
Show HN: CloudParty – play games with friends in the cloud - gionn
https://cloudparty.io
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ChrisClark
I can't find any price listed anywhere. Without knowing that, I don't feel
like even starting the trial.

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gionn
We are very beta, the pricing will be simple since we will charge something
for us and the remaining part is to cover the cloud provider costs (e.g.: 10 $
for a 1 GB digitalocean instance).

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marak830
Ill keep an eye on this, it all boils down to the pricing. Eg id be quite
happy to spool up a few servers based on what my mates amd i are playing
(especially if i have access to mod the files - talking specifocly about arma
3 mods now), but if its more expensive than a standard server, id prefer not
to waste the time setting it all up.

Goodluck, and hopefully the pricings good!

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gionn
What is the cost that you expect for "a standard server"?

The service will cost no less than the cloud provider price where the server
is running, plus a fee for us to maintain the platform up and running.

You will probably like to spin-up game servers using a web interface, rather
than administering a Linux machine via ssh, isn't it?

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marak830
Ill do a quick check when i can (no internet at home atm just moved apartment
haha), top of my head for an arma 3 it was around 10 us for a 64 player(again
approx info and probably 6 months old at that).

A web interface would take a lot of hastle out id imagine, especially if game
specific instances and prebuilt modules are available in a semi plug and olay
manner.

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gionn
Please be aware that we don't have (and probably will never have) any kind of
pricing based on user slots, since we are launching a dedicated VM for each
user server.

Basically, you can let as many users joins as the virtual server can support
them, until it starts swapping when RAM is exausted (and performances will
fall down).

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marak830
Thats understandable, might be a good point to try and get some approx numbers
supported @ ram usage. It would be a heck of a ballpark, but a lot more useful
than saying x amount of ram.

Edit: fat thumbs on mobile.

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funkyy
You got probably one chance to be featured on front page of YC news. No
prices, no updates from owner, no support in the thread. Seems like you missed
on an amazing opportunity.

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gionn
Yeah, I've got it.

The bad idea was the resubmit the story at 10 PM GMT+2, I just woken up and
see the overflow of new users registration emails. That's a good way to woke
up, anyway.

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gionn
TL:DR; We are building a service were users can easily spin-up private game
servers to play with friends.

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gionn
Basically we support launching VM on multiple cloud providers (mainly thanks
to jclouds), then we provision a game server via docker container on a vanilla
ubuntu 14.04, finally the user can get the IP address of the VM and play.

Game servers are launched with pre-defined configurations, but the user can
override the command line flags of the game server and restart it, directly
from the control panel.

With this platform, we would also love to help multiplayer indie developers to
host and sell their shiny new game server to users.

If there are HN gamers reading this, feel free to suggest any game that you
think it should be available.

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joshmn
Sounds nice in practice. Do any of the major providers (GameServers.com,
Hypernia, MultiPlay) use containers for their services? I ask because, if this
is something worth doing, why they haven't done it yet (if they haven't)

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gionn
I don't think, since they existed for years, they are probably stuck with pre-
built images to spin-up. However, being a sysadmin, I've never been a customer
of such services.

The idea came while looking for interesting docker applications published on
docker hub, and we saw that a lot of people was published game server images.

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altern8
"in the cloud" == "on the Internet"?

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gionn
We are able to dynamically provision new VM on public cloud providers.

We currently support AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, potentially anyone
who as a decent remote API for creating new VM.

However, the cloud is put there mainly as eye-catching.

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marak830
Im trying to find the price, but cant? This may be because its displaying
weird on my mobile(android/chrome).

It is an interesting idea, and using Azure servers i assume would go a long
way towards reliability.

I do wonder what the limits would be(eg could i spool up a 64 player arma3
server with custom mods?) and ofcourse, how expensive it would be.

Edit: i actually think that isnt displaying weird, i think thats
intended(although i do have some slight word overlap, and damn that font looks
huge on my note 3).

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gionn
Proper tablet / mobile support will come, at the moment is better if you look
through a desktop computer.

At the moment we don't have yet published a pricing policy, we have just throw
everything on the internet to learn if this is something interesting.

Just to have an idea, the total cost will be the cost of VM on the chosen
public provider, plus a fee for us for the management service.

