Starlight 1.0 Released

[Snrrrub]

I've just released Starlight, a chat client for Continuum, on my website. It works with both ASSS and Subgame and doesn't need special privileges - you can use this without VIP. Download it here: Starlight 1.0 Download.

 

-Snrrrub

[»Lynx]

A* Kudos

 

 

- Lynx

[Hakaku]

Although it doesn't have some of the functionality of Subchat2, from what I see so far: great work.

 

Edit: One remark I have is that the text won't scroll upwards after I type something, making it harder to notice if someone replied.

[»Purge]

Moved to General Development & pinned.

 

The client doesn't seem to work for me, however. I installed GTK+ but when I run the client it goes unresponsive.

[X`terrania]

I think it should remain in the general thread and possible stickied.

 

This program is awesome, and yeah also noticed that chat doesn't really move at all.

[Samapico]

You have to put the cursor at the very end of the chatbox, and then it will scroll normally again. (ctrl+end does that I think)

 

I'm pretty sure snrrrub will fix this though

[Snrrrub]

Purge, can you explain what happens when it goes unresponsive? Can you tell me the steps to reproduce the bug (and the platform you're trying it on)?

 

X`terrania, what did you mean by "doesn't really move at all"? The chat window doesn't scroll or some other issue?

 

On a related note, I've just put a Linux version up on my site. It's for i686 and requires the GTK+ 2 libraries but I've only tried deploying it on a Ubuntu 8.04 machine. I would really appreciate it if those running Linux could try it and tell me if they were successful or not in running Starlight with their distribution.

 

-Snrrrub

[»Purge]

I think it should remain in the general thread and possible stickied.

Yeah, I suppose it will get more exposure in that forum when stickied. I'll move it back to General Development after a few months or so.

 

Purge, can you explain what happens when it goes unresponsive? Can you tell me the steps to reproduce the bug (and the platform you're trying it on)?

All I did was install GTK+ first then run the client. It goes unresponsive once the window showing the preferences pops up (with the other window in the background). I'm running Windows XP SP2.

[Samapico]

How does it look in the task manager? Is it maxing out the CPU, does the memory keeps going up?

 

These are always interesting clues

[»Purge]

Nope, it doesn't seem to affect the CPU and its memory stays static at 15K. I've tried uninstalling then reinstalling both without any success.

[Snrrrub]

Maybe a screenshot would give some hints - mind putting one up here? Also, can you check your install directory for "error.log" - if there's anything in there, please post that too.

 

Thanks,

Snrrrub

[»Purge]

P34312 [ ERR] [Thu May 29 16:59:46 Eastern Standard Time 2008]: Network thread aborting: [socket_Win32::Write]: unknown error on write.

P34396 [ ERR] [Thu May 29 17:01:03 Eastern Standard Time 2008]: Network thread aborting: [socket_Win32::Write]: unknown error on write.

P35424 [ ERR] [Fri May 30 12:39:43 Eastern Standard Time 2008]: Network thread aborting: [socket_Win32::Write]: unknown error on write.

P36404 [ ERR] [Fri May 30 16:07:36 Eastern Standard Time 2008]: Network thread aborting: [socket_Win32::Write]: unknown error on write.

P35548 [ ERR] [Fri May 30 16:12:12 Eastern Standard Time 2008]: Network thread aborting: [socket_Win32::Write]: unknown error on write.

P34376 [ ERR] [Fri May 30 16:36:38 Eastern Standard Time 2008]: Network thread aborting: [socket_Win32::Write]: unknown error on write.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/purgey221/starl.jpg

 

That is a Vista skin on Windows XP SP2 by the way - not the Vista OS.

[X`terrania]

Yeah, CPU usage on it is fine for me. Are you sure one of your antivirus/spyware programs isn't messing around with it, Purge?

[»Purge]

Nope, I checked. Nothing is touching it.

 

And yes, I have admin privileges.

[ThunderJam]

First use: seems quite nice.

 

Second thoughts, has problems:

- Player should be able to divide by freqs, or show points, or w/e like F2 does ingame.

