Modding Discussion Elitism in Starbound, How it affects Modding, You and the Future of the Game Itself.

Why should you *have* to do that?

 

More "this knowledge is forbidden griefers could use it" mumbo jumbo rubbish.

The idiot's guide to griefing:
Step 1). Increase the blast radius of a plasma grenade to 99999.
Step 2). Blow up planets while putting up your carefully drawn goatse.jpg signs everywhere.

Yet despite griefing being so blatantly easy and obvious, people still stick to this excuse that griefing is a mystical art that requires dark forbidden magics.

 

I literally just stated that it's easy. Perhaps you cannot read.

Also, again it goes to show your ignorance. Increasing blast radius will kick you from the server for attempting to damage more than 49 blocks at once. Good job!

Lets face it... you aren't here to discuss this. You're just here to rant about how you cant figure out how to troll people because you cant fathom the idea of learning to do things yourself. That's all there is to it.

 

Only for mining tools, not for projectiles.

 

I have a MM with an 8x8 area and have used it on servers @_@

 

danger dark forbidden spooky griefing knowledge contained within

There's an upper limit on the number of blocks a mining tool or the world.damageTiles() lua function can effect in a single "hit" before the server kicked you. (at least, there was in Enraged Koala)

But you could get around this by using multiple world.damageTiles() calls or a projectile!

 

Its probably been increased with the fact that MM Upgrades were actually incorperated into the game. Try setting it higher and see what happens.[DOUBLEPOST=1431295281][/DOUBLEPOST]

http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/crash-from-damaging-too-many-blocks.84904/

Im sorry, what was that?

 

Well, if that's what you want to religiously believe, be my guest.

Any server administrator who runs a public server will tell you otherwise.

 

Rubbish you say?

I would like to see what would be of starbound multiplayer if the exploit that allowed one player to WRITE ON THE FILESYSTEM of the Computer running a server, messing all the filesystem the user that ran the server had access to..... Wasn't only on a person hands (that only used it against a small number of targets)

That lua exploitation forced the worldb writing function to write on places it shouldn't, changing the filesize of all loaded universe files, starbound logs / config, assets and the own server executable to 0bytes (on linux you have greater control but you can't deny write access to universe/config/logs). On some starbound servers they actually targeted the OS, specially on linux some victims who had their servers on a too high permission user.
This particular lua script also corrupted ALL players online on the server shipworld and .player files in a amazingly automated way.

So don't dare to come say me it's rubbish, if this particular knowledge leaked into public, all the kids without any knowledge would now be able of do real damage to servers.
I can assure there would be no alternative but the shutdown of servers and bug the starbound developers (that didn't care at the time about this).

And that is why it existed a hot-fix for Enraged Koala some time before Upbeat Giraffe for the server software, when the servers being attacked almost daily decided to insist with the developers, that neither them had any idea (neither believed) how could that be possible.

 

I am pretty sure there is a world of difference between "how can I make X effect for a mod" and "how can I use an obscure unintended exploit to write arbitrary data to other peoples computers".

I am not talking about security exploits. I am talking about how the community at present believes that information acquired from the Lua API or the json structures is "dangerous knowledge" and go to absurd lengths to prevent anyone sharing in depth information about it.

 

The fact that its possible to write data to someone else's computer is a HUGE concern. Don't downplay it so casually. Your head is in the clouds if you don't think that information should be hushed.

I don't even know how it is done, and while I am curious, I understand why it is kept secret.

 

And it was kept secret till Upbeat Giraffe where it was finally made impossible by starbound developers. Luck we had, that knowledge didn't leak or things would have gotten much serious.

The point turns around that, i know the way that exploit was done is actually with knowledge you can use to create a simple tech .lua of one vanilla tech. And it hasn't hard. The knowledge is actually used to do legit things but when someone figured out "oh i can use this to do that", everything felt apart.

When we fight to keep the information buried is that kind, to avoid it spreads because it's really like that, once someone can grab the info in how to exploit it, it spreads like a cancer to a point it's out of control. Even legit mods, when people saw they could use some tools to actually attack servers with them, i see people now downloading them only with the intention of attack servers.

