It's hard to summarize all of the issues with Valve's SDK 2013 Multiplayer Source Dedicated Server, but basically, it's designed for Ubuntu 12 servers with 32-bit libraries. If you try to run it on other platforms, particularly amd64 systems, or systems with older libraries, it will fight you every step of the way.
Darkness is new, and can't afford to have a dedicated server that's so hard to deploy, so I made a few changes to SRCDS:
- Use SteamCMD to download SRCDS
- Use debootstrap to create an Ubuntu 12 chroot (i386)
- Copy the Ubuntu 12 libraries to the SRCDS folder under lib
- Copy the Ubuntu 12 library loader to the SRCDS folder
- Copy SRCDS libaries in bin ending in _srv.so to just .so
- Make a modified srcds_run script that uses the new loader/libraries, and doesn't change LD_LIBRARY_PATH globally like valve's script does.
- Unpack Darkness into the SRCDS folder
With the above changes, SRCDS should work well on most Linux distros, including Debian 6. So rather than forcing users to repeat all of these steps just to run the Darkness server, I just tarred it all up and put it on the site here.
