Plutonium

No, we don't care.

It's a fairly large amount of work to get anywhere close to the original game, and would require either packet dumps or possibly replays to datamine information only available on the game servers (which obviously no longer are available). I feel like you'd also run into "why patch x and not y" debates, which wouldn't help anyone.

It's also very likely that Epic would take action against any project that built this at scale, regardless of if custom skins are allowed or not, note the explicit single player mention in the image below.

The potential is definitely there, I realized this many years ago, but it's just not worth the effort.

OXIDE_Andybrtn What was the error from the game?

Seems like something related to how our client makes its web requests, which end up getting blocked even though a browser works, very hard to say/fix without more debugging on an affected machine. I looked in our firewalls and nothing indicates that requests are getting blocked there, so must be between you and Cloudflare.

OXIDE_Andybrtn Do you get a 404 in your browser if you try https://nix.plutonium.pw? The launcher should work then too

OXIDE_Andybrtn Can you try pinging nix.plutonium.pw

With the information you've provided it's impossible to determine what the "issue" is. As previously mentioned, we haven't explicitly blocked any country and the issue is most likely not on our side. Please answer the following:

• What is the actual issue - does something not load? is there an error message?
• What exactly is blocked (can you access the website, forum, launcher, game, any servers like before)?
• Can you ping plutonium.pw? What IP does it resolve to?
• Which IP do you believe to be blocked?

Thanks for the new copypasta.

You use common sense.

You tried to host a server from a sanctioned brand, and thus your server was blocked.

_caLLaBoki_ said in Project Idea (NBA 2K16):

Hi, I was wondering if someone here could give me some pointers on how to to start with modding video games (if that's the correct term).

For a long time I've wanted to create a "client" for NBA 2K16 to play online again but I just don't know where to start, can't find anything on YouTube/forums/books that can help me just get started.

I study software development so the learning curve when it comes to coding is not so steep, I kinda just need to get something going. Any recommendations, videos, courses, books, will be highly appreciated :).

Unless you know reverse engineering, the learning curve will be very steep. We took a quick look at this franchise ~2 years ago and concluded that it'd likely take us a collective ~500h of work or so to get to a shippable product. If this doesn't discourage you, here are some things we figured out (on 2k17) while investigating:

• It uses an HTTP API for most "live service" tasks, with some (custom?) binary body serialization
  • Their backend expects a special HTTPS client certificate, so if you want to sniff this traffic on newer games you have to extract the cert and key from the game
• It uses a combination of WebSockets and UDP for the game traffic
  • WebSockets seemed to be used for the "neighborhood/park" feature, and UDP for the actual "match"
  • Packet structure seemed very different between the two
• The game stores (caches) some files on disk that it gets from the HTTP API, this probably includes updated player lists, small patches and the like
• In order to get a playable mod, you'd have to figure out these 3 components, all without being able to sniff any data from it, and potentially find someone who has had the game installed since it was shut down and still have the cached files
• The different games did seem very similar however, so some research could probably be done on the newer (still active) games

Figuring out the HTTP API stuff seems like a good and very doable first step, after which I'd look at the UDP data (via the quick match feature or whatever it's called). If these are hosted by one of the participants and not always on a dedicated server you may be able to get at least that working fairly easily, but if you want the neighborhood/park functionality you're most likely looking at writing a game server from scratch - a very hard and time-consuming task.

After you've done all that, there's a very high probability T2 will send you a letter, yet another reason we felt like this just wasn't worth spending time on.

We know there've been multiple attempts to scrape the publicly accessible user data (username, id, email if the user has opted-in to show it, etc.) and the dump in question is most likely from one of those attempts. Since noticing this (last year) we've added several mitigations, and haven't seen such attempts for quite a long time now. As far as we can tell no sensitive information have been leaked, which is why we haven't formally disclosed these attempts.

EDIT: See https://forum.plutonium.pw/topic/25366/notification-of-plutonium-forum-databreach-september-2021

Thanks!

Wait out your ban.

Thanks!

If you still have that server you clearly don't regret it, nor do you deserve a second chance. Rejected.

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Thanks!

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Thanks!