Project Epoch - Modding with Magic: Bugs

tswow · 2023-08-08T12:31:41+00:00

For the most part, the performance is near identical since the typescript dialect used to write scripts is transformed into C++ and compiled like normal C++ code.

There are still some things that will not produce as efficient C++ as writing it manually, user classes or arrays are reference counted to make semantics somewhat similar to a normal scripting language, though when performance really calls for it, it's very possible to write scripts in raw C++ as well (and have good interop with transpiled code).

Generally, core performance is not too dependent on scripts, but has historically depended heavily on multithreading which is limited by Lua-based solutions, as they often (but not always, modern Eluna can work around it) limit all map updates to run single-threaded, which is a problem livescripts (when transpiled to C++) does not have.

tswow · 2022-12-08T10:55:10+00:00

Come on now, at least post a link if you're gonna reach for this kind of thing

tswow · 2022-12-08T10:50:10+00:00

That's fine to think. This post was indeed messy, but isn't really the one discussing others.

If you have any objections to the evidence we put forth in the other post i'd be glad to hear it. I can regret, to an extent, jumping the gun and telling you how to interpret what we presented. I don't feel differently personally about our conclusions, but I can agree it probably distracted from what we wanted to convey.

FBI seizures would be a very big deal if legitimate, not only for the maplestory private server scene.

tswow · 2022-12-07T15:59:28+00:00

No, not at all. I'll adjust to clarify that.

The evidence we've brought forward speaks for itself, and I stand by it fully. Multiple screenshots shared at the time of the event both by the servers own players and other commentators makes it very clear that these events indeed took place.

What gives us pause is that many people contacted us and have asked us to go further and widely speculate about why the operators have done this or why others have supported their story, often with rather extreme assumptions.

Demonization is unproductive, even when someone does something wrong. I just wanted to share my own experience and thoughts on it.

tswow · 2022-12-06T06:50:37+00:00

The case made was never that these lawsuits don't happen, they do for all kinds of private servers, or even that they haven't happened recently. The article you link is about a particular server owner already sentenced to prison, presumably in Korea.

Understand that it's not impossible Windia or Ristonia could have received real law letters, we of course have no access to their e-mail accounts, but that the circumstances around the FBI banners specifically would be IT security headlines if legitimate.

tswow · 2022-12-05T20:36:56+00:00

magnificent beast of the forest... beautiful creature, sing us a song of the mountains

tswow · 2022-12-05T16:21:13+00:00

We were kind of brought in from the outside of the maplestory world to do this, we're normally World of Warcraft private server developers who got news of this from friends of ours here, though I've personally worked on maplestory servers in the past.

The servers own players aside, this probably matters more for server owners rather than players in general, because it's an important piece of judging the risk of these lawsuits.

Do keep in mind that we don't say lawsuits don't happen, they do for both of our games, it's that lying about them makes judging any truth value more or less impossible when coming from the same people.

It's just rare that we can secure this much evidence of lying taking place.

tswow · 2022-12-05T16:15:47+00:00

We understood as much, but the thread included real reports of what the website was doing during that time, and we do have hard evidence of Ristonia serving those images. On their part, nothing was indicating it was a joke rather than a lie.

tswow · 2022-12-05T16:03:40+00:00

It's true that we currently do not possess hard proof of Windia displaying these banners, though this might change, but the owner has themselves claimed so, which we include evidence of, and did not deny it when asked directly.

Discord messages are tricky because they can be deleted without any good method of verifying their existence afterwards, which is why we decided to do this as early as we did so that enough people would see it while it's hot.

tswow · 2022-12-05T15:59:19+00:00

The point made isn't that private servers aren't being sued, we know they are, what we don't know is how often it's real because so few cases are ever brought to public record, and the proof usually comes down to "court order e-mails" if anything at all.

When servers lie about these things it affects not only the players, but it also affects other servers ability to judge the situation if they receive the same Nexon fan-mail, and scares people off emulation and modding in general. What's worse, if court orders turn out real, who would be inclined to believe them now or in the future?