- Text should be colored WHILE typeing it if preceeded by a ; or // or w/e

- if someone puts a url in the chat, it does not act as a hyperlink :/

- When someones text goes into a second line, it starts at the far left, breaking the format of the timestamps. Maybe indent it to where player text usually begins?

 

Also some color options for the backgrounds of the different text window areas would be nice too. So if ppl wanted to change the background of the text box to black (like an alt tabbed client), they could.

 

**edit: Oh and of course this bug of not remaining scrolled down, once you touch the scroll bar.

Edited June 2, 2008 by ThunderJam

[Snrrrub]

Purge, looks like there's some sort of Winsock error. I'd like to work with you, if possible, to resolve the issue. Please email me your contact details and some times that work for you so we can tackle this one-on-one.

 

ThunderJam, thanks for the suggestions. Some of the missing features were intentional due to time pressure but rest !@#$%^&*ured, I will be addressing them in future releases.

[»Ceiu]

Good job -- you got your uber chat client out first. Mission accomplished.

 

Now release the key expansion and checksum source so the rest of us can make use of it.

Edited June 5, 2008 by Aceflyer
Flames removed

[»doc flabby]

Good job -- you got your uber chat client out first. Mission accomplished.

 

Now release the key expansion and checksum source so the rest of us can make use of it.

errr we can already?

[»Ceiu]

Don't be re!@#$%^&*ed.

 

The last thing this game needs is yet ANOTHER self-important !@#$%^&*head who desires to have an entire community rely on him. The fact that you'd gleefully accept that position is telling of the state this game is in. We've finally got the opportunity to truly rid ourselves of Priit's client and the person who has the key (literally, in this case) would much rather make other people reinvent the wheel or go through some bull!@#$%^&* extra steps to make use of his work.

 

Three facts that make his Oracle server useless for any serious project:

- If his server decides to take a !@#$%^&* or is otherwise unavailable from the location your program is running from, your program no longer works.

- If his server gets extremely lagged for whatever reason, your program becomes unstable.

- If he decides to change the ip/port/protocol, your program (or configuration, if you're smart) needs an update or it no longer works.

 

Think about this: Discretion is arguably the closest we've come to a replacement client for this awful game since Continuum, but it means nothing if it can't connect to existing servers -- not many people are willing to download a whole new client just for one or two zones; and that in itself will lead to a lack of server development (which, ASSS is already hurting for dev as it is). Sure, Bak could probably write it to use Oracle to do the checksum nonsense, but do you really want to be depending on two servers to stay connected? Further, what effect is this going to have if every player is essentially DOSing the Oracle server to stay connected?

 

I've been trying to reason with him for a month or so now trying to understand his position on the matter, but this program of his makes his intentions clear. Did we really need another chat client for this game? No. We've already got three that I can think of that are as or more capable and extendable, minus the feature of connecting to any zone without needing VIP.

 

 

Peh. I'd continue this rant, but I've to go to work.

The bottom line here is that it's stupid for him to require developers to rely on him for such a thing.

[»Admiral Kirk]

You may be right in some of what you say but thier are a few important facts you are glossing over.

 

1) If the source code for the entire encryption and key expansion are released, it would be near trivial for anyone with a few hours of spare time to write a quick and dirty client that could join any existing zone and spray L4 bombs all over the place while being invincible, while at the same time using rotating public proxy's to byp!@#$%^&* any attempt at a ban. The strength of the BanG banning system relies entirely on the client providing accurate system data when logging in, with a custom client you would be reduced to nothing but IP address for banning, and anyone who was here when VIE dumped us knows how well _that_ worked out...

 

2) Even if the source were only released to a select few "responsible" parties, you would still need to be an x86 !@#$%^&*embly genius in order to protect your executables from reverse engineering as effectively as Priit did with his. And of course you would need this creative genius once for every platform you intended to compile your program for.

