How to make Lobby to start dedicated server and forward players

Hey all,

I has to start working on creating a game (with steam integration) which should similar to Dota 2 or overwatch.

  1. Players should be connected to dedicated lobby server (Single instance for all players). Imagine 100 players in lobby
  2. Players should party of find match inside Lobby server. Lobby will match make and find players. Imagine 10 players are clumped together through match making.
  3. Lobby will start a dedicated server and send the Ip, port etc to players. 90 players are still connected to lobby while 10 players will be moved to game server.
  4. Players will connect to the dedicated server. ServerTravel on lobby will disconnect all players from lobby and move all of them into server. I want lobby alive with other 90 while 10 players will be moved into this dedicated server.
  5. Players will play the game and once its done, close dedicated server and return back to lobby. Dedicated game server is closed while lobby will have 100 players again.

I saw tutorials where a list of dedicated servers are shown and player will join servers, or players can host the servers and others can join the servers.

From these tutorials I can piece together how to forward players from lobby, but I haven’t seen how to start or stop dedicated servers dynamically through lobby.

Some forms said that alot of dedicated servers will be started manually and matchmaking server will maintain all of them. But I’m planning to use AWS which gives free server unless usage is under certain CPU and bandwidth. Which is why I want to dynamically start and stop game servers while having lobby always running.

How can i go around tackling this challenge?

Have you found your answer? I’ve been trying to figure out this one as well for quite some time but couldn’t. I don’t think this is even possible.

I found some similar questions in the ue4 forums and what they suggest is to have alot of dedicated servers started manually and lobby will forward players in and out of servers. there is no way to dynamically start/stop servers or atleast i haven’t found any.