Little question: What can an admin even do? I gave Admin rights to my steam ID, but it doesn't even seem to do anything: No spawning items, still restricted by factions etc... I realize everything important like kick and ban goes through TelNet but whats the point of flagging someone as admin?
There is literally nothing an admin can do that I am aware of with out a telnet client, and that is only shutdown the server, kick, ban, view players, view playfields. That is it. All other stuff I do like recovering ships, moving players that are stuck, etc, is file manipulation. I hope this helps
Do you know of any commands that can be executed within the game itself? So far as I know telnet is required, but I'd rather not give everyone telnet access to my server that I would want to be able to kick or ban.
Dedicated Server owners need some method that is automated to detect players who are cheating in the form of duping, and that auto bans them. Also should be some shared resource between dedicated server owners to report steam id's of people who have been hacking. So other dedicated servers can download a ban list that is populated with cheaters steam id's to prevent them from accessing other servers and causing issues.
Suggestion, a way Dedicated server owners can combat against hackers. Log all player core destruction by what player(s) with a time stamp to a file which admins can review to determine if there is abuse happening.
I disagree with this but I understand what you're trying to accomplish and acknowledge the problem that does need to be addressed. In my view one should always hold the dev's accountable for cheating, because they are the only ones that can fix the it. Unless someone is abusive or malicious I would never ban them even if they were obviously cheating. I might delete their mega-structure if it threatens the stability of the server or becomes otherwise disruptive, but no more than that. To me it's like getting mad at your dog for eating the bacon you left on the floor when it's just too tempting and you might have done the same. A group of confirmed dupers that are actually causing problems might be another story, but I have yet to encounter this on my server (yet). If and when script kiddy type apps become available for this game then I am all for instant banning, but if you can do it simply within the game then it's not our place to try and enforce rules against that, and we'd either fail outright or it would or could not be applied fairly. This is for the dev's to tackle (pre-alpha, yada yada yada), and I for one have faith that they will address these issues in due time. I've followed a lot of developers over the years, and these guys do more and talk less than any of the others I've seen. My 2 cents at least...
The game is so buggy right now it could be hard in some cases to tell really if they are hacking or not. When we ran our servers we had console commands we could hand off administration status to regular members (clan members). We are talking a finished game here. But we band and kicked almost every day.
Fundamental vulnerability of the game code to hacks is what ruined dayz and similar games. I really hope the framework of their code is not hopelessly inadequate and seemingly designed for only honest people to play. If client side hacks can affect the game in any significant way then I fear this game will be doomed. A shooter is one thing but losing in a game like this where massive amounts of time can be spent will not go over well. Let us hopeople the developer'and are cynical as hell and are taking this into account.
I'm afraid i have to say this here, but this issue is still persistent, since my last post i rented a server and still got this issue that ships - overall yet just small vessels just dissapear and can't be found anywhere, i think it have something to do with the save managment but im not a pro. The first 2 SV who got lost where build at the first day we started the server at a gamehoster, and they dissaperead right after i did a first manually restart of the server via a webinterface. after loading up the server i ended up somewhere in aqua, without my ship and my friend lost his SV also but started at the same point he looged out. The 3. SV just dissapeared right now. No server side restart or change done, just builded a SV and shortly looged off to eat something when my friend came back after 30 minutes the fresh builded SV dissapeared also completly. And for some reason also i think my little dual core with its 4 gb ram got a better performance than my actuall host. especially looting is sometime at prime time gaming sloopy and laggy i click nothing happens then i click 10 time and 1 second later it picks up the loot/ore or open&close the freightbox 10 times. The only thing wich had better perfomance on the rented server is changing playfields thats more fluid rightnow. Overall i will see the next few days weeks if it get's better but i guess change of host again should help . hopefully also for loosing vessels ...
Being the game started out as a single player. Probably no thought was put into bullet proofing the Multiplayer code. Good time to separate the two games.
