The LUNI Archive

TLDR: LUNI has been dead for years, go visit https://lusprojects.github.io

As of today, all repositories in the LUNIServer GitHub organization are read-only archives. This has been long overdue as the community around restoration of LU has left LUNI behind a few years ago.

I don’t really have the time or incentive to write a full post-mortem here. The GitHub org is the only LUNI-related platform that I (Xiphoseer) set up and thus the only one that I can shut down.

If you are interested the backstory of this particular project, ping me on LUCH (linked here). But if you are really just interested in LU restoration projects, have a look at the current ones and come hang around on Discord.

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Proposal: Federated LU Servers

Seeing jamesster’s video on the Outpost LUP world today, I am in awe of what kind of creativity LEGO Universe has produced and how much and diverse content could have been provided through it.

As you may know, I’ve worked a little bit on restoration projects of the game where you get to experience some of the systems on which it runs. These are already quite intriguing, and really show that NetDevil was all in on turning that game into a powerful platform where the only true limit was creativity. And this one thing is what LEGO is really good at inspiring, which just feels like exponential growth to me.

In essence, every world is just a plane with some textures and a height map. On this map there are objects featuring components that would model virtually any capability something in the game could have. It doesn’t matter if the objects you are buying stuff from is a machine or an NPC for example.

When it came to bringing the objects to life, the game used the same powerful behavior system that was available on properties for basically all item features. And if that was not enough, you had fine grain control over the object by adding LUA scripts that could interact with pretty much any part of any object.

This was achieved (in part) by the scripts having access to the over 1000 GameMessages that were used internally within client and server to model all these interactions and attributes that an object could have.

A lot of this was exposed to the developers and artists through a tool called HappyFlower, developed initially for LUPs to create their own worlds, and part of the client. Recently, in a cooperation between DLU and LCDR-U this tools was brought back to life within an alpha client.

But enough on technical details, I want to come to my reason for writing this post: An idealised (and likely irrealistic) concept on what this community could evolve into and a different approach to what infrastructure might be possible here.

In a nutshell, I’d love a federated approach to LEGO Universe servers.

To explain that idea, I need to go into some technical detail again. The LU client only ever connects to three or four kinds of servers. These are:

An authentication server, which can be on any domain, but always on port 1001. This server is responsible for checking that the username and password are correct as well as handing out a session key, which is later used to verify that the client is authenticated.

A world server, which tells the client which map to load and starts up all ‘living’ objects within that world. This means that maps are not static but can behave in wildly different ways as long as all resources are available.

A chat server, which is mostly accessed through the world server, which handles in-game communication and social activity.

A cache / UGC server, used to provide content that the client has not yet downloaded or that has just been created through modular building or BrickByBrick.

The cache and auth server need to be statically set within the client someone uses, while the world server can be anywhere on the internet. The crucial thing here is that you can switch world servers while within the game, without even noticing.

Now the first proposal (which I’ve stated before) would be a central repository for assets and a common database that everyone would have access to. This ideally would be using some version control system as a backbone and as a way to keep it synchronized, because: There should be a number of cache servers from every project that serve this content, much like a CDN would.

This would allow some theoretical load balancing and geographical variety, which could lower costs for individual projects while still making the largely compatible. With how the original patcher works, this would even allow for different feature-branches of the central repo to be served while in development for the different teams from only their respective cache.

Then, as you start into the game, every project has their own authentication server. This server verifies the credentials against their database and returns a key which not only identifies the client, but also the project doing the authentication. Possibly something like “ab345df3223092456fec8686@dlu.org” which would have a standardized format.

Now when you start up your character, you would connect to a world server that does not need to be served by your project, but possibly by one of a creative team that takes part in the federation, or even another project altogether.

I imagine each project serving the basic game ‘campaign’ on their own servers, while using hub worlds like Starbase-3001 to provide access to other worlds. These would be standalone servers (possibly even running different software) run by LUP like creative groups, which use a common API to 1. verify that the player is logged in with a project and 2. get the necessary inventory and achievement data to provide a smooth experience.

