Kyrand doesn't really need you to make him look bad and be unpopular. He does a very good job of doing it himself.
Kyrand appears to have taken serious offense to Rebels. I do think Kyrand is positively trying to contribute to this community due to his efforts at Wikipedia and spreading the word, even if he is a bit hard to tolerate.
It's up for debate. If we do decide to carry this discussion further, let's do it on another topic, please!
Kyrand doesn't really need you to make him look bad and be unpopular. He does a very good job of doing it himself.
Kyrand appears to have taken serious offense to Rebels. I do think Kyrand is positively trying to contribute to this community due to his efforts at Wikipedia and spreading the word, even if he is a bit hard to tolerate.
It's up for debate. If we do decide to carry this discussion further, let's do it on another topic, please!
Hear Hear! Can we please have the Kryand V. Rebels segment of this thread relocated to a thread were it will be left to fester? I would like very much to see this thread continue without interference.
While Kryand may be very verbal about his issues with the Rebels server, he is also providing constructive criticism and seems to also want to genuinely help. He isnt making any threats or trying to hinder the progress of the alternate master server so lets just leave things at that.
With that out of the way, its been said that the t2 browser will eventually be able to work. Will any other community features be added or altered? Will t-mail work? Sorry if my questions have already been addressed.
I'm not interested in the obvious politically motivated tensions between communities. I'm interested in getting this project done. If you people want to bicker like little children, I respectfully request that you take it somewhere else.
Nicely said, And I agree, You seriously need to take your issues elsewhere. This topic is for information on the new server, not requests on who should be banned because they "supposively" hacked.
Kyrand appears to have taken serious offense to Rebels. I do think Kyrand is positively trying to contribute to this community due to his efforts at Wikipedia and spreading the word, even if he is a bit hard to tolerate.
While Kryand may be very verbal about his issues with the Rebels server, he is also providing constructive criticism and seems to also want to genuinely help. He isnt making any threats or trying to hinder the progress of the alternate master server so lets just leave things at that.
Whatever. If I continue to post on this forum, it's obvious I'll have to swallow more criticism on how I run my server from the same idiot who bungled the attempt to hack v2rebellion. No way I'm gonna submit to that, so I interfere no more on this forum. Have to draw the line somewhere. Hacking, and tolerance of it, is where I draw that line.
While Kryand may be very verbal about his issues with the Rebels server, he is also providing constructive criticism and seems to also want to genuinely help. He isnt making any threats or trying to hinder the progress of the alternate master server so lets just leave things at that.
With that out of the way, its been said that the t2 browser will eventually be able to work. Will any other community features be added or altered? Will t-mail work? Sorry if my questions have already been addressed.
The constructive criticism from Kryand ended when he openly declared that War can't run a server and proceeded to bait and posture. But I will leave that for the other thread if at all necessary.
ANYWAY... I had forgotten about the T2 browser and Tmail!
What would be involved in setting the browser to reference a forum site such as this one, or one of a players choosing.
And Tmail to reference the Private mail section of the same web forum? Would it even be necessary to have the Tmail section if the webforum interface was available?
Is T2 flexible enough to allow a full HTML/JAVASCRIPT/etc. to be displayed and navigated in those pages from the T2 Console?
ANYWAY... I had forgotten about the T2 browser and Tmail!
What would be involved in setting the browser to reference a forum site such as this one, or one of a players choosing.
And Tmail to reference the Private mail section of the same web forum? Would it even be necessary to have the Tmail section if the webforum interface was available?
Well if we don't have the T-mail section then how would we accept tribe invites? Or would the web forum interface somehow allow that as well?
What would be involved in setting the browser to reference a forum site such as this one, or one of a players choosing.
And Tmail to reference the Private mail section of the same web forum? Would it even be necessary to have the Tmail section if the webforum interface was available?
Is T2 flexible enough to allow a full HTML/JAVASCRIPT/etc. to be displayed and navigated in those pages from the T2 Console?
Quite a lot, actually. The way those systems were implemented internally queried a bot on the Dynamix IRC server named dbqax. Converting them over to an HTTP system would require at least some effort.
