Arma 3 Dedicated startup infrastructure

This is intended for a small group of people hosting dedicated servers from their PC workstations and potentially exchanging saved state, so that anyone can host and the saved state (CBA settings, persistent world saves, etc.) is transferred over.

How to use

1. Place the .bat file and dedicated-config into Arma 3 install folder
2. Optionally configure mods and parameters inside the .bat file
3. Start the .bat file, which starts up Arma 3 dedicated server
4. When shutting down, close the Arma 3 window, not the console window
5. When Arma 3 exits, the .bat script does a backup of the saved state into dedicated-config
6. Now you can zip / move dedicated-config to somebody else

When receiving dedicated-config, delete dedicated-local-tmp first, if it exists.

The script works by having two folders:

• dedicated-config (which is meant to be easily editable/portable)
• dedicated-local-tmp (which is messy and local to your PC)

If and only if dedicated-local-tmp does not exist, the script reads dedicated-config and produces dedicated-local-tmp to be used by Arma 3 exe. In other words, the saved state in dedicated-config is never read again if dedicated-local-tmp exists, only written to.

So if a friend sends you dedicated-config, you need to delete dedicated-local-tmp or you'll be playing on your old save (and overwrite dedicated-config when the Arma 3 exe exits). This is for safety reasons (so you don't lose data when your PC crashes while the server is running).

For more details / config options, read the first few lines of the .bat.

...
If you do accidentally close the console window first (or if your PC crashes), any saved state will remain only in dedicated-local-tmp, so you need to start up the server again and exit cleanly to save it into dedicated-config as well.