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Arborea Is My Oyster

@komyou / komyou.tumblr.com

wow what a huge nerd // mostly tera script mods // celestial hills: meishu, iri // she, her

Progress Report

I’m getting some really good questions so far, and digging around for solid answers to them has been really insightful and wonderful.

I’m hoping to make the final post of the series sometime on Thursday, if not Friday, with cameos from several people more knowledgable than myself on their respective topics.

Again, if there’s anything, anything at all that you or anyone wants to ask me regarding the recent events so it can be publicly answered. send me an (optionally anonymous) tumblr ask.

If you want it to be private, or you’re unfamiliar with how that works, note that I cannot privately reply to anonymous asks. Also, if you don’t have an account and just want to say something to me without it being published, just go ahead and mention that you want to keep it private.

Thanks again!

Part 3: What Can Be Done?

This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we've been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

May 1st, the first scheduled protest day, has come and gone, and EME doesn't seem to have done much of anything with this subject matter, so it's time for the last bit.

Part 2: Techno Mumbo Jumbo

This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we've been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

Last time we talked about what happened and when, but now we're going to get into the how. How do DPS meters and tera-proxy work? How even do the skill prediction and other things work? I'll be answering that in this installment.

First, a disclaimer. This post analyzes in detail the alteration of game behavior. Many places will consider this "discussion of cheats, hacks, or exploits". If you want to post a link to this post anywhere, make sure it follows any submission rules there about this sort of topic.

If it's so sensitive and controversial, why am I still posting it? Because I would argue this post has nothing new to offer to anyone with malicious intentions. Remember, TERA has been out for 5 whole years already, and there's plenty of underground communities dedicated to illicit activities. Plus, the recent storm has only brought even more attention to tera-proxy. The proxy, along with ShinraMeter, CasualMeter, and Alkahest, are all open source. Everyone can look at the code, and anyone with the technical knowledge and ability to do bad things would have already figured out what we're doing by now.

Anonymous asked:

Will you be quitting Tera? And by that I mean quit making mods and what not?

I think it’s too early for me to decide this right now. I’m going to give it a little while and see where things go. There’s still plenty of people being vocal.

Part 1: The History – A Timeline

This is part of a series describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we've been doing resulting in this big En Masse / NA TERA commotion:

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

The fires are still raging, and plenty of people have stated plenty of thoughts in plenty of places. It just so happens that I'm not at home today and I have nothing else to do, so now it's my turn to dump words.

For those unaware, EME has banned me for my work with the proxy. Bernkastel was also banned and did a writeup (see justpaste.it or the original PDF download) with their thoughts on the situation, and I myself don't have much to add there. So, instead of writing yet another wall of text to explain why I agree or disagree with things for reasons everyone's heard hundreds of times by now, I'm going to write something different.

This is going to be a series of posts describing the history, context, and technical details of the modding we've been doing. I am writing this for a general audience, so if you're a casual passerby who just wants to know exactly how things work and why they came to be, this series is for you. I'll be doing my best to introduce topics and concepts in a way that even "halp how do i computer" should be able to follow along.

There's a lot of misinformation being spread around, largely because people just don't know what's really going on beyond a few technical buzzwords. And I don't expect them to know, either. So this series is for the people that care to know and want to become a little more educated on the topics involved.

I will not be trying to make any arguments about right or wrong. I'm not here to ruin anyone's reputation. I simply want to share facts and share information that may not be so easy to casually Google, and put it all into one convenient place for anyone interested in finding out more about this whole drama stuff. As with everything written, you'll be reading things through my own filters and biases, but I will attempt to remain as neutral as I can. Feel free to send me messages with questions, corrections, or suggestions because I'll happy to entertain any discourse on this subject.

However, do note that each part will be very, very, very detailed. If you're not down to read 2,000 word novellas, now's the time to back out.

This series will be published over the next few days (I'd like to do one a day) and is currently planned to be divided into these sections:

Feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you.