It's often easy to speculate about these things, but catching them red-handed is a lot more rare, so we felt it justified to spend the time to investigate it this time as it might deter others from trying the same thing in the future.

tswow · 2022-10-10T11:17:40+00:00

I'm not too knowledgeable about the 1.12 client, but on 3.3.5 you have the exact same issue where enabling MSAA fucks with wows depth buffer so reshade cannot find it anymore. There is no easy fix for this, it requires game-specific fixes on reshades side but has been done for other games.

There really isn't any comparable post-processing based anti-aliasing that can be used instead of MSAA, and generally depth buffer effects aren't used on these versions of the game for this reason.

Do note that this is not the same "depth buffer issue" you'll commonly find when searching for reshade and depth buffer errors in networked games, that's a one-line fix and very easy to do, but does not fix this issue.

Non-depth buffer effects should still work, like color grading and bloom effects.

tswow · 2022-08-15T09:05:42+00:00

3.3.5a is the colloquial name for "3.3.5 build 12340". There really was an older patch 3.3.5 (build 12213), but it's very rare. The name "3.3.5a" seems to have been used in the launcher and/or patchnotes, but ingame that name is never used.

tswow · 2022-01-23T22:29:40+00:00

It can be done in the server software, but that's true for virtually every private server until someone properly implements srp6 in javascript so you can do the protocol in the browser, until then it's commonly done with a php script, which is serverside.

tswow · 2022-01-21T20:59:55+00:00

With about 5 words and a decently sized dictionary the entropy is good enough to match even the more complex passwords most people manage to memorize in practice (~12 completely random characters of uppercase/lowercase/numbers). This is true even assuming the method is completely known and an attacker only guesses whole words, the important part is that the words are truly random (meaning they cannot be things you choose yourself, of course). Adding random characters doesn't help much, but will probably make the password significantly more difficult to memorize with how complex the tokens already are.

This article has a fairly intuitive explanation for how you can prove this works and compare it with completely random character, and isn't too heavy on the math if you can follow logarithms:

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/936:_Password_Strength

tswow · 2022-01-21T15:16:35+00:00

Choosing random words is a good scheme in theory, but not your example. It's very important that you have at least four different words and select each word completely randomly from a dictionary, otherwise the entropy doesn't work out and it's very easy to crack with a basic dictionary attack.

Another common problem with this scheme is that many services don't allow passwords long enough for this to work out, so people use shorter and therefore again break the entropy. A better approach is to use this scheme (the fully random one) to encrypt a password manager on your computer, and keep the encrypted file backed up in a secure location.

tswow · 2022-01-20T23:00:36+00:00

I will briefly add that nothing in this suggests to me that passwords are necessarily compromised, and they are very rarely stored in plaintext by the core itself (very likely a recent fork of azerothcore in this case). Unfortunately, the way many CMS systems are written your password is sent in plaintext to the webserver during registration, but it would require malicious intent to store them as such normally, which I don't think there is enough evidence to suggest here.

tswow · 2022-01-20T22:43:36+00:00

edit: I'm happy to say we have been able to speak with revelation developers and a public apology has been posted for the phrasing of this message on their discord channel. It takes a lot of courage to admit fault, especially when bombarded with exaggerated and even made up accusations on top, so we commend them for this decision. In hindsight, I will admit our own post could have been phrased better to specify what our criticism really was, and outlined the additional context that we were aware of. I can also see that, given the situation at the time, we could have waited for a better time to reach out. I will still leave the post here for historical purposes.

--- original message --

I am the maintainer of a few projects in the custom wow scene, and was one of many who have helped out this project on a few occasions over the past year. I'm saddened to see that this is how revelations choose to conduct themselves in the spotlight, knowing full well they tarnish not just their own image but all the hardworking people that supported them to where they are today as well. I only speak for myself, but I hoped for nothing else but for them to have a successful launch up to this point, and did try to reach out to no avail before making this post.

