hifi

Hello Commanders! Some people possibly know me from around 2010-ish when I first worked on CnCNet 2 and it has been a long ride up 'till today. I haven't been very active after CnCNet 5 was released and it has been *years* since that came to fruition and I'm really happy how things have turned out without my involvement. So it has finally come a time when I can't support this project anymore and it has become a burden that I do not want to carry. I get support requests by players that I feel like I can't handle anymore as I don't have anything to do with the daily operations. The day-to-day tasks are well handled by the staff but my name has been on the domain names and server hosting for over 7 years and my PayPal account has been where the donations have come to. I don't feel that I should be managing these assets as I have other priorities in my life now. We're currently in-progress to move the "ownership" of everything to @Tore who has been involved in CnC-Comm long before I was part of this community and I have 100% confidence he is the right person to continue running everything. Please do not donate to the old address anymore. It's still up but currently I can't take it down and PayPal is kind of annoying you can't deny people from sending you money. All (very gracious!) previous donations will be used directly for the expenses of CnCNet as promised but with the current rate of things it should cover the rest of the year. CnCNet is truly made by the players as it would not have been possible to pay for everything without the support of you all! This change of ownership will not affect any player facing services and everything will continue to run like before. Big props to the original CnCNet developers, Irony and Myg for creating the service and letting me mess with their project. Much thanks to the current team for continuing and perfecting the service into something I would have never imagined. And lastly, you, the players, are the reason everyone have worked so hard to provide the best online experience for classic Command & Conquer games. I hope the service I helped build will stay up and serve the players for another decade!

It wasn't really about resources or money, we could have run it forever but it didn't really give us back anything as all I read was complaints on renforums that it was down for half a day a few times. I was pretty sure that someone in your community cares enough and would want to step up and start hosting it and there were. renlist.cncnet.org now points back to master-gsa.renlist.n00b.hk which is the official master server alias for RenList and it has been reassigned. The source was also released on CnCNet GitHub for inspection. It's not a good implementation by any means but could work as a reference for someone to reimplement it in a better way. In my opinion, keeping the GameSpy master alive is a waste of time and should be replaced by a custom master server implementation by the community. https://github.com/CnCNet/renmaster

It's actually really hard to find people who want to babysit a massive channel that's (seemingly) full of kids that pick on each other 24/7 and use foul language most of the time. Especially if you want to find them outside the community itself since there's no reward for being a channel moderator. I believe the reason why moderators/admins come from the RA1 community is that it's the most active sub-community here and they are closest to the developers so it's easier to find people you think you could trust. I can't say anything about this case as I'm not involved in the moderation process, sorry. My two cents.

Total cost of everything is around $50/mo, give or take. I can't go too much into details to avoid exposing too much of our infrastructure. For some reason script kiddies like attempting to break our shit. Then there's GameSurge that really powers the gameplay, lots of love for them.

I know it's unfortunate we had to close the beta for now, but as you said it has had stability issues and some technical issues we need to iron out. This also gives us time to evaluate the feedback and take actions without making big changes during active ladder season that would upset players. The one biggest reason for this action was the overall stability of our servers which you have probably noticed like getting through to our forums and ladder results not going in. This is now being addressed hopefully this weekend to first get the forums better available. Thank you all for participating and being part of the active CnCNet community!

FYI the core staff does not host any of the tunnels so it's out of our control where people host their tunnels they sponsor for CnCNet. Rowsnet.com tunnels are hosted by Rowtag who is in close association and has the official seal of approval. If you need a tunnel in Sydney, you can host one yourself.

But it has unicorns and rainbows and I like them. DDoS is equivalent of dumping a truck full of sand over someones sand castle. You still don't get in the castle, you know? I don't keep logs so you should pull them off somewhere if you want to accuse me of something. Well, yeah? Yes? I said no one in the staff is paid for their work which means they don't expect to get paid to do something. The fact that people do get some money sometimes from the surplus is a sign of appreciation when we can afford it without compromising the service stability and continuation. I'm also personally ready to support CnCNet from my own pocket if it comes to that but the donators have shown that they can handle it so we can focus on the service itself and not worry about money. That's not surprising at all, people usually go in the lobby "who the fuck is this hifi guy and why he has a hammer besides his name?". That means I have no reputation whatsoever and you're absolutely correct on that. Now something we can agree on. That would be you, though.

