Posts made by Sponge

@Thenomain said:

@Sponge said:

Packet Capture

I still had to look this up to understand what point you were trying to get at. (tl;dr: I still don't know.)

It makes more sense with the winky face. Every byte that the Internet passes in and out of the game is saved. If a packet gets lost and retransmitted, I've (probably) saved both the lost packet and the retransmitted copy. I get the empty ACK packets generated by the KEEPALIVE flag. I get all the communication to and from the client before the user logs in.

Anyway, it was a silly comment. I have complete logs of everything but not at the right level to be useful for this problem.

After doing the scant research about it, I don't see how that changes my response. You don't need to scrape anything; it can be done (and by your comments, done better) by using in-game resources. You can also scrape the logfile that you can convince Mu* to make to begin with, where everything typed is logged, but it also doesn't have the context to make a good poselogger.

You know what does? Master room, &log_everything <object>=$*:<log it>, done. The default TinyMUX install passes through commands instead of absorbing them when matched, though you may not get the "Huh?" message because the server sees it getting matched. Compare to @Chime's "@whence" output and if fails, report the Help Text.

Anyway, yeah, your correction didn't make much sense to me.

A secondary point there is: It doesn't require hardcode fiddling, and really isn't that hard on the softcode side, to log everything outputted to every room or object on the game. This was to the people concerned with such things being abused, a point that @WTFE made as well. @TNP's solution wouldn't work in this case.

As I mentioned, I don't like @hook for this and if I implement something it will be akin to what @Bobotron describes: a system to create a Monitor object that does the logging work and is conspicuous about what it's doing.

Packet Capture. I capture all the traffic that goes in and out of the game.

This runs before ./Startmux:

/usr/sbin/tcpdump -pns0 -C 8 -w newprospect -W 64 'tcp port 7777 and not (net 127.0.0.0/8 or net $home_ip/32)'

@Thenomain said:

@Sponge said:

@Thenomain said:

Why not simply log the entire game? We're over halfway there as it is.

I do, but I'm hesitant to try and build a mechanism to scrape the pcaps and push them into the game on demand.

Why? That's what people are asking for. If you mean for security reasons, then build better security, security considerations that would need to be made regardless of the system you would end up using.

Without parsing the streams the most granular filtering I have in the pcap data is remote IP + remote port. Without a really sophisticated stateful parser (that I'd have to write) there's no differentiation between MU output that's destined just for the user and MU output that's for the "room". Even the concept of a "room" or a list of other players in the same location as the recipient are really hard to infer.

You wouldn't even need to scrape. @ahear on the master room and boom, game-wide listening. I'm not a fan of soft-code extensions to hard-coded functions, but what could possibly go wrong using a system that can retrieve poses in a room you weren't in when they were being made, like Pose Order Tracker? A system that will have to be always-running to be effective as this kind of tool?

This reads like you missed the word "pcaps".

@Thenomain said:

Why not simply log the entire game? We're over halfway there as it is.

I do, but I'm hesitant to try and build a mechanism to scrape the pcaps and push them into the game on demand.

@Arkandel said:

For instance I walk in your room. I type something like "+poselog 10" or whatever to see what's been going on and you and @Coin both get a message asking if that's okay. You say yes. @Coin says no. What happens then? Is one person vetoing it enough for the log to remain undisclosed? What if a third person's in the room but idlying? If I can't get the poses right at first they're probably nearly useless to me later on.

And who can clear a scene? Imagine a five-person scene where one of them clears it because they need to go, but others want it there so they can log it, or for newcomers to see. What happens then?

The system could record who was present to witness each emit. In that case, anyone who was there to witness can permit to repose whatever they witnessed. This is no different than the ability for players to copy-paste what they have witnessed.

@Bobotron
This should be adaptable though I'm somewhat @hook-averse. It will catch poses via say/pose/emit but not anything soft-coded that doesn't @force players to say/pose/emit.

Man, I wish MUX had lambdas. Having to set up a distinct soft function for things like filter() and sortby() has always felt clumsy.

@Glitch

If my desire to have an implementation was unclear, I apologize for the ambiguity.

Do you have an implementation of either?

@Coin

I agree that server-side repose is more useful. I assert that client-side is more useful than nothing because copy-paste is tedious and error prone.

Do you have an implementation of either?

@Coin

It wouldn't be pointless. It would be a convenient way for others to repose to you as a courtesy.

I like the idea of games with codified (if not coded) Influence action systems. You get a regular allowance of action points based on some stats and time or whatever. The ability to hand out more is cool, especially if they can be scoped to the domain of the plot (Underworld, Occult, Law, etc). Your actions can then be to use that influence to get a gun or a bag of money or a jar of newt blood or a speeding ticket waived later. Perhaps picking up the gun and getting rid of it earns you a favor represented as influence.

As for tangible things, giving people things they could reasonably get on their own seems sensible out of the gate. What supers don't really have a means of either breaking into a house/store/whatever and stealing a gun or "talking" someone out of the gun they have? A Ma Deuce? No. A Beretta? Sure, why not? A grand claive? Keep dreaming.

On CoH I created an object that would give whoever carried it a small stat bonus. Being ICly cursed (unbeknownst to the characters) it would randomly @pemit crazy things to the player only or to the others in the room only.

A good reward is itself a plot vehicle.

Got a feature request on NPM:

I am not a coder, and thus do not know how difficult this feature is to create or enact, however, +repose was a command on a previous game I played; Star Wars: Generations of Darkness. The command essentially ignored all ooc, and just re-posted the last...10 or so poses, appended with who made them. It was an INCREDIBLE feature to help keep up with a large scene when struck by a sudden torrent of spam, and allowed very large scenes to go on without people getting lost very easily at all.