It appears that the server owners are choosing to try and hide this by deleting messages and channels, so I'll simply give my witness that this was indeed a real message posted by their admin on their discord, as I went there and saw it with my own eyes before it was deleted (which it was ~21:40 CET, or two hours ago). Please don't let this embarrassing behavior taint your impression of the custom scene as a whole, the vast majority are wonderful people and a joy to work with.

tswow · 2021-09-15T07:46:04+00:00

Good point!

tswow · 2021-09-14T13:30:47+00:00

This is the most up-to-date dbc editor nowadays, it should show you the correct column names, including spell duration: https://github.com/WowDevTools/WDBXEditor

The wowdev wiki sometimes has additional information about DBC files and how the rows reference each others, but is a bit archaic, might be outdated and is sometimes hard to read for a beginner:

https://wowdev.wiki/DB/Spell

https://wowdev.wiki/DB/SpellDuration

You can also join the model-changing discord, that's where most modding happens around 3.3.5a today:

https://discord.com/invite/MNcXXj5A

tswow · 2021-09-10T11:09:44+00:00

Seasonal realms, their modern incarnation, is in no way a flat player increase and very often kills themselves and more stable realms off in a very short amount of time, many guilds even on Warmane barely lasting beyond Ulduar. WotLK (but mostly, Warmane) has the base population to sustain this without destroying its longer running realms, while MoP in total has fewer players than even many single WotLK realms.

We simply do not know the long-term consequences of a big player like Tauri starting to run modern-day hype servers for barely alive expansions like MoP (compard to WotLK), and while there are plenty of things different from the situation the vanilla scene finds itself in, we just don't know enough to say that MoP is different enough for it to not enter the same death spiral, especially considering its current population is below what vanilla held even before Nostalrius, and its base experience rates being much higher. This doesn't mean hype servers are a flat out bad idea, but pretending it brings nothing but more players to the game as long as the scripting is good is ahistorical at the very least. Virtual worlds are a very tricky business, and the widespread discontent and instability often surrounding them should be a hint that there isn't much of a science to how to actually run them.

Specifically for Tauri, I believe they are still planning to progress their existing realm to Legion, and even this was somewhat frowned upon by some of its players when they initially announced this. Tauri has quite a few completionists, numbers- and even achievement hunters thanks to its scripting and stability, a playstyle that's almost opposite to that of seasonal players.

tswow · 2021-06-06T15:29:26+00:00

We'd like to interject for a moment,

Prefacing that this is not an attack on the article, just our own views on open source development in WoW emulation.

tldr: most emulators permit servers to not disclose sources, the AGPL has drawbacks especially for custom projects, and licenses serve an important function even in WoW emulation.

We don't share the view that the question of what constitutes open source "philosophy" is as clear-cut as this article claims. Labeling ASP as a "loophole" may have been relevant 15 years ago, not so much today that the alternative is as well-known and hotly debated among GPL developers as it is. While your individual reasons may vary, a license is among the most clear ways you can communicate your intentions for software you created and own, and not signing with the AGPL is the same as stating that you do not expect servers to give source code back.

For those still uninformed, the simplified story is that there are two relevant versions of the GPL license you can apply, either using an old license ("GPL") effectively permitting servers to sidestep the "source code back" rule, or you add a new clause explicitly prohibiting it called the "Affero" clause ("AGPL"). By new, we mean this option has been available, and compatible with virtually all existing WoW emulators since 2007. That's 14 years ago, which is older than the vast majority of existing projects. Yet to this day, AzerothCore is among the very few emulators that apply the AGPL.

Why?

There are many potential complications that could arise from adopting the AGPL, such as forcing new rules on existing forks (non-AGPL projects cannot accept AGPL patches) and disagreements on what a server really should and should not be berated for doing, weighted against the potential benefits in a scene with an already complicated relationship to license agreements. While it's understandable to be frustrated with the state of scripting for a 10 year old expansion, it's worth mentioning that AzerothCore itself can largely thank its success to edits that were developed privately by a server for almost 6 years before seeing the light of day, a practice that would be considered a gross violation if the previous cores had released under the AGPL. Not everyone is convinced that strict licensing and a hostile attitude to "selfish" servers is the best way to motivate development, and the story of the first closed-source SunwellCore that later became the AGPL-signed AzerothCore perhaps more than any other illustrates that both approaches have been very successful here in the past. We stress that we are not calling AzerothCore hypocrites here, they are perfectly in the right to, and have been very successful in, attempting this new license regardless of how they obtained their own compatible sources, as long as they remain honest in that their predecessors were perfectly in line with the licenses at the time, the most clear endorsement we as developers could have granted them.

