Messages

16

Modification Help / [Library] SHA-256

« on: March 19, 2017, 09:33:52 AM »

In light of a SHA-1 collision being found in practice, Blockland no longer has any default functions capable of providing even the slightest glimmer of cryptographic security.  So I decided to write SHA-256 in TorqueScript.

This library was written using pseudocode from the Wikipedia page on SHA-2, an addition function by Port, and test vectors for several SHA variants from DI Management.

The function in this library operates much in the same way as the default sha1 function, taking a string and returning the hash of that string in hexadecimal.  It should work on any string that does not overflow the TorqueScript string buffer, but as it is written in TorqueScript it may hang Blockland for noticeable periods of time for very long strings.

Please note that unless you are writing code where the cryptographic properties of SHA-256 are important, you should probably stick to using the default sha1 function, which is much faster than any hashing function written in TorqueScript.


Benchmark comparisons:
Running sha1("") 999999 times: 2400 ms, or ~2.4 µs per call
Running sha256("") 9999 times: 124736 ms, or ~12.5 ms per call

17

Add-Ons / Re: Xalos Add-On Rerelease Pack

« on: November 05, 2016, 08:52:16 PM »

How do I start up realistic space? I just spawn with invisible ground and regular gravity.

The server must be a dedicated server - there's a glitch with the client that I have tried and failed to fix something like twenty times that causes severe client-sided lag under certain conditions, so if you're hosting a non-dedicated server it has a bad habit of everyone timing out and thinking the server has crashed.

18

Add-Ons / Re: Xalos Add-On Rerelease Pack

« on: November 03, 2016, 08:28:26 AM »

Realistic Space Mod?
I don't think that it's in the pack, at least I didn't see it.

It's named Gamemode_SpaceMod, and yes, it's in there.

19

Add-Ons / Re: Xalos Add-On Rerelease Pack

« on: November 02, 2016, 05:14:18 PM »

EDIT: What does dimensions do?

It's a mod that allows players to place dimension doors down that take them to a dark region where they can build.  It also breaks saving and I never got around to fixing that.  So not something I'd recommend for long-term servers.

20

Add-Ons / Re: Xalos Add-On Rerelease Pack

« on: November 02, 2016, 04:02:55 PM »

Sever_Zoneplant: Zoneplant.

What the #### is a zoneplant

It allows the host to create regions in which people can place bricks without permission, which I created for my hotel so people could build in their rooms but not elsewhere in the hotel.

21

Add-Ons / Re: Xalos Add-On Rerelease Pack

« on: October 31, 2016, 11:04:08 AM »

You should host a server so I can join and Stargate with you :P

22

Add-Ons / Xalos Add-On Rerelease Pack

« on: October 31, 2016, 10:49:38 AM »

I recently noticed that Google Drive has deprecated the format I was using for direct linking.  As such, all images, sounds, add-ons, and other files I have linked to there no longer work, including almost all of my released add-ons.

Thus, I decided to make a comprehensive archive of all the add-ons I have released previously, and many I have not.  Be aware that many of the mods which were not released, were not released due to stability or usability concerns.  It is unwise to simply drop all of these into your add-ons folder and enable all of them, as any number of conflicts may occur, both within the mods in the archive and with other mods.

The very popular Planets mod (Server_Planets.zip) and the Stargate mod (Gamemode_Stargate.zip, enable as normal under Custom rather than running as a gamemode) are both included in this archive, which had not been released prior to now.  Also included is the Planets gravitation helper and its source code.  Run this before starting a Planets server and, in theory, it will allow the server to run much more smoothly than the native TorqueScript version of the code.  In practice, some retrying might be needed to get it to work correctly.

Feel free to modify, expand, and redistribute any or all of the mods.

Xalpack.zip

23

General Discussion / Re: Is Blockland community dead?

« on: June 21, 2016, 03:11:43 PM »

Blockland has a long and glorious tradition of dying, with seemingly no ill effects.

Blockland died on November 24th, 2005; no one has ever played since then.

24

Off Topic / Re: Is my logic false?

« on: May 28, 2016, 04:14:10 PM »

have you ever heard the phrase "take the high ground"?

Not really; what does it mean? Serious question.

"Taking the (moral/ethical) high ground" refers to refraining from stooping to the level of someone who's acting unethically, and instead choosing to continue acting ethically.

25

General Discussion / Re: A Blockland Glitch I'd only like to share.

« on: May 26, 2016, 03:14:30 PM »

this is the aot master server glitch all over again

Yes.  Same root cause, different symptoms.