Now now, don't be naughty. We can do show and tell. Who said $100? I didn't. For the record, you can run this on a crappy $5 VPS but the reliability is worth exactly that. In the beginning it was about being cheap, now it's about being reliable as we've grown to such scale we can't afford to be down anymore. You are quite right. No one has claimed the ratio is 1:1. Some people are more generous than others and some give what they can because of the economy. Every $1 adds up. And they do? No one in the staff is being paid for their work and people get in the staff by contributing to the project. Simple as that. If your "hacking" skills are as good as your English, I'm terrified.

That's true for the most part. You can't ban anyone completely ever so there's usually no reason to even try. You ever wonder why we don't permanently ban you from the forums? Usually known cheats can be detected and prevented. When new cheats are created and admins get access to them we try to find a way to detect it and prevent the use. Players are always welcome to anonymously give us cheats they find. Because hosting all this is free? Hacking the servers? Don't see anything hacked. *tumbleweed* Nobodies are not allowed to create useful services for others for no cost? I'm sorry, I didn't know. We will return you the money immediately to fix this injustice.

According to GameSurge SpamServ (bot), sucking an AIDS ridden dick is bad for your health: 12:08:24 < JackoDerp__> and then he gloats on the forums and is like "ooh yeah he sucks dick im the best he has AIDS" 12:08:24 -!- mode/#cncnet [+b *!*@gamesurge-209d83c2.as13285.net] by SpamServ 12:08:24 -!- JackoDerp__ was kicked from #cncnet by SpamServ [badword has been found in channel message.] All badword/flood bans by SpamServ are 5 minutes AFAIK.

You know, when you pop up in the middle of the night, what do you think happens, everyone will wake up just to greet you? Everyone except tahj are Europeans.

Seems everything has been said about the origins by Nyerguds, Tore etc. so I don't really need to add much, just chime in. I wrote the first cncnet.org history page long ago based on my personal experience and the current one still reflects that a lot as it's based on the old content which Tore improved at some point. I guess Grant did some touching up at the time the current page was released but the majority of it is still original. Getting it cleaned up and improved to credit the original folks more is certainly something that should be done with screenshots and everything. Might be fun to get some quotes of people who were involved back then to make the history more alive. CnCNet has moved forwards on its own weight when new people started contributing and working. Almost everything that is CnCNet 5 is from FunkyFr3sh, Iran and Rampastring. Historically rverything web has been Tore and now lately more Grant. My job has been to just run the servers and shout at people when they do things against my will which usually just gets ignored. I'm really proud of everyone as CnCNet has turned into something no one could have ever expected. When I came in, we started from peaking at 20 players into 200 at the end of CnCNet 4 (if I remember correctly) and now we're up to over 500 and the record is over 600.

Now, now - that's iN-SaNe! That's a sick demeanor. Why not based on WOL?! What's the design choice, here? :ranting: How does in-game paging and all that jazz work? Well, at least you guys found a fancy way to spawn a game from a GUI - I'm sure the possibilities are endless but so are the obstacles. It's not based on WOL because it wasn't flexible. WOL was also not available as it was in the end for TD or RA (except buggy 3.03 lobby) so there was nothing to base it on. All obstacles have really been crossed already. CnCNet 5 game spawning is 100% in-house developed x86 assembly and C with no external help from anyone or anything.

