between maps / launches of the game / changes in public IP. I suspect it would at least be independent of IP.

EDIT:
Disregard that last, SteamP2P ID changes the next time you load the game.