The second point has the downside that some projects might make it easier to obtain some items, so we might go for world specific inventory, and possibly make only items from you home project be persistent (to also allow to make that API read only). But it also has the advantage that other programs could fetch this data to provide browser based maps or some forum integration with in-game items and achievements, and much more.

This was the federation explained from a user perspective. From the perspective of a content creator, this would allow to ask a project for a standalone server binary, run that to create worlds on it, get whitelisted with the other projects, and just like that allowing a large playerbase to find and enjoy that content, without the huge overhead of setting up all full-blown project with the ‘campaign’ worlds, the user database, password security and validation, forums, possibly even forwarding chat to the moderation staff of one of the projects.

I don’t see how a single project will ever handle a large quantity of worlds in a non-commercial setting. But I find it much more likely in this proposed way. Projects would develop their own software, which allows them to stay independent, small, possibly closed-source if required, and with all the backbone infrastructure.

At the same time, they’d be handing out binaries that allow registered creative teams to build their own maps while not fracturing the community as these are useless without being whitelisted, backed by and accessed through the project.

This whitelisting also serves the purpose of ensuring that the game remains child friendly. A project as the single source of information on its playerbase has all required control to ensure that no inappropriate content can be shown to their players. Teams going wild would just never get the character data, and as their software would be developed by a project, it wouldn’t even include a way to work without that.

If you want any more details on these thoughts, feels free to ask me here, or preferably in the LUCH discord.

I’m really inspired by what this game can do. Answer the call, save Imagination!

About my logo

Today, it has been brought to my attention, that a popular eSports team uses a logo very similar to mine, which is very interesting to me, since I stumble upon these weird coincidences sometimes.

About Data, Files and Protocols

This post is currently a draft, it’s not yet finished and will be reworked.

Today I want to write a bit about a theoretical approach to file, formats, packets, data and memory. This is the second time, I start writing this post, since the thing i’m trying to present is still evolving in my head.

This post will be about data. Not any specific data, just data in general. What I mean by data is nothing else than information, or more theoretically entropy, chaos. It’s numbers, texts, statistics, programs, music, video, webpages, and much more.

One single piece of data is pretty boring. The number 2374552 for example, is a piece of data, but there is not much you can do with that on its own. Data becomes interesting when you have multiple related pieces of information.

A LUNI Reference Page

In addition to the LEGO Universe Page on this blog, that explains to you the current situation of LU development from a users perspective, I have created a little page describing how the project has evolved, and how you should deal with this diverse past. This is specifically targeted at server owners/maintainers, YouTube creators and others providing content using a distribution of a C++/RakNet LEGO Universe Server emulator, based on humanoids code, with its most prominent example, the LUNIServer project.

This intentionally doesn’t include the drama around this development, you can read about that in the A Bit of Backstory post on this blog. So here you go, the Reference Page for LUNI content creators is now available.

Note by Xiphoseer

UPDATE 11.01.2016

Hello again, people reading this blog. Initially, I tried to gather some information on what happened, trying to clear up the situation and minimizing the amount of flamewar that has always been a threat to the LU community. I’ve seen several sources by now, but most of them seem to conflict with one another, so the original blog post probably contains mostly false information.

It seems clear that Jonnys database has been wiped, and anything but that I can’t be certain. I thought that people would at least be reasonable, but the truth seems to be buried under a ton of lies. I want to go through what I’ve heard and try not to judge that much in the process.

I’ve heard of the incident in the ex-LUNI Skype chat. At the time I got to read it, 99% of it were Egmo and someone else spamming it with walls of text. Someone dropped the username “SexyChicken” and Jonny himself said, he had been hacked, and someone had wiped his database and messed with his VPS.

Then, I talked to Egmo himself, and he told me that he was sad that Jonnys server was closed, and that a developer called BYNCA21 had attacked Jonny without his knowledge and had also messed with Egmos own server.