Now, the game's capabilities to parse out data from web pages is considerably limited. I would prefer to avoid invoking the Ruby interpreter for those purposes, since the interpreter communication interface isn't designed to push a lot of data (it's perfectly fine for the ~40 byte messages sent over as part of authentication sequences, but parsing multi-kilobyte pages would take too long to send over IPC). So, it would be to the benefit of the people writing that system to provide a bare machine readable interface that requires minimal parsing to display that content. A competent PHP programmer could write something like that for any major piece of forum software in a matter of under an hour.
T2 does not have an HTML layout/display engine built in, and I'm not about to port Webkit into the game. There are a few tags that are handled, but they are implemented in a manner that is not consistent with HTML, thus would require a translator/adapter layer running on the server side.
Now... my vision is a system that reactivates t-mail, browser, and chat support within the game.
Cat seems to have a pretty functional IRC server running which could be used for rebuilding the chat system. The game already has a fully functional IRC based chat script which will need only minor modifications to connect to standard IRC servers; some modifications will need to be made to NickServ on the IRC side to maintain nickname associations with accounts. We would, of course, permit standard IRC clients to connect to the server and communicate with people playing the game.
T-Mail is pretty straightforward to implement from scratch in PHP. Krash installed SMF on the TribesNext web server, and an integration of T-Mail and private messages on the forum would be pretty easy as well.
Browser is also straightforward to implement from scratch in PHP, and some sort of online Browser viewer could be put together that gives all of the functionality of the in-game version.
There is nothing particularly complicated about the community system; certainly nothing nearly on the order of complexity close to the authentication system. At the moment, Krash should have the lead on this topic though, and I will defer to him on the details.
On a side note, irc.tribalwar.com was set up by the bulk of the Tribes community to replace irc.dynamix.com. I don't know what IRC servers you guys use, but I thought I'd mention that.
Quite a lot, actually. The way those systems were implemented internally queried a bot on the Dynamix IRC server named dbqax. Converting them over to an HTTP system would require at least some effort.
Now, the game's capabilities to parse out data from web pages is considerably limited. I would prefer to avoid invoking the Ruby interpreter for those purposes, since the interpreter communication interface isn't designed to push a lot of data (it's perfectly fine for the ~40 byte messages sent over as part of authentication sequences, but parsing multi-kilobyte pages would take too long to send over IPC). So, it would be to the benefit of the people writing that system to provide a bare machine readable interface that requires minimal parsing to display that content. A competent PHP programmer could write something like that for any major piece of forum software in a matter of under an hour.
T2 does not have an HTML layout/display engine built in, and I'm not about to port Webkit into the game. There are a few tags that are handled, but they are implemented in a manner that is not consistent with HTML, thus would require a translator/adapter layer running on the server side.
Now... my vision is a system that reactivates t-mail, browser, and chat support within the game.
Cat seems to have a pretty functional IRC server running which could be used for rebuilding the chat system. The game already has a fully functional IRC based chat script which will need only minor modifications to connect to standard IRC servers; some modifications will need to be made to NickServ on the IRC side to maintain nickname associations with accounts. We would, of course, permit standard IRC clients to connect to the server and communicate with people playing the game.
T-Mail is pretty straightforward to implement from scratch in PHP. Krash installed SMF on the TribesNext web server, and an integration of T-Mail and private messages on the forum would be pretty easy as well.
Browser is also straightforward to implement from scratch in PHP, and some sort of online Browser viewer could be put together that gives all of the functionality of the in-game version.
There is nothing particularly complicated about the community system; certainly nothing nearly on the order of complexity close to the authentication system. At the moment, Krash should have the lead on this topic though, and I will defer to him on the details.
Thyth,
Just out of curiosity... were you able to determine all of the above operational tidbits from scrounging through the T2 scripting or did you have to use a packet analyzer or even a logic analyzer?
(I am a network engineer and Internet communications and firewall admin by trade and my only degree is in Physics specializing in microcontroller engineering, so if I'm badgering you for details... sorry! :> )
So the IRC chat in T2 is a true IRC protocol and not some custom abomination that will need to be reverse engineered?
And the SMF for the forum has an SMTP mail server functionality that is compatible with the T-mail client code? Tmail is just a SMTP mail client and not some aberrant custom code as well?
Yeah T2 IRC was just like any other IRC server. The IRC ops even used mIRC etc to connect to it. I knew one guy who forced his T2 to connect to irc.dynamix.com and it worked fine.