I know a fix for missing ships and can swap their position with a starting block. I have done this many times and it has always worked. It uses the same method used for bringing blueprints into survival but in this case no blueprint will be used. I can do this in less than 5 minutes often and practice helps. I am on my phone but I will do my best to type out the process now but when I get home I will make a more detailed document. 1. When a ship goes missing the files for that ship will still exist in the "shared" folder within the save game folder. 2. Knowing when the ship was last used will help locate the folder it is in since the timestamp of the files will match that. If the ship was flying an hour ago then look for a file called "0.area" with a timestamp that is close. The folder name contains a prefix of SV, CV, BA, or HV followed by a random set of numbers. If you are looking for a missing SV then ignore the folders without an SV prefix. 3. So let's say you found a "0.area" file whose timestamp matches a missing ship. You then need to open the folder that file is in and copy that and the other files within (4 total I think) somewhere safe. 4. Start a new single player game in creative mode and get to space. Place a startet block for the type of ship you are missing then save and exit. 5. Go into the save folder of the creative game and enter the "shared" folder and sort by date. The most recent folder within will be the starter block you just placed. 6. Copy the files from the folder on the server that might be the missing ship into this folder, overwriting them. 7. Load the creative game and you will see that the starter block is now a ship. It might now be the right ship but rinse and repeat this process until you find it. 8. Once found note the folder name. If the ship is ever lost again you can recover it in 2 minutes because the hard part in all this is finding it. As a server admin you can ask people to make note of when starter blocks are placed then write down the folder name to make this is even easier. Do this especially when someone is starting a big CV or something. It is so much easier to identify blocks recently placed. 9. Login to your server and place a starter block where you want the missing ship to appear. 10. Logout and look at the "shared" folder in the save on the server and note the newest folder which should be that of the starter block just placed. 11. Either stop the server or ensure all players are out of the playfield and the playfield is unloaded (both work). 12. Copy the files from the folder in the creative level that contain the missing ship into the folder on the server containing the starter block. 13. When you login the starter block will now be the missing ship (so long as the playfield was not loaded when you did this. 14. Now do this in reverse so the folder that used to be the missing ship now contains the files from the starter block. 15. Boom! Ship and all contents recovered! I hope this is helpful! Shannon (skeptic1222) Patterson Liberland server
Kind thank you for this short workarround, i may try it out, for now we just build new ones cause it´s fun to build
There is a minor distinction to be made between passive mods that do not affect the server but give players an unfair advantage due to poor coding on the part of the developer (my opinion) VS code that intercepts and modifies communion between the server and client. It is still all cheating and should not be allowed by the developers to work. So I'd say the person using the passive x-ray mod would be like a peeping tom while the script kiddy using teleportation hacks is more of a home invader. They are both criminals and need to be stopped but one is far more dangerous. In all cases the developers are ultimately responsible for any cheating that occurs due to vulnerabilites in their code.
Ok, I understand the distinctions you're drawing. Do you think it's actually possible to code Minecraft to prevent a client-side x-ray mod while still maintaining playability through an internet connection? If you only send data for the next block as a player breaks the one in front of them, for example, the game will not be playable. BTW I've seen servers where they have competitions, whoever has the most wealth at the end of some time period wins IRL stuff/money.
It might not be possible to get there from here easily, but if designed from the beginning with that concern in mind? Absolutely! Apple abandoned it's own operating system and started using a unix-based OS in part because their OS was not designed from the start to scale in future environments. By the time OS9 was released it might as well have been a wooden wagon with a V6 engine mounted on it. It was a monstrosity that could not be saved and was never meant to run on modern hardware. So OSX was a complete reboot because they were unable to secure and upgrade their old code. Minecraft faces similar issues and it is entirely possible that the code might be filled with dead end design decisions that limit what can be done from this point forward. DayZ is my favorite example of game architecture that is so fundamentally unable to be secured that it is now considered hopeless by many. I do not believe that DayZ can ever be free from hacking simply because of the way the client and server talk to each other. They would need to start over from scratch with hackers in mind in order to beat them. The problem in my opinion is a pronounced lack of cynicism amongst developers and people in general. The true potential magnitude of human deception and cleverness is rarely accounted for to the degree that it's a threat. Developers seem to either underestimate the technical abilities of their customers or the depths to which some of them will sink in order to gain just the slightest advantage in a video game. I suspect that future games will need to incorporate encryption into their code in new and clever ways in order to solve these problems long term. Computer code is inherently too trusting and often assumes that everything is on the level when it should be more stand offish. Developers are generally getting better at obfuscating the inner workings of their code so that clever people cannot find ways to exploit it unethically. I don't know the future but the curve towards more security in game applications (and all application design) is pretty clear. It is only a matter of time script kiddy's are a thing of the past. It's really not as insurmountable a problem as many make it out to be, we just need to be more cynical. That's my 2 cents at least.