The problem on how to put custom mods isn't solved yet, but we are thinking
about giving FTP access to the game data folder, or just package the mods in
the base image if they are famous enough.

At the moment everything is on Azure since we got a bizspark plus offer and we
are not paying anything for it.

Please, don't ask what I think about Azure.

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sfteus
Cool idea and presentation, especially considering the state of some other
game server companies.

However, I, along with probably many other people, would not give you any
personal information without seeing a pricing scheme up front.

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gionn
Yep, eyes were bleeding when two weeks ago we were looking for active
competitors in this market, looks like they got stuck in early '90.

The pricing will be online soon, thanks.

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finnn
That's pretty cool, but seems like something that could just be a collection
of ansible scripts. I suppose this allows CloudParty to take a cut and make it
easy for non-technical people to use.

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gionn
At the moment we are using Chef, but behind CloudParty there is a 2+ yrs
startup idea about creating a generic application marketplace.

If I will have the possibility to rewrite it from scratch today, I will be
prefer using Ansible instead of chef-solo.

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jagermo
Good Work. I'd love to see a comeback for own gameservers instead of things
like matchmaking etc. I'll keep an eye on you for sure.

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gionn
That's exactly what we are aiming at, we also love to play with friends and
not with random people that I will never met again.

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deevus
1\. How is the price calculated?

2\. Minecraft gets boring quick without mods. Do you guys plan to have a
solution for that?

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gionn
1\. Cost per month per instance size, depending on the cloud provider, plus a
fee for us, paid upfront.

2\. We are thinking about giving FTP access to the game data folder.

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breakingcups
The home page scrolls very jerkily, and I have a pretty beefy computer.
Otherwise, cool thing :)

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gionn
Browser/version/OS?

Thanks!

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gionn
Guys, if you want updates, sign-in for the newsletter.

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curiousjorge
registered, nothing happens. ended up logging in like 3 times, started a
minecraft server that is stuck in a failed loop.

10 VM creation: BadRequest The subscription policy limit for resource type
'public IP count' was exceeded. The limit for resource type 'public IP count'
is 5 per subscription, the current count is 5, and the requested increment is
1. 4 ottobre 2015, 5:19:21 pm 9 VM creation, trying again, attempts left: 1 4
ottobre 2015, 5:18:51 pm 8 VM creation: BadRequest The subscription policy
limit for resource type 'public IP count' was exceeded. The limit for resource
type 'public IP count' is 5 per subscription, the current count is 5, and the
requested increment is 1. 4 ottobre 2015, 5:18:21 pm 7 VM creation, trying
again, attempts left: 2 4 ottobre 2015, 5:17:51 pm 6 VM creation: BadRequest
The subscription policy limit for resource type 'public IP count' was
exceeded. The limit for resource type 'public IP count' is 5 per subscription,
the current count is 5, and the requested increment is 1. 4 ottobre 2015,
5:17:21 pm 5 VM creation, trying again, attempts left: 3 4 ottobre 2015,
5:16:50 pm 4 VM creation: BadRequest The subscription policy limit for
resource type 'public IP count' was exceeded. The limit for resource type
'public IP count' is 5 per subscription, the current count is 5, and the
requested increment is 1. 4 ottobre 2015, 5:16:36 pm 3 VM creation

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gionn
Good advertisement for Azure, I've discovered this incredibly low quota
yesterday at 16 PM GMT+2, I've open a medium priority ticket to increase this
quota, and they haven't replied to us yet (and we are also a bizspark plus
partner).

I hope they fix this by the end of the day.

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gionn
We should have workarounded the problem, despite Azure support is slow.

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curiousjorge
curious, why Azure?

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gionn
If you google for "Bizspark plus", you will discover that they are giving a
lot of credits for startups to use their cloud.

That's the reason.

When will be out of BETA, we can enable almost every other public cloud
provider to deploy on.

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curiousjorge
Up to $10,000 per month, that's $120K of FREE Azure cloud services for 1 year

WHAT THE HECK! how did I not know about this. omg, how do I sign up?

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gionn
First enter the basic Bizspark program, they will give you 150 $ per month.

Then, you need to summon some Microsoft support employee and ask for Bizspark
plus.