The game IRC implementation is pretty standard. I think there was some connection specific obfuscation (maybe a server connection password?) that prevented a no-effort connection using a standard IRC client. The IRC protocol is quite the abomination (despite its simplicity), so I didn't bother to investigate it deeply. T-Mail was not SMTP, rather (as I mentioned, albeit not super clearly) it was implemented by private messaging a robot named dbqax on the IRC server -- as were the browsers.
How did I figure it out? Some of the simpler protocols (i.e. list server queries) could be figured out through packet sniffing, and proper application of a brain -- even if hard coded in the executable. IRC, T-Mail, and the browser were all implemented entirely in the TorqueScript language, so figuring those out is a matter of reading a few thousand lines of high-level code. Considering how human-readable IRC is designed to be, it wouldn't take much to realize what the game was doing with a packet sniffer in that case either. The most complex packets were the WON related authentication exchanges as they were all encrypted and signed -- in that case, the most I could do was make (well) educated guesses about how it worked (and design my authentication system around a similar model).
T-Mail was not SMTP, rather (as I mentioned, albeit not super clearly) it was implemented by private messaging a robot named dbqax on the IRC server -- as were the browsers.
If I understand correctly, getting the Tmail interface to function again as everyone was once used to, will require an IRC front end to communicate with the private messaging functions on the SMF SMTP services??? (Tmail IS the IRC client actually isn't it, there would need to be a gateway service, the robot, to process the IRC data and relay the SMF message store contents back to it?) Is that some functionality already developed for SMF or will it require new code to get it running and THEN make it play nice with Tmail?
And shouldn't you be finishing the Master Server instead of answering all these inane questions about tmail and chat?! :>
The game IRC implementation is pretty standard. I think there was some connection specific obfuscation (maybe a server connection password?) that prevented a no-effort connection using a standard IRC client.
It was some kind of hash or key that was easy to obtain from a running copy of T2. From there it was just a matter of connecting to one of the ingame servers using any client and sending a command with it as the parameter.
The IRC protocol is quite the abomination (despite its simplicity), so I didn't bother to investigate it deeply. T-Mail was not SMTP, rather (as I mentioned, albeit not super clearly) it was implemented by private messaging a robot named dbqax on the IRC server -- as were the browsers.
I still have my notes with all the dbqax commands and their syntax. I didn't keep logs of the responses though, but all that parsing stuff is still in the script.
Considering how human-readable IRC is designed to be, it wouldn't take much to realize what the game was doing with a packet sniffer in that case either.
There is a variable that made T2 echo all the IRC stuff to the console. No packet sniffer required.
If I understand correctly, getting the Tmail interface to function again as everyone was once used to, will require an IRC front end to communicate with the private messaging functions on the SMF SMTP services???
You could replace the dbqax related script with something else to query a web server. No need to write any custom IRC services to handle database stuff.
guys, i sent word to the dof clan about this project, hopefully they register and come online with something to say soon, but the last website update was at 2007 so it might be a bit delayed... however, they are a very well known euro clan (youtubely known well as far as i know) so my expectaion would be that their next move is to post a youtube vid announcing the update, however i am uncertain, only way to know now is to wait
guys, i sent word to the dof clan about this project, hopefully they register and come online with something to say soon, but the last website update was at 2007 so it might be a bit delayed... however, they are a very well known euro clan (youtubely known well as far as i know) so my expectaion would be that their next move is to post a youtube vid announcing the update, however i am uncertain, only way to know now is to wait
They have an IRC channel that they idle in on Quakenet. #dof
I'm sure someone has let them already know by now as euro cluster players (and euro players in general) that still play t2 idle on the same IRC server as them.
there is absolutely no reason to delay the authentication server to appease warlovr and the rebels' server. Like it has been said on numerous occasions, every problem they have encountered on their server can be easily solved with a little bit of scripting know-how (much of which has been volunteered with no reward expected). Instead, he'd rather bask in his scripting ignorance and let other people figure out how he can regulate his [poorly run] server.
Thyth: any chance of getting the source code for the client modifications you make to the executable? I'm not asking for the private keys for the authentication server, but I already have a skeleton replacement IFC22.dll and I wouldn't mind trying to achieve the same results without patching the executable on disk.