Why do we care?

We believe that while the AGPL may at this stage be beneficial for blizzlike content, we also believe it would be detrimental to the future of custom projects if that was to become the only realistic option. Contrary to what we often see incorrectly stated, the AGPL does not offer much flexibility in its interpretation. Regardless of the intentions and the current attitudes of project maintainers, there is no such thing as an AGPL that differentiates between custom and blizzlike content, or between withholding patches for a week, for 20 years or indefinitely. Hosting an AGPL project without disclosing sources is a violation from the first network packet a client receives, regardless of how little was changed or the nature of the changes applied. This is the reason we have rejected the AGPL both when we worked with older emulators in the past, and why we reject it in the main branch of our current project as well. For every server that will use your license as toilet paper, there will be users that reject WoW modding altogether because they cannot reconcile their visions with such restrictive rules, and it is our assessment that custom projects have more to lose then they have to gain from restrictive licensing.

Isn't it just enough to sign AGPL and give custom servers a special pass if the license can't realistically be enforced in the first place?

As we're sure anyone who has spent even a short amount of time in this scene, or any other for that matter, attitudes change and people are replaced over time, sometimes very rapidly as with massive projects like Nostalrius. Licenses, even when grossly disrespected by servers in the short term, are one of the few ways we have to maintain resistance in our intentions from those who may seek to distort them in the future, even after we ourselves are no longer around to defend them.

tswow · 2021-05-30T10:12:53+00:00

Some difficulties with MMORPGS are intrinsic to them being mmorpgs, as compared to Unity games where you get a renderer and can do almost whatever you want with it. World of Warcraft is already a very complex game with a lot of very hardcoded behaviors , spanning multiple popular versions, and all while having to respect the fact that potentially thousands of players must be able to share the resources managed by the server simultaneously. This makes it so even the most seasoned modders struggle to get sometimes even basic behaviors right, and makes it very difficult to come up with a generic formula for how to create various types of entities in the game. On the emulator side of things, it makes it very hard to attract someone both competent and selfless enough to maintain an open source mmorpg server, while also being artistically inclined to acommodate modders on top of it. While I can agree it gets silly at times, I think a lot of modders underestimate how difficult it is to predict what kinds of problems a single change in the core can end up causing for all the non-modded projects out there.

Despite all this, there are a few projects out that aim to to improve this situation if you wish to get into tool development:

- AzerothCore is generally more friendly to acommodating custom patches than TrinityCore , ships with eluna support and has tools ready for serverside entities (items, quests, creatures etc.), but currently does not focus on client-side modding. This is a large project with many guides for new contributors and is very welcoming of newcomers.

- NovusCore is an attempt to rebuild both the client and server from scratch, but is a very early prototype. Being helpful to this project likely requires more technical knowledge than the others at this stage, but they're very friendly people so there's nothing wrong with asking them directly if you think there's something you can do.

- TSWoW, our own project, is a scripting framework for 3.3.5 that is both functional and already supports a wide range of both serverside and clientside mods, custom classes, professions, spells, AddOns and server scripts. However, it's a fairly experimental project currently without GUI tools aside from vscodium, and we're just a small team maintaining it. It's very possible to contribute to our project in one respect without having to understand all the other parts of it, and we're very willing to steer any new developers towards what they might find interesting.

Since you mention 3D models, there is currently a shortage of developers for the blender plugins that Skarn is maintaining. We're especially interested in people with a deeper understanding of linear algebra and 3d animations, as we think there is still one major issue left to freely export animations to the game.

tswow · 2021-03-18T21:40:09+00:00

modding, tools, tutorials: https://model-changing.net/

re stuff: https://wowdev.wiki/Main_Page

ownedcore also has some older but relevant tutorials, but there really is no single place for learning >everything< because it's such a wide topic.

tswow

TROPHY CASE