• There is NO official Otland's Discord server and NO official Otland's server list. The Otland's Staff does not manage any Discord server or server list. Moderators or administrator of any Discord server or server lists have NO connection to the Otland's Staff. Do not get scammed!

What do you think/what is your experience with custom clients?

bury

Active Member
Joined
Jul 27, 2008
Messages
421
Solutions
7
Reaction score
25
<h1>Hello world! </h1>

I was thinking this days in doing some custom sets, nothing hard just a re-print of some armors that already exist. For example, re-print plate armor/plate legs in a green colour etc. That obiously would alter items.otb so as far as I know, a custom client would be needed, isn't it?

I host a custom edited RL map 8.6. Do you think the fact of limit the ingame conection to a custom client (so launcher 8.6 and ipchanger will be useless and people wont be able to connect this via) will decrease the number of players? Or nowadays people don't mind to download a custom application to join the server? I think some kids that play this game are still a little "basic" so if they can't connect through the normal client with his "Homer Simpsons" maybe the look for another server.

Also, I think with a custom client, you can't use any kind of bot, no? At least, Elfbot. And if most people still play 8.6 is because the bots.

Let's talk about this!
 
I think it's mostly based on trust.

Some people will appreciate a custom client for ease of joining, but a lot of others won't, because they'll be worried about the security implications.
Any untrusted .exe can be a virus, or can contain viruses. CIPSoft's client is official and trusted, and due to its age the "Homer Simpson" is also trusted.
Your custom client however, is not. So it's up to you to prove to them that it's safe, or you'll miss out on everyone that's not in the "I don't care/I don't know" category of users. Which can be very, very hard. But once you manage to earn that trust, custom client is definitely the way to go.

As for botting, the answer is yes and no.
Assuming you use a custom encryption key, then yes, you will get rid of some of the botters, but only the lazy ones. The kind of people whose limit of patience is downloading the bot and running it, before fecking off to Netflix or Fortnite or whatever. Those people will be gone.
The real botters however won't, since they'll just extract the encryption keys from your modified client and throw them into the bot, and then bot away happily. They might also share it on some forum so the above mentioned lazy botters can also start botting with minimal effort.

The only surefire way of preventing botting with a custom client, is to rewrite the entire networking stack and replace the default CIPSoft made protocol with one of your own. And then change that protocol once in a while when you notice bots starting to pop up (assuming your server is popular enough for people to want to bother disassembling your protocol).
 
Thanks for your answer @Rexxar !

Btw, for what I said about editing items reprinting them, for example, doing a green plate armor/plate legs will need a custom client? I assume yes, since you need to edit the items otb file, isnt it? I'm kinda lost in that. Thanks.
 
Well it depends. If you want to just tint the sprite of plate armor/legs then you can just edit the sprite and call it a day. That'd require minimal editing, possibly just a .spr edit (I can't remember if the client checksums .spr files or not).

If you want to have normal plate armor/legs in addition to green plate armor/legs, then you need to go through whatever process is involved when adding new items to the client and server.

If you want to have the player be able to "dye" his armor/legs into whatever color he wants, in a way that doesn't involve the server choosing to give him a custom item tied to a pre-colored custom sprite, where you have the client's graphics engine do the coloring rather than just fetching a pre-made custom sprite, then you will need a custom client. Since there's no way of "teaching" the CIPSoft client to do that.
 
Back
Top