I'd LOVE a similar feature, as I think it'd help me (and a lot of people) hack their way through bigger crowd scenes and deal with channel spam at the same time. Is there any way that something like this is
possible here?

Sounds like more use of hooking than I'm interested in. Seems like it would be best implemented in client. Am I missing something?

@Runescryer said:

@Sponge said:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8000 -j DNAT --to-destination :7777

This is what I have in my startup scripts. If the connection is destined for port 8000, change the destination port to 7777. The game only runs on 7777 and everything is happening within that one game,. You can map as many inbound ports to the game port as you like.

Being able to differentiate between connecting on one port versus another requires extra trickery and it's probably better just to do only soft-code things to have multiple realities within the same game.

The problem I'm trying to avoid is conflicting object (including character) names. It would be easier to just have everything on one port, but how do you avoid conflicts that happen with 4 or 5 versions of the same character on at the same time? Especially with logins?

I can't speak about other platforms but for MU, the name and alias being unique within the database is a fundamental assumption of the software. You could do trickery to make unique names look non-unique in softcode (Sara-smith and Sara-jones could both show up in +who in as just Sara) but hard-code like page and mail won't work as desired.

You could tie multiple, separate games together by using either a bot to relay/synchronize data across or pointing multiple games at the same MySQL database. I've never used MySQL with MU. In the past, having one game at MySQL was a recipe for game-crashing hilarity. Now it's more sane for a single game. For multiple games, any code accessing the DB would have to be written with assumptions of concurrent changes in the DB and changes in the DB that the game didn't cause (because a different game did).

There used to be the concept of disparate games forming portions of a larger universe. BAMF used to be a thing: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bamf.html

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 8000 -j DNAT --to-destination :7777

This is what I have in my startup scripts. If the connection is destined for port 8000, change the destination port to 7777. The game only runs on 7777 and everything is happening within that one game,. You can map as many inbound ports to the game port as you like.

Being able to differentiate between connecting on one port versus another requires extra trickery and it's probably better just to do only soft-code things to have multiple realities within the same game.

You can also use iptables to make the same game available on multiple ports. This is useful to allow people to get on the game if your main port is blocked by corporate firewalls.

In the realm of total weirdness, with a combination of iptables and softcode you could actually have the same game vary depending on which port the player connected on. Roughly, when the player logs in, code could set reality levels or other things based on how they connected. This probably would be nothing more than a novelty and might cause more trouble than it's worth.

I'm in the midst of a whack-a-mole game with banned player so the slight annoyance has my mind wandering. I've been thinking about this for a while and I don't think implementing this is worth the effort but I'll share the idea because it tickles me.

I believe the idea of the Hell Ban originates from forums. The user isn't prevented from using the site, however, they are the only person who sees any of the content they generate. They post, their posts go up, if they leave and come back their posts are still there. Nobody else sees them though.

With a few pieces you could do the same thing on MU. You would need to hack or hook the hard functions that determine "onlineness" for players like lwho(), hasflag(), etc, so that it shows people as being online. You'd have to hook page so that pages seem to go through to players that should appear to be online... or you could just have an emit to say that the person is page locked. You would need a robot to relay channel messages and onlineness updates from the real game to the hell game. Or you could just have scripted/logged events replayed. Finally, you'd need an iptables rules to DNAT hell banned players to the hell ban game; this is actually trivial.

The result should be a game that makes all the noises of a live game and is difficult to distinguish from the actual game.

In our case, the meaning of each level was spelled out with respect to the character. We didn't anticipate things like risk to character property and the few players we had with bad intentions identified that fairly quickly.

For something like this to work it really does require having everything spelled out unambiguously and my intuition is that they can't be spelled out enough to not require staff interpretation. If it ultimately relies on staff interpretation it becomes more an advisory thing. In that case it's just RP Prefs on a game that's consent or not.

This reads somewhat similarly to the Risk system we created on City of Hope. Our intent was to help prevent people from getting run over by the Welcome Wagon.

A few people would hide behind it but that was rare. A similar subset of players would use it as a metagame element. For us the fundamental aspect that was misunderstood was that consent on CoH drew a line on where consequences should be enforced by players vs staff. For it to work properly, players have to adjust their behavior to the people they are with which is difficult for some. It attempted to codify the spectrum between safety and spontaneity with mixed results. When we made our successor game we dropped it for full Consent.

Anecdotally the level of Risk players would set themselves to correlated to the risk inherent to their play style.

I'll second Red Breast but it's spendy.

I've been looking for the best bang for my buck boozes. So far:

• Bourbon: Old Grand Dad, Buffalo Trace
• Vodka: Tito's Handmade Vodka
• Tequila: El Espolon (Reposado), 1800 Reposado

For expensive shit, Hudson Baby Bourbon is amazing, and the price reflects this. Angel's Envy, Blanton's, and Four Roses Single Barrel are also good. If you look around you can find a cask strength of the latter at like 56%.. In Tequilas, Corzo is solid, Tres Generaciones is decent.

I dislike Scotch but I'm told Costco's Highland Single Malt 18 is comparable in quality to a Macallan 12.

http://www.rprepository.com/

Anyone use this site? Opinions?

@Rook said:

I never understood why a simple +IGNORE-like command made you unfindable to people whom you don't want stalking you. Maybe another level could hide you from simple WHO, +WHO, +WHERE, +HANGOUTS when they run them.

Hmm. Something to ponder through.

It forces them to stalk you on their alts.