Overview
While we at Server Academy mostly create content based around administrating the Windows Server operating system, we also love to game! One of our favorite games is DCS World, a flight simulator with highly detailed fighter jets and realistic flight models and combat systems.
In this tutorial, we are going to cover the steps require to build a DCS World server on Windows Server 2016. While this involves gaming, what you learn in this tutorial like port forwarding, firewall configuration and scheduled PowerShell scripts will in your IT career.
We are going to complete this with the steps below:
You want to be sure that you have configured your DCS Server with a static IP address (instructions here). In my scenario, my gaming server's static internal IP address is 10.2.0.2.
Download and install prerequisite files
Keep in mind all you really need is the DCS Server and a Windows computer and you can skip the other files if you'd like. However, below are the tools that I will be installing and configuring and what I recommend you use.
Download the files listed below (excluding the OS if you already have one):
- Windows Server 2016 Desktop Experience (Windows 10 would also work)
- DCS World Open Beta Server
- TacView Advanced
- Simple Radio Standalone (scroll to bottom of page)
SRS is hosted on GitHub which among other things is a way for developers to collaborate on software. The process for downloading and installing something from GitHub could be a little different than what you're used to so I will cover the steps below:
When you click the Simple Radio Standalone link above, you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and located the "Assets" section. Click the DCS-SimpleRadioStandalone-x.x.x.x.zip file to download the installer.
Just extract that zip file and run the Installer inside of the folder with the default settings to complete the installation.
Once the installation is complete, you're done with the downloads / installations.
After you have downloaded the above steps, this is what your desktop should look like:
Launch the DCS World OpenBeta Dedicated Server, and log in to your https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/ user account, then close the dedicated server as we still need to configure our firewalls to accept DCS client connections.