XWIS is the service that works out-of-the-box for all of the original C&C games so when people come to CnCNet they have made a choice to do so despite there being working multiplayer included with TS, RA2 and YR. I don't count Westwood Chat as working so XWIS isn't really the place for Tiberian Dawn or Red Alert however you try to look at it, it's just too painful to use and it's not their fault multiplayer sucked with those titles originally. Reading back the CnCNet Facebook page I didn't see anything said about it being official in any way and it only has links to the free offers and some CnCNet related stuff (duh). If there's CnCNet talk on anything else than the official CnCNet Facebook page, that's our of our control and you should contact the author directly. I believe EA acknowledges our existence and if they had a problem with the way we do things the would have asked us to change our ways already. Looking forward to official contact by them if you do get a reply. You can get my email via the donation button (visible on the PayPal page) to CC me when you send the email so they know how to contact us directly if they have something to say.

There's really no point in making a separate standalone ladder that's as bad as the WOL one when it comes to validating results. Also C++ is a horrible language to do something like that if you want it to be maintainable. It's also *very* trivial to make a ladder backend that doesn't really do anything than take in gameres packets. I give you non-brownie points for the nice UI you made for your WOL result server client though.

Hello and thanks for your continued support! I'm aware the tunnels might be abused for non-game traffic or UDP flood and it's very hard to fight against it. If you happen to be a developer and know a bit about networking and UDP, you could take a look at the actual tunnel source and figure out if there are some holes that could be patched up. It wouldn't be surprising if my code is not air tight as it hasn't really been audited by anyone else. As for what your investigation concluded, wouldn't this issue exist with any public ip? Unless the tunnel is actually passing the packets somewhere it's just getting hit with stuff it will drop on the spot and would act like the packet was dropped as no NACK is sent with UDP if the target port isn't listening. Are you sure those open connections weren't TCP as the tunnel listens on TCP for the HTTP session control commands? And for the tunnel itself, there are a few conditions that should be met for the tunnel to pass any UDP traffic through: [*]session is requested over HTTP with the number of end points that will be connecting [*]incoming UDP packet has a valid source (own) ID header [*]incoming UDP packet has a valid target ID header [*]target ID has sent a packet so it's locked to an ip address where the data can be sent to [*]both IDs need to be in the same session Only if all above is met a packet is let through. At least in theory. The source is at https://github.com/hifi/cncnet-tunnel if you're interested. It would also be a great idea to rewrite the tunnel in some other language for server side use to gain better performance under heavy load.

Banning is the right thing to do regardless of how useless you think it is. I think bans have worked great so far and even the minimum effect is an annoyance to the cheater. Well of course it's the right thing to do. But when the methods are sub par it's just more annoying that unseful. That's why some sort of persistent accounts that are hard to get would help "solve" that problem. Not so "free, forever", if you have to buy premium to get fair play. Yeah, it's fine for you because you don't play and in that scenario you would probably be the first one to get paid if someone cheats, at the expense of legit players. That would be unethical. I didn't coin that slogan and we're talking about personal opinion here I think. It's not so unethical as you think. I did point out that it would be unfair to people who can't afford it. If you want bans that hold you need a money gate. Seriously. When Valve has a sale and people create Steam accounts to buy cheap copies of CS:GO the matches get flooded with cheaters. Over time they get caught and it stabilizes a bit. It just means $10-$15 is cheap enough for most cheaters to pay to go ruin the game but $20+ not so much anymore. If there would be a better way to force one account per person policy I would definitely support it but money is the only thing that I've seen working in bigger scale. Money is just the easiest way to hurt people when it comes to cheating. So every cheat is detectable and friends can't cheat? If you don't trust your friends that's your issue. You can't detect all cheats so why even bother is what I've been saying for the last 7 years I've been with CnCNet. People disagree with me (mostly everyone) and put their effort into preventing cheating. That's fine. Just don't start demanding I put my time on something that even big companies like Valve can't "fix". I said this on IRC before and Plokite_Wolf mentioned it as well. If there would be a good replay system it would be possible to detect some cheats and that's what Valve is actually doing in large scale. They have outsourced people watching demos to some portion of the player base called "Overwatch" where you get candy for doing that and can weigh in if someone is cheating or not in your opinion.

