Windows Gameservers

Run GameServers on Kubernetes nodes with the Windows operating system.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required to create a GameServer:

  1. A Kubernetes cluster with the UDP port range 7000-8000 open on each node. Creating the firewall.
  2. Agones controller installed in the targeted cluster
  3. kubectl properly configured
  4. Netcat which is already installed on most Linux/macOS distributions, for windows you can use WSL.

If you don’t have a Kubernetes cluster you can follow these instructions to create a cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Minikube or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and install Agones.

For the purpose of this guide we’re going to use the simple-game-server example as the GameServer container. This example is a very simple UDP server written in Go. Don’t hesitate to look at the code of this example for more information.

Ensure that you have some nodes to your cluster that are running Windows.

Objectives

  • Create a GameServer on a Windows node.
  • Connect to the GameServer.

1. Create a GameServer

Create a GameServer using the following command:

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googleforgames/agones/release-1.45.0/examples/simple-game-server/gameserver-windows.yaml

You should see a successful output similar to this:

gameserver.agones.dev/simple-game-server-4ss4j created

Verify that the GameServer becomes Ready by running:

kubectl get gameservers

It should look something like this:

NAME                       STATE     ADDRESS       PORT   NODE     AGE
simple-game-server-7pjrq   Ready   35.233.183.43   7190   agones   3m

Take a note of the Game Server IP address and ports.

For the full details of the YAML file head to the GameServer Specification Guide

2. Connect to the GameServer

You can now communicate with the Game Server:

nc -u {IP} {PORT}
Hello World !
ACK: Hello World !
EXIT

You can finally type EXIT which tells the SDK to run the Shutdown command, and therefore shuts down the GameServer.

If you run kubectl describe gameserver again - either the GameServer will be gone completely, or it will be in Shutdown state, on the way to being deleted.

Next Steps


Last modified December 12, 2024: Delete List Value(s) on Game Server Allocation (#4054) (3c5b7df)