26

General Discussion / Re: A Blockland Glitch I'd only like to share.

« on: May 26, 2016, 10:54:08 AM »

I've posted this before, but the post must have been lost in the Great Coding Help Culling of 2015.

Blockland stores time in a 32-bit signed integer.  The maximum positive value this data type can store is 2,147,483,647.  Now, last time I made a very broad, sweeping statement that all of the ways you could get the simtime used this value at their core.  I don't actually know if this is true, but it would amaze me if it were not.  For one thing, it would mean that $Sim::Time would rapidly build up inaccuracies and deviate wildly from the correct value.

Assuming, however, that it is true, and every possible way you can get the simtime uses the same 32-bit integer at their core, then all of them will eventually overflow at the same time as the game passes 2147483647 milliseconds of uptime.  With some basic arithmetic, we know that this occurs after:

24 days, 20 hours, 31 minutes, 23 seconds, and 647 milliseconds.


After this period, any scripts or code that use getSimTime() or $Sim::Time and aren't designed to be Ragnarok-proofed against simtime suddenly jumping to -2147483648 milliseconds will probably experience glitches.  These can range from momentary bizarreness at the discontinuity, or extremely long-lived glitches that last until the simtime reaches a value of 0 milliseconds again, after 24 days, 20 hours, 31 minutes, 23 seconds, and 648 milliseconds.  In theory, at this point, all of the problems would stop occurring for another 2147483647 milliseconds.

In theory, anyway.  I don't think anyone's ever hosted a server for 50 continuous days without restart.  If anyone wants to try, go for it; I'd be interested to see if the problems actually did stop or if they continued indefinitely.

27

Suggestions & Requests / Re: Generating a map using a height map

« on: May 19, 2016, 08:33:32 PM »

I have a heightmap to .bls program that I never got around to finishing.  It takes a height map, color map, and colorset as input, and generates a .bls and .jpg file as output.

Executable and source code


The four fields at the bottom are all required.  They all have tooltips, but Windows is a bit inconsistent about showing them, so I'll explain here:

• Brick Size: The size of the brick, in terms of 1x1F plates.  Thus, a 1x1 brick is "1 1 3", and a 32x32 baseplate is "32 32 1".
• Brick UI Name: The name of the brick, as it appears in the brick menu.  If you get this wrong the save simply won't work at all.  Capitalization won't matter, but spelling will.
• Terrain Height: The difference in height, in plates, from black to white.  If you put 255, then the difference in color brightness and brick height will match one to one.
• Terrain Base: The elevation of the bottom of the lowest brick, in plates.  For most purposes, you'll want to leave this as 0, but if you want you can move it up or down as needed.

28

Drama / Re: DipMan threatening to hack

« on: April 26, 2016, 10:28:25 AM »

Oh yeah, like Xalos said, it doesn't matter if they have it, as long as they don't have your local ip address.

I feel obligated to correct this - your LAN IP address is even less useful in most cases to an attacker than your public IP address.  With your public IP address, they can attack you.  With your LAN IP address, they'll wind up either attacking something on their own local area network, or sending a lot of traffic to nowhere.  The only time you should be worried about someone having your LAN IP address is if they're connected to your LAN, in which case they're physically quite close to you, which you should probably be more worried about than electronic attacks on your machine.

29

Suggestions & Requests / Re: Disable Clear bricks for non admins

« on: April 23, 2016, 11:41:41 AM »

That's false. I could include a gamemode.txt and a colorset.txt in a weapon file and I'm sure it could work

No, doing this does not work.  It must be Gamemode_* to be detected as a gamemode and added to the Gamemodes selection screen.

30

Suggestions & Requests / Re: De-spam bricks by combining them.

« on: April 23, 2016, 10:00:30 AM »

This is an NP problem, which means there's no way to solve it in polynomial time.  What that means in layman's terms is that as the scale of the problem you want to solve increases linearly, the computational complexity to solve it increases exponentially or even superexponentially.  There's no way to "prune" bad paths, because the optimal solution could actually be on a path that appears bad at first.

As I've said before, the Trench Digging gamemode doesn't actually solve this.  It attempts to, but falls short as soon as you move outside of its operational assumptions.  Once you do, its optimization method actually decays rapidly as it recombines bricks in nonoptimal ways.  Anyone who's played Trench Warfare will have seen this happen; trying to fill in an enemy tunnel will result in a disjointed mess of blocks almost every single time.