Plutonium

_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!

This is an issue with the translations we just added, switching to English resolves the link correctly.
https://plutonium.pw/iw5m_dlcs.torrent

T7 is by far the most popular CoD game on Steam which is ultimately what matters - not necessarily when the game was released. As far as we can tell we're fine and stay under the radar working on the games we currently support/have in the pipeline, but T7 specifically would almost certainly get the papers flying at a certain law firm.

eRa Rob I revoked your Discord ban. Tag me in #general on our server.

I will give you all a final chance to drop this matter, or we'll have to start cleaning up this spam.

eRa Rob What you all are doing right now is brigading. I just looked up your Discord account, it was banned from our server for "spreading false information". Nothing here really is speaking in your favor.

You also acknowledged yourself 25 minutes ago that this entire platform is ran by us, yet you're trying to pull a "mah FREE SPEACH" argument. I just don't get it.

As for the other guy...

No conclusive proof have been provided. Nobody connected to this "case" seem to understand what conclusive even means. As have been stated now multiple times, we can't take action based on accusations.

We in no way support people launching DDoS attacks, and have punished people for this in the past. We also did way more work than would've been required to ban a few people, so claiming we're taking the easy route doesn't seem justified.

I understand that it's frustrating for server owners to have to deal with this, but it's really nothing we can effectively do. You seem to be under the illusion that we can magically stop the attacks, but even if we banned the attackers they could still easily obtain a server IP and continue their attacks.

This discussion doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so I suggest you drop it now.

Should be fixed now.

DylanM Since you're courteous I reduced the length of the ban to a month. If you appreciate what we do you can donate at https://forum.plutonium.pw/donate.