I’ll probably have a writeup of stuff sometime today. I think everyone has spoken plenty of the topic in general, but we’ve really been missing some technical writers. Might be interesting for people who are genuinely interested in exactly how everything is working.

So Valks are a thing now.

Hello again! It’s been too long.

I’ve been mostly quiet here but things are still progressing—by quite a bit, actually. Most of it is unfortunately invisible to everyone who just wants to use mod things, but with the help of a few people whose assistance I am very thankful for, we’ve built up a pretty solid base. And also set up a Discord.

And a website. And I updated all my documentation. https://meishuu.github.io/tera-proxy/

If you already had some old version, there’s a prepackaged build which you can just download, unzip, and then grab your old tera-proxy/bin/node_modules folder and move it over. (You might also need to move servers.json and other files, depending on what you might have had to change.)

Up next is... a lot of things:

  • Make a better configuration system so it’s easier for people to set things up correctly for their region / server.
  • Arborean Apparel is still coming! I’ve been testing a pre-alpha, but most things seem to be working and there’s a few more I’d like to add before an actual public alpha or beta release.
  • GUI, plus autoupdater, so no more having to mess with downloading and unzipping and moving things every update. Will also auto-update mods from GitHub.

Probably silence again up until the dungeon patch. If you want to get in touch, definitely try Discord.

Until then! 💉

🔥

Or: How a Bunch of Drama Happened and an Alt Gmail Got Hacked in Record Time.

This is the story of how MT and Moongourd went from 0 to 100 in a day. This is a cautionary tale about securing your email accounts. And most of all, this is a story about taking things way too seriously.

This is going to be a very lengthy post giving a chronological account of my experiences, with an update at the end detailing my plans moving forward. Grab some popcorn and strap yourself in for some entertaining drama, because this is gonna take a while.

The story is under the cut, but if all you wanna know is what’s going on with me and my stuff, just skip to the very last section.

I’m still alive!

Lately I’ve picked up a job and a thesis / project on top of my usual classes, and with the guild quests out now, I’ve been kept real busy.

But there’s still work being done. Remember those posts about skill queueing? I took a stab at some ping-reliant holdable attacks: Burning Heart, Rapid Fire, and Burst Fire.

Above is a video showing Burning Heart with the “fast-fire” mod on the left, and without it on the right. This is with:

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In tests, dumping a full bar of Chi with Blazing Attunement went from 3.94s all the way down to 2.76s. It shaved off 1.18s – that’s 30% of the original cast time. Ridiculous!

So yeah. I’m still around, and I’m still working on things. Sorry it’s taking so long, but there’s my update nonetheless, since I haven’t posted anything in half a year. More details under the cut.

What kind of programming expertise do you have that allows you to make such extensive Tera script mods that no one has been able to achieve thus far?

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I’ve been coding lots of things for basically the past... ten years or so? It’s mostly been chat bots (Battle.net, IRC, and now Discord), game plugins (BZFlag, TF2), and web dev (most notably AnimeBytes), but I’d like to think I’ve dabbled in a bit of everything—including an internship at a software startup as well as some work here and there with really small games that never really went anywhere.

I don’t think my background has that much to do with it, though. The really difficult parts have been done by all the people working hard on TERA server emulators, and I just came along with a neat idea and a passion for the game along with coding things for it.

(If anything, I’d think that the only reason we don’t see anybody else doing it is that it’s really treading the line on “hacking”. Why open this stuff up for free and publicize it when you could make mad money doing it in secret, avoiding the threat of being found out and banned? But that’s speculation.)

Either way, my hope is for my script mod framework to make it really easy for pretty much any coder to get started with making cool things for TERA. If you think the stuff I make is extensive, just imagine what it might be like if everyone was making these kinds of mods.

Anonymous asked:

Hey, are you still working on your huge mod thing ? c:

Aha, yeah. I just got a little distracted with grad school and...