Thyth: any chance of getting the source code for the client modifications you make to the executable? I'm not asking for the private keys for the authentication server, but I already have a skeleton replacement IFC22.dll and I wouldn't mind trying to achieve the same results without patching the executable on disk.
There are only two components that I would need to change as part of implementing the code additions through IFC22.dll: firstly, add code to perform patches in memory; secondly, switch the DLL entry point to the one IFC22.dll exports.
The first part just requires a call to VirtualProtect() to switch memory page permissions to PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE, followed by regular memory modification. The second part just requires opening up IFC22.dll in IDA and locating the entry point.
Seems like it would be easier for me to just do that, since it would take all of 10 minutes on my end.
I kind of wanted to see what I could add to T2, possibly including some hudbot-like features. I did some fun (and stupid) things when I was making my DT hack, not all of them related to hacks/cheats. If you're pretty much done with development once a working -online replacement is complete then doing so could rekindle my interest in the game.
I could probably do it without your source code though.
I kind of wanted to see what I could add to T2, possibly including some hudbot-like features.
We can discuss this after the initial release, but in general, I don't plan to make DLL source code generally available. Obviously, if you want to write hacks that could give you an unfair advantage in game play, I would prefer you did not redistribute them.
Anyway... update time. I found some time to work on the authentication network interface while rebuilding a RAID array. The script for transactions with the authentication server is about 90% written -- there just isn't any particular handling of the 14 possible error codes (ultimately these will be pop-up message dialog boxes so users can act on errors), and I haven't attached the credential download into the client certificate store yet. Finally, I'll need to write a tiny script to acquire the current location of the authentication server from the TribesNext HTTP server, but that's minor.
With this in place, I can perform a full debugging session of the authentication server codebase, and at the same time iron out any issues on the client side.
After authentication works properly, I'll do one more debugging sweep to make sure all aspects function as expected, then send the scripts to Krash so he can finalize the GUIs.
Comments
Kyrand appears to have taken serious offense to Rebels. I do think Kyrand is positively trying to contribute to this community due to his efforts at Wikipedia and spreading the word, even if he is a bit hard to tolerate.
It's up for debate. If we do decide to carry this discussion further, let's do it on another topic, please!
Hear Hear! Can we please have the Kryand V. Rebels segment of this thread relocated to a thread were it will be left to fester? I would like very much to see this thread continue without interference.
With that out of the way, its been said that the t2 browser will eventually be able to work. Will any other community features be added or altered? Will t-mail work? Sorry if my questions have already been addressed.
Nicely said, And I agree, You seriously need to take your issues elsewhere. This topic is for information on the new server, not requests on who should be banned because they "supposively" hacked.
Whatever. If I continue to post on this forum, it's obvious I'll have to swallow more criticism on how I run my server from the same idiot who bungled the attempt to hack v2rebellion. No way I'm gonna submit to that, so I interfere no more on this forum. Have to draw the line somewhere. Hacking, and tolerance of it, is where I draw that line.
http://the-construct.net/forums/showthread.php?p=18578#post18578
Continue on this thread if you want to continue this discussion.
The constructive criticism from Kryand ended when he openly declared that War can't run a server and proceeded to bait and posture. But I will leave that for the other thread if at all necessary.
ANYWAY... I had forgotten about the T2 browser and Tmail!
What would be involved in setting the browser to reference a forum site such as this one, or one of a players choosing.
And Tmail to reference the Private mail section of the same web forum? Would it even be necessary to have the Tmail section if the webforum interface was available?
Is T2 flexible enough to allow a full HTML/JAVASCRIPT/etc. to be displayed and navigated in those pages from the T2 Console?
You're not PunkBuster.
Now, the game's capabilities to parse out data from web pages is considerably limited. I would prefer to avoid invoking the Ruby interpreter for those purposes, since the interpreter communication interface isn't designed to push a lot of data (it's perfectly fine for the ~40 byte messages sent over as part of authentication sequences, but parsing multi-kilobyte pages would take too long to send over IPC). So, it would be to the benefit of the people writing that system to provide a bare machine readable interface that requires minimal parsing to display that content. A competent PHP programmer could write something like that for any major piece of forum software in a matter of under an hour.