But it's really about, if i posted all we know about the modded stuff that could be harmful with used with bad intentions somewhere public, i as well the other servers owners would be forced to shutdown or implement some very strict whitelisting, it would get to a point of people afraid of play this game MP (something that did happen during Enraged Koala due the same exploit i mentioned). I'm in favor of release all info, but, when starbound developers get into their plan that is, the security on MP (server-side saves), not affected by Mods from clients any longer. Then yes security won't be one issue or a reason to not share and help expand the modding community of this game.

 

Example of a batch file to back up player. It could easily be improved to save information like a time stamp and there is the PING command.
This is for Windows so I don't know what Linux users would have to do instead. Cheers!

Code:

SETLOCAL
ECHO OFF

REM Place this file in the directory containing your starbound folder and execute.
REM Change giraffe_storage to koala_storage if you are using the stable version.
REM This batch script will continue running until you close the command prompt.

REM Location of batch file when executed.
SET PARENTDIR=%~dp1
SET STARBOUNDVER=giraffe_storage
SET BACKUPFOLDER=StarboundBackup
SET BACKUPVERSION=1
SET MAXBACKUPS=3
REM Maximum amount of time(minutes) before saving a new backup. (largest value = 1666)
SET NUMBEROFMINUTES=10
SET /A BACKUPINTERVAL="%NUMBEROFMINUTES%*60"

:ENDLESSLOOP

ECHO Backup number: %BACKUPVERSION% Date: %DATE% Time: %TIME%
SLEEP 5

ECHO Create the backup folders if they don't exist.
MD %PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\player
MD %PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\universe
MD %PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\mods

ECHO Copy files to backup folders.
COPY /V /Y "%PARENTDIR%Starbound\%STARBOUNDVER%\*" /B "%PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\" /B
COPY /V /Y "%PARENTDIR%Starbound\%STARBOUNDVER%\player\*" /B "%PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\player\" /B
COPY /V /Y "%PARENTDIR%Starbound\%STARBOUNDVER%\universe\*" /B "%PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\universe\" /B
COPY /V /Y "%PARENTDIR%Starbound\%STARBOUNDVER%\mods\*" /B "%PARENTDIR%%BACKUPFOLDER%\Backup%BACKUPVERSION%\Starbound\mods\" /B

SET /A BACKUPVERSION="%BACKUPVERSION%+1"
IF %BACKUPVERSION% GTR %MAXBACKUPS% SET BACKUPVERSION=1

ECHO Backup completed! Wait for next round ...

TIMEOUT %BACKUPINTERVAL% /nobreak

CLS

GOTO :ENDLESSLOOP

ENDLOCAL

 

I have read a bit on the concerns people have with server security risks and have some concerns with some of the viewpoints people have provided. If people have been practising the craft of hacking successfully for a while then it is likely they have extensive knowledge of vulnerabilities to networks and servers. I have seen the viewpoint more than once that we are lucky that the knowledge of hacking the game has not leaked out and caused damage. It is fair to state the only people prevented from hacking the game in this case are people that don't really know much. For those with more experience it may be only a matter of time or worse, currently happening and nobody knows about it. The kind of activity that took place in the past with nasty pictures looks to me like the act of a very immature mind. If their goal was to get a reaction from people then they could not be happier right now. Not only did people really freak out but now there is a culture of mistrust in this forum. My concern now is people feel secure because they don't know of anything happening right now but a more experienced hacker would likely find the bug(s) with enough time and have really malicious intents you would not know about until the damage is done. If you are really concerned then you would not play on a server until this game is declared secure by the company. By keeping the information hush-hush you are preventing "ignorant" (sorry for the term but it shows up a lot in this thread) people from knowing about the risk.

I have been called a liar (making up facts from thin air on purpose with the intent to decieve) and ignorant (don't know anything at all). I know I did not commit the former and I consider it an insult and I would like to know why such a strong accusation was called for when your could simply have stated why you did not agree with me. As for the latter, I clearly stated I was not an expert so informing me of my ignorance was redundant and purposeless. It does fall in line with a fine, inviting and inclusive community that I mostly see here and was beginning to value very much. I really do not know what to think of this community now.