 

3) Anyone who is a serious programmer knows how much it hurts when something you have slaved over to perfect is made invalid or obsolete by someone else. Say what you will about Priit and his apparent apathy to this community but he did help us and continues to albeit in small ways now. As a fellow coder it makes you think twice before delivering the ultimate insult of obsolescence.

 

 

 

Now, thier are 2 concievable solutions to this problem that come to mind, one of which we are all aware of, the other mabye not.

 

1) We all switch to ASSS, make it fully authoritative, and drop the Ctm encryption in favour of something more standardized and open sourced. Obfuscation is no longer necisary with a fully authoritative server.

 

2) Someone who _does_ have sufficient knowledge of !@#$%^&*embly be given the Ctm encryption, who will then develop a library with the necessary function calls to act as a client, but also add all necessary checks to make the library fully authoritative thus not allowing any cheating by clients of said library, then obfuscate its code as well as Ctm's.

 

 

Either way its not a particularly easy question to answer, no one wants to be responsible for the second Twister, and I fully understand that in regards to Snrrrubs current decision.

[Testtube]

Good points Kirk

[»Purge]

Purge, looks like there's some sort of Winsock error. I'd like to work with you, if possible, to resolve the issue. Please email me your contact details and some times that work for you so we can tackle this one-on-one.

It's been fixed. I decided to uninstall BitDefender antivirus since it expired and now Starlight works.

[»doc flabby]

Don't be re!@#$%^&*ed.

 

The last thing this game needs is yet ANOTHER self-important !@#$%^&*head who desires to have an entire community rely on him. The fact that you'd gleefully accept that position is telling of the state this game is in. We've finally got the opportunity to truly rid ourselves of Priit's client and the person who has the key (literally, in this case) would much rather make other people reinvent the wheel or go through some bull!@#$%^&* extra steps to make use of his work.

 

The bottom line here is that it's stupid for him to require developers to rely on him for such a thing.

What are we relying on him for? A chat client for the mortals who don't have VIP, hardly a massive reliance.

 

If he released the source we would be in a twister situation.

 

I personally think you need to look at the big picture, discretion is far from ready to replace continuum at this moment in time.

Releasing the source now would simply destroy continuum without having a replacement client in place. Not to mention most of the zones rely on Prittk for hosting, by cutting off continuum, we cut off the only reason he still supports this game.

 

Continuum encryption grows less and less important by the day, its more important we develop the replacement clients/servers imo

 

Fully authoritative server will never work with this game imo. No real-time online game is fully authoritative, it causes problems with gameplay.

The best you can do it try to make hacking the game difficult, or make it easy to spot/ban hackers.

[»Lynx]

All that aside, and the fact that he simply can't release the source, because he's not allowed to. A lot of it was written for a business, so he doesn't own the licences to the source code, and I'm sure that his job means a lot more to him than some annoyed people on a 2D spaceship game.

 

The information to byp!@#$%^&* all of the security checks is out there, it's all been released. All you need to do is test it and find out how to byp!@#$%^&* it yourself.

 

-Lynx

[»Admiral Kirk]

An MMO by the name of Ragnarok uses a fully authoritative server model, and it works quite well. Basically you make the server fully authoritative and then add "guessing" logic to the client. Basically what this does is that when the client issues, say, a weapons packet, it uses its _own_ logic to determine what the repercussions will be (much as our current client already does). This substantially reduces or entirely negates the inherent latency in a fully server authoritative system that would normally make implementation in a real time environment difficult. However once the server receives the weapons packet, it then responds by telling the client what _actually_ happened according to the servers fully authoritative check. If the two differ the client corrects its representation. This can sometimes cause minor jumpiness on laggy connections but imo thats better than our current model which can result in hitting your target on your screen but not on someone else's with no way of knowing whos representation was accurate. This is a very simplistic version of the same protocol that WoW uses (which is also fully authoritative).

 

The only reason SS was never designed this way is due mostly to bandwidth limitations and to a lesser extent server speed. However at this time, thier is no reason a game of SS's comparative simplicity could not use a fully authoritative server model. It would, however, involve a great deal more code in ASSS than it currently has.