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Author Topic: Having fun reverse engineering the undocumented LiF API  (Read 9453 times)

gnif

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Having fun reverse engineering the undocumented LiF API
« on: July 02, 2016, 10:54:06 pm »
See attached for a laugh!

For those that might be worried, this is all on a local test server, this development work will not affect the public LiF server.

gnif

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Re: Having fun reverse engineering the undocumented LiF API
« Reply #1 on: July 13, 2016, 03:53:55 pm »
Ok, an update on this.

Many of you may know that I 'Dougal' in game have been fairly idle, and some of you have decided to raid my little estate while I have been working to better the server... thanks :P.

Today I officially announce that we have the only LiF server in the world that logs Global and Local chat for GM review. The reason I can be so certain it is the only server is because I have had to spend the last few weeks finding a way to intercept the chat data so it can be logged.

Tech details follows for those interested

LiF does not provide any means to obtain the chat messages via TorqueScript, it's scripting engine, the only other way to do this is to reverse engineer the .exe and hook it internally. Because LiF is built on an open source platform (Torque3D) it has made it possible to reverse engineer large portions of the dedicated server without too much trouble. Armed with this information I wrote a DLL that injects into the server and hooks the chat processing function. The new code simply grabs who sent the message, the time, and the message itself, then writes it into the database for later review.

End Tech Talk

As you might imagine this was an extremely complex undertaking, and this is why I personally appreciate donations to keep us online so much, the amount of time involved to develop such a modification to the game is extensive, and can get very frustrating... The donations show me that my time is well spent, and our community appreciates the efforts to make our server one of the best.

CewHit76

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Re: Having fun reverse engineering the undocumented LiF API
« Reply #2 on: July 14, 2016, 12:08:36 pm »
Way to go, mate!! That is just friggin' awesome!!

 

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