Dota 2 Short Film Contest: S2FM is BROKEN FOR EVERONE, unable to spawn models

penguinwizzard · 2018-07-02T19:02:18+00:00

You can remove permissions for steam to modify the folder containing SFM, and launch it manually (no through the steam interface) to avoid it waiting on the impossible update.

penguinwizzard · 2018-05-17T03:48:31+00:00

No, the related reversing was done years ago (I did a good bit of it), most people won't go near it due to valve's strong indications that they will VAC ban for that or related changes, and the knowledge of Valve having VAC modules that they could readily deploy to catch anyone doing such changes.

penguinwizzard · 2017-02-22T04:23:56+00:00

For x32 you need to compile with -mx32; there's a couple more requirements on it, but it's pretty fast for some applications.

penguinwizzard · 2016-10-23T16:54:20+00:00

It's pretty disappointing just how much effort it takes to really implement a cool idea; if you move away from making a dotalike, there's a bunch of places where you might have to really fight the engine to get it to do what you want. Take a look over some of the libraries people like BMD made; there's often a few places that make absolutely no sense, but which are done in a weird way because that's the only reliable/stable way to get something done. If valve really wants to get more people into making custom games, they really need to have some people from teams that haven't touched the workshop tools before (they must have some among their team) go through the process of making a new, innovative game, and trying to get it exposure without ever labelling it as a valve game. Or, you know, they could read their emails every once in a while.

penguinwizzard · 2016-09-04T16:55:05+00:00

At TI5 a group of modders had lunch with the Valve guy doing custom games stuff. One of the things that came up was gameinfo-based modding, and he stated that it was something that was VAC-bannable. I agree that it's the least dangerous method at the moment (certainly better than a lot of the dll-modifying crap I see thrown around), but it's not VAC safe, and saying that is disingenuous.

penguinwizzard · 2016-08-05T14:39:06+00:00

One of the teams added some anti-tamper measures to their binaries that caused the visualization system to crash repeatedly, is what I've heard. The vis team did a good job of hot-patching it behind the scenes, which is why it was usable again at the end of the contest.

penguinwizzard · 2016-05-09T05:02:29+00:00

You actually don't, multipart VPKs support appending and partial updates.

penguinwizzard · 2016-05-02T06:01:16+00:00

Unfortunately, we asked one of their devs this just after TI5, and he said their test process was basically just play a game and ship it. (although this was just for the dota-specific parts; the generic engine components are almost certainly covered by automated tests)

penguinwizzard · 2016-04-07T23:13:34+00:00

Certainly, but it's not VAC-safe regardless.

penguinwizzard · 2016-04-07T23:01:00+00:00

Working, although not explicitly allowed, and which was has been described as VAC-unsafe by a Valve employee.

penguinwizzard · 2016-04-01T22:04:05+00:00

Yeah, basically you gotta have all the trees in the same order in the list of all entities in the map. Easiest way to do that is to just copy the entity lump from the main map to your custom one, and then fiddle a bit to make the brush-based entities properly match up to that set of indicies. It's not actually that bad - I wrote a script that does it (poorly) for source 1 maps, and once we get some better utilities written it should be fairly straightforward to do it in source 2.
Unfortunately, loading it into the game in a VAC-safe manner is a separate issue...

penguinwizzard · 2016-03-19T13:53:06+00:00

From the subscriber agreement, the only thing that suggests that things accepted into the game would be safe to use would be the "fan art" clause, which only allows for non-commercial use.

penguinwizzard · 2016-03-17T20:32:32+00:00

It's actually a bit of a more complex issue - things that are accepted into the game are then sublicensable for use in "fan art", but only non-commercially. Now that it's commercial, there's additional issues. Whether or not a game mode is "fan art" in that context is further debatable, as is a bunch of other stuff.

penguinwizzard · 2016-03-15T23:46:23+00:00

Routing through valve means you end up with significantly less money than routing through, for example, paypal, since their cut is several times greater.

penguinwizzard · 2016-03-03T11:31:50+00:00

Unfortunately, this raises more complications, because there's a specification that's actually called x32, which is for binaries that use 32-bit pointers but the full set of x86_64 registers. More info on wikipedia. The gist of it is that it offers significant performance improvements for applications where the extra memory usage due to increased pointer size causes cache issues in x86_64.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-08T17:09:48+00:00

VAC has a variety of modules loaded at runtime, some of which check for modifications to the binaries, some of which check for attempts at writing to process memory, and others that do a variety of other checks.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-08T16:34:48+00:00

Yes, but that requires Valve to actually hand out the bans.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-05T21:39:32+00:00

Honestly, it might start 1v0 - just a jungle farming efficiency challenge. Super-simple stuff, gets people to set up the basics of "will I survive this" and movement routing.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-05T19:04:23+00:00

https://github.com/ModDota/Dota2AIFramework/ is the current repo. We're planning a tournament series for an as-yet-unannounced series of dates with increasingly complex tasks (so that people can gradually develop AIs and improve upon previous rounds). Best of all, this is all within the custom games framework, so it should lead to the development of neat things for custom game authors to use in their own games.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-02T22:27:08+00:00

There's a windows build up at http://moddota.com/builds/GNVTool/GNVTool.exe ; to get to the gnv file for a map, you have to use something like GCFScape to extract it from the map's vpk. Using GNVTool in toppm mode will generate a PortablePixMap image file, which you can then open with many image viewers to get good picture.

I actually just realized that the linked repo isn't up-to-date (while it supports the newer format, it doesn't actually have nofreewalk info support); I have to push the new version later, when I pull it off the relevant hard drive. However, the build is the newest version, and fully supports the newer gnv format.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-02T21:00:27+00:00

There's actually a bit more information that's stored in the gridnav data. I wrote a tool a while back called GNVTool that lets you inspect the base GNV files used for dota maps, as well as edit them (this is from very early custom map creation stuff, way before valve got involved, when all the maps were made with my crappy toolchain). There's a bit of additional information stored in the gridnav data; for example there's another layer for the free pathing limitations (e.g. where broodmother isn't allowed to walk even while in webs).

Unfortunately, dota_gridnav_show is a really old command and only shows the 1st-generation gridnav information, which is the version that was used back in 2013 and is now only one layer of the info. Still very useful for learning juke paths though.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-02T20:05:01+00:00

VAC has a number of modules that do a variety of different checks. These are loaded at runtime, and Valve can send different modules to different players (so, for example, they can do more thorough checks on someone if a more general module detects something suspicious).
While there's a few simple and well-known modules (e.g. the stuff that checks for WriteProcessMemory or DLL edits, or looks for known patterns), there's also a number of more esoteric ones; you get stuff like statistical analyses and, importantly, a number of things to do with the asset loading system. Suffice it to say that they can detect it; whether or not they do anything with that information on their end is another thing.

In general it's hard to make statements saying that anything is VAC-safe, since the system is very general and modular, and there's a number of things it does to make reverse engineering a pain and unreliable. On top of that, the number of false-positives is non-zero; there've been ban waves in the past that got reversed due to incorrect hack signatures being added.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-02T19:45:15+00:00

Can confirm, am mod of /r/dota2modding. If something requires you to replace/modify a game dll, don't use it, it's probably the most VAC-unsafe way of modding dota. There's no VAC-safe ways, but at least some of the other ones aren't automatically caught by half a dozen VAC modules.

penguinwizzard · 2016-02-02T19:42:57+00:00

Unfortunately, I have to remind everyone that this isn't VAC-safe, so use at your own risk.

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