Later, I contacted N4mEL3sS (nameless), and talked to him about the project, he said he got into Jonnys Admin account and deleted all instances, though he claimed not to be the person that wiped Jonnys database. He also told me, that there was no other dev working with Egmo than him and kee225.

I believed both of them, and updated my post accordingly, thinking, that the situation was resolved. But they have since been claims, that Egmo lied about his developer being someone else, which would be the best explanation for the whole story. This would mean N4mEL3sS is the developer responsable for this situation.

I’m just sad at the moment, that this is really happening. But I guess, people malicious enough to mess with other peoples servers, alos don’t care if they are lying to people, whose work they use.

I’m not sure, what I want to do now, but I guess I can’t ask people to care for the people that made the thing they use possible rather than those who give them access to it.

I’ll keep the old post here, just for historic purposes, remember, anything below is likely untrue.

About Experience

I guess I’m really using this blog now to channel my frustration. I should post some more programming techniques or tips on here, and not use this as a place to rant about anything that comes to my mind. Well here we are again.

Teaching Programming

When you work on a programming project, and people like what you create, there tend to be people showing up, who look up to you and want to be able to do the same. Some ask for advice, some want to join the project, others try to replicate your work and some ask you if you can teach them how to program.

What these people sometimes don’t realize is that programming is finally just a tool. It’s a very sophisticated way of telling a digital machine what you want to do. And it’s up to the user of that tool to decide how to use it. When you ask people to teach you programming, you might as well ask them how to use a hammer. Once you get what it can do, you have hundreds of possibilities. But you need to decide what to do for yourself.

A bit of backstory

Dieser Beitrag is auf Deutsch verfügbar auf xiphosiade.wordpress.com

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I’m not an expert on this topic, but I feel there is the need for some explanation regarding the story of LUNI. I’ve not been around the LU community for very long, but i’ve read a fair bit about it, and talked to some relevant people. If I say anything wrong here, please correct me.

I want to publish this here, because I’m the only person responsable for this blog. This is my personal point of view, and I don’t want it distorted by others on any public site that is not fully controlled by me.

Let’s start at the beginning

What is LUNI? LUNI is a project aiming at recreating a server for the game LEGO Universe. It originated even before LU was shut down, but continued it’s work afterwards. LUNI is an acronym for “Leggendary Universe Nations Iperspace” or “LEGO Universe, Newly Imagined”.

Regex Configurations

Yesterday, I implemented a first version of some code to parse a config file using regex. We needed a simple, human and machine-readable config format, that would be easy to implement and needed basically no error handling and it should be able to do single & multi-line config files. I already was used to regex, having used it to validate various inputs before feeding them into SQL statements, but also to filter text.

So the idea came up to create a basic regex statement, that would match config values in a key: value type fromat. A basic regex query to parse this would be:

(\w+):(\w*)

This matches any two strings of alphanumeric characters and underscores that are linked together with a colon. The key can then be extracted as sub match #1 and the value as sub match #2. Since the regex implementation handles the extraction for you, you don’t need to worry about malformed files, they simply won’t give any results.

At this point, I’m going to introduce you to a very handy tool, I use to develop regex expressions, which includes a handy cheatsheet. I’m talking about regexr.com. If your config regex doesn’t return anything, it’s a good place to check the file you are using against your expression. Keep in mind, that e.g. a string in c++ needs to have all ‘\’ characters escaped, so you need to to remove those double ‘\’ characters when putting the expression into regexr.

The regex expression above is already capable of parsing multiple valid formats you may want. It is even capable of parsing empty values. But we can improve it to make the syntax we want more specific and while doing that, allow us more freedom in how we want to lay out the file.

Hello World!

I apparently have a blog now. Every site on the internet gives you the possibility to link to a personal webpage. I would set one up, but then hosting would be needed and the ideal domain for me (xiphos.ia) is not even possible. So here I am, creating a random blog without content. I might post things occasionally, but I will not promise anything.