And then they create another one. You can't reliably ban a machine. Banning an ip could potentially block more than one player and most ips are dynamic so they just reset that as well. Unless there's monetary penalty or someone checking your passport when you create one it's always easy to create accounts. Create them on a virtual machine and/or play on the virtual machine, vpn, whatever. Just don't tell me you can ban anonymous people. Currently, it's impossible to avoid them as anyone and everyone can use any username they wish, including that of people who are offline at that moment. That is true. But you do know your friends, right? Bullshit. You've never played post-Zero Hour games - nobody on the ladder cheats. If they do cheat or are involved in point-pushing, they're sanctioned. It's still a competitive and relatively healthy environment for play. I play CS:GO and cheating is more frequent there than on CnCNet, I can be sure of that. Just having a funny rank next to your name is enough to get them interested enough in cheating. And in general just making the day worse for everyone else. I'm going to guess post-Zero Hour games use some EA account that actually has value, right?

I think banning is useless because it's laughably easy to go around. Instead I support the idea of having an inner circle that you can get kicked out of - a premium subscription. You can still play, naturally, but can't compete in the ladder. Unfortunately having a paid-for premium service makes it very unfair to all those people who don't have access to PayPal and/or don't have access to a CC and/or just can't pay a reasonable fee (like $5/mo or something) because it's a lot of money for quite many. Not having a subscription fee or it being too low would make recreating premium accounts too easy. Also it's fine for me we get paid if someone gets caught for cheating and buys another subscription, that's how almost all online games work, people just literally buy around their bans. Having high enough initial payment makes it always less desirable to cheat because it gets expensive real quick if you get caught. Maybe this could be used to have a price pool each month, as more cheaters get caught the bigger the prize pool is Realistictly there's nothing that can be done to cheating except have a wall of shame (I think there already is for Red Alert) and people just avoid playing with the cheating folks. When it comes to the ladder, I don't really like competetive play because it encourages cheating even more. My advice pretty much comes down to: "Play with your friends. Don't have any? Tough."

I've suggested this to Olaf but he didn't really respond in the end. How I see it is that there is no winning for XWIS in such merger. They have their WOL tech and they are pretty stuck with it because it's what the games originally used. Killing WOL isn't really an option either because it's an important part of C&C history. The only thing that could be done is rebrand both services under a single umbrella and WOL could be considered "legacy" while CnCNet 5's tech "current" for each game that is supported. CnCNet 5 is also a big hack however you look at it. It's not very pretty. Ideally CnCNet 5 would need to be unified into meaninful smaller projects and not scattered around like it currently is. However, even with the mess that it currently is it serves the player far better CnCNet 4 or XWIS ever did (minus ladder, but that's coming I suppose). One fortunate recent event was that we merged with PlayCnC and got their talent under our hood. That has given us our new site and forum layout (all Neogrant) as well as other things that are currently under development. It really benefits us all to have all working together but the unfortunate state with XWIS isn't probably going to be solved ever. Regardless, I'm always open for new contributions/developers/ideas. CnCNet has never turned down any help and people are free to work on anything they like and believe in. If something someone has worked on proves to be useful it will be released to the public. CnCNet 5 came out like this when FunkyFr3sh wrote the client after I made the initial game integration that lacked just that. After it was polished enough we released it as the official CnCNet 5 client and it has been a great success so far. Iran worked on the Tiberian Sun integration and it was released later as well as he is now working on the Red Alert 2 support which is in public testing.

That's right and it does have troubles with NAT.

Really? Last time I checked RA2 was peer-to-peer and not server based.

Fixed. The server crashed and there wasn't anything to automatically restart it, now there is.

Wow, people actually care about the site. I'm positively surprised by this. I thought no one really goes there and the only meaningful entry point to CnCNet was redalert1.com. It's great that you give feedback so we can make it more suitable for everyone.

There is actually very little content on the CnCNet website. It didn't really change that much. The design these days is very much like this. For example see the PayPal front page http://paypal.com/ .