T2 does not have an HTML layout/display engine built in, and I'm not about to port Webkit into the game. There are a few tags that are handled, but they are implemented in a manner that is not consistent with HTML, thus would require a translator/adapter layer running on the server side.
Now... my vision is a system that reactivates t-mail, browser, and chat support within the game.
Cat seems to have a pretty functional IRC server running which could be used for rebuilding the chat system. The game already has a fully functional IRC based chat script which will need only minor modifications to connect to standard IRC servers; some modifications will need to be made to NickServ on the IRC side to maintain nickname associations with accounts. We would, of course, permit standard IRC clients to connect to the server and communicate with people playing the game.
T-Mail is pretty straightforward to implement from scratch in PHP. Krash installed SMF on the TribesNext web server, and an integration of T-Mail and private messages on the forum would be pretty easy as well.
Browser is also straightforward to implement from scratch in PHP, and some sort of online Browser viewer could be put together that gives all of the functionality of the in-game version.
There is nothing particularly complicated about the community system; certainly nothing nearly on the order of complexity close to the authentication system. At the moment, Krash should have the lead on this topic though, and I will defer to him on the details.
You guys truly are a boon to the T2 community.
And once more, thank you for all your efforts.
Remind me... exactly how will a new player download the T2 distribution package and apply whatever changes necessary for the TribesNext Master Server?
EXE or MSI installer package for Windows? Linked from the TribesNext website?
Thyth,
Just out of curiosity... were you able to determine all of the above operational tidbits from scrounging through the T2 scripting or did you have to use a packet analyzer or even a logic analyzer?
(I am a network engineer and Internet communications and firewall admin by trade and my only degree is in Physics specializing in microcontroller engineering, so if I'm badgering you for details... sorry! :> )
So the IRC chat in T2 is a true IRC protocol and not some custom abomination that will need to be reverse engineered?
And the SMF for the forum has an SMTP mail server functionality that is compatible with the T-mail client code? Tmail is just a SMTP mail client and not some aberrant custom code as well?
How did I figure it out? Some of the simpler protocols (i.e. list server queries) could be figured out through packet sniffing, and proper application of a brain -- even if hard coded in the executable. IRC, T-Mail, and the browser were all implemented entirely in the TorqueScript language, so figuring those out is a matter of reading a few thousand lines of high-level code. Considering how human-readable IRC is designed to be, it wouldn't take much to realize what the game was doing with a packet sniffer in that case either. The most complex packets were the WON related authentication exchanges as they were all encrypted and signed -- in that case, the most I could do was make (well) educated guesses about how it worked (and design my authentication system around a similar model).
If I understand correctly, getting the Tmail interface to function again as everyone was once used to, will require an IRC front end to communicate with the private messaging functions on the SMF SMTP services??? (Tmail IS the IRC client actually isn't it, there would need to be a gateway service, the robot, to process the IRC data and relay the SMF message store contents back to it?) Is that some functionality already developed for SMF or will it require new code to get it running and THEN make it play nice with Tmail?
And shouldn't you be finishing the Master Server instead of answering all these inane questions about tmail and chat?! :>
I'm sure someone has let them already know by now as euro cluster players (and euro players in general) that still play t2 idle on the same IRC server as them.
The first part just requires a call to VirtualProtect() to switch memory page permissions to PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE, followed by regular memory modification. The second part just requires opening up IFC22.dll in IDA and locating the entry point.
Seems like it would be easier for me to just do that, since it would take all of 10 minutes on my end.
I could probably do it without your source code though.
Anyway... update time. I found some time to work on the authentication network interface while rebuilding a RAID array. The script for transactions with the authentication server is about 90% written -- there just isn't any particular handling of the 14 possible error codes (ultimately these will be pop-up message dialog boxes so users can act on errors), and I haven't attached the credential download into the client certificate store yet. Finally, I'll need to write a tiny script to acquire the current location of the authentication server from the TribesNext HTTP server, but that's minor.
With this in place, I can perform a full debugging session of the authentication server codebase, and at the same time iron out any issues on the client side.
After authentication works properly, I'll do one more debugging sweep to make sure all aspects function as expected, then send the scripts to Krash so he can finalize the GUIs.