Just this week I’ve started focusing some more time on the app, and I found a few people who can help me get the ball rolling since I’m a lazy pile of bun.

So—no more time estimates, because I’m horrid at those, but I’ve pretty much finalized the details for at least a beta version of the app, and hopefully sooner than later it’ll be up for people to play dressup.

Time to race against the ninja patch, I guess.

Hey Meishu! I came across your Arborean Apparel and was wondering... do you have plans to release the mod? I would really like to use it... ive always begged EME to release the alice dress, but i don't think we will ever get it... this mod would be nice to have just for the dress QQ;; Also i noticed your in Mahou Shoujo Guild on CH! Were on same server! It be nice if we could get together in game/run dungeons together C: Anyway hope to hear from you!

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I actually just wrote about this, but the short of it is that yes, it’ll be released sometime, hopefully sooner than later!

I’m pretty much on all day every day, for the most part (except for today!), but if you happen to catch me not being AFK, just send me a whisper on Meishu or, if I’m on alts, on Mush. See you soon~

Happy New Year!

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything so here’s a quick rundown of what’s happened and what’s to come.

The very last thing I’ve done this year was finish up emulation of race/gender/appearance changing. Video for proof and hype, but it looks exactly the same as any normal changer would work.

Besides this, a number of reasons have led me to begin the process of releasing my mod system. Any developers familiar with JavaScript (and Node.js) can take a look at tera-proxy on GitHub and start building their own script mods.

Anonymous asked:

I see. It does seem like a lot of tweaking is required to get the system working optimally and preventing sync issues, especially for chained skills. I'm also wondering how you managed to work out the packet structure for TERA. Is that something you're willing to provide or point me somewhere for?

I haven’t really been keeping up with what other people are doing, but I’d guess GoneUp’s work is up to date and easy to find (just Google it!). I started my own projects based off P5yl0′s server emulator but I dunno if he’s still around, and if push comes to shove I have a really old project on GitHub though I omitted the network encryption stuff.

Then the rest of it comes down to testing and trial and error until someone else finds out a convenient way to automatically pull the data structures from some game files or memory. I wish that were me but sadly that’s not my field at all.

Anonymous asked:

That actually sounds amazing. Never thought you could do something like that instead, which would also be "pseudo" effective against input lag. If/when you have the time/want to, would be great if you could look into it, it's like a super QoL feature. Not sure if I'm misinterpreting, but one way I can think of to calculate speed is to instead read your character animation time from memory? Ideally I would personally dedicate time to this, but I don't think I have the prerequisite knowledge.

Oh, reading the speed from your character sheet is no problem, and figuring out which attacks should be faster from glyphs is also not an issue besides being tedious.

From what I remember, there were two main problems:

  1. Chain skills. Figuring out the timing window on them will probably boil down to even more tedious testing, but this becomes a problem with an unstable network. If, for whatever reason, the TERA server hears about your attack maybe a quarter of a second too late because of a hiccup, that may be the difference between the slow cast and the fast cast, and that’s something I can’t really detect.
  2. Events happening during latency. As mentioned before, consider this series of events: a) You trigger Whirlwind, and we start it at, say, 100% speed. b) Energy Stars lands, giving you something like 110% speed. c) The server receives your Whirlwind and starts it at 110% speed. But on the client, you’ve already started it at 100% speed.

Why are these a problem? Well, we can’t modify an attack’s cast speed in the middle of it, and we also can’t start an attack animation at any arbitrary point. So the only tools we have are stopping an attack, and starting one from the beginning.

Trying to handle all these edge cases gets really messy and frankly I’m not sure at all how the client and the server will react to mismatches like that, which means even more rigorous testing.

I’m sure for the most part they won’t be too big of a deal, at least relative to the benefit of essentially ping-less attacks, but it’s just something I haven’t yet been able to dedicate a lot of time and research into.

Thank you for asking, though! It’s definitely something I’d like to revisit at some point.

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