Allegiance Under WINE (or similar)

[BackTrak]

QUOTE (Technical Wonder @ Jan 22 2008, 11:58 AM) The external (background) program would serve to ensure that you are actually running the community's version of the game. Then the community's version of the game itself would send in hardware details, and ensure you are not banned before letting you in. That part would have to be open source (because of the open source license), but the external program would try to ensure you aren't using a hacked version, would not need to be open source.
By speed I'm talking about when you exit Allegiance and need to relogin, or just close ASGS, the interface locks up and spends maybe 20 seconds just hanging before becoming usable again.

Heck, the same server-side ASGS stuff could probably still be used.

I know the issue you're talking about. Many times I have to hard reboot my computer if it locks up completely.

I also see your point about having a minimal black box to ensure the validity of the rest of the components. I would say that having the hardware interrogation things in the clear (IE in SVN where they can be inspected by anyone) would invite people to find ways to get around them. IE: it is possible to re-mac address NIC cards, re-sid your computer, and re-vsn your hard drive. ASGS presumably tests other things as well, and the obscurity probably keeps it secure. Anyway, IMO the less visibility into that process, the better.

If it ain't broke...

EDIT: MP - Couldn't agree with you more. Are there any other ways of positive user identification that were considered?

[Orion]

Well.. it is broke.. hence all the threads containing posts along the lines of "waaa asgs doesnt work!"

The hardware detection could also be stuck in the external background program too I suppose.

[madpeople]

QUOTE (Technical Wonder @ Jan 22 2008, 10:19 PM) Well.. it is broke.. hence all the threads containing posts along the lines of "waaa asgs doesnt work!"

The hardware detection could also be stuck in the external background program too I suppose.

i haven't seen a single thread about someone hacking allegiance / getting past asgs. (exempting the one who got it to work in a VM, he wasn't hacking and its been fixed now)

i've seen plenty about getting stopped by asgs because of user error getting them selves linked.

feel free to point out any times when someone has hacked allegiance /got past asgs to cheat in game / circumvented a ban (for long, we know abut getting all new hardware, but they usually say who they are and get banned again)

[Orion]

I'm not saying ASGS isn't secure, it's awesome at preventing people from playing (like ogorass for one), but that is exactly my point /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

I am also not saying ASGS is secure, because I havent tested it (if I did, I'm afraid I might get banned /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />), nobody really knows how secure it is without seeing the source code.

I didn't mean 'broken' in terms of how 'secure' it is or isn't, I meant it insofar as dozens and dozens of people having issues with it in just the past few months.

[Grimmwolf_GB]

QUOTE (Technical Wonder @ Jan 23 2008, 02:33 AM) I'm not saying ASGS isn't secure, it's awesome at preventing people from playing (like ogorass for one), but that is exactly my point /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

It was doing fine until MS messed up. (I know you did not blame Pook, but plenty of people jump to this wrong conclusion)

[madpeople]

QUOTE (Technical Wonder @ Jan 23 2008, 01:33 AM) I'm not saying ASGS isn't secure, it's awesome at preventing people from playing (like ogorass for one), but that is exactly my point /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

I am also not saying ASGS is secure, because I havent tested it (if I did, I'm afraid I might get banned /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />), nobody really knows how secure it is without seeing the source code.

I didn't mean 'broken' in terms of how 'secure' it is or isn't, I meant it insofar as dozens and dozens of people having issues with it in just the past few months.

and as its primary job is to keep things secure, and it is "awesome" at it.

i conclude it is not broken.

however, saying it has a limited number of supported systems and it seemingly hangs when it does wtf ever it does could be valid criticisms, but a general "its broken" isn't

[Orion]

It depends on your perspective, I suppose from an "I'm pamela and it works perfectly fine for me" perspective, its great. For the several people stuck behind a "ERROR CODE 4325324" it's not so great.

It isn't pook's fault for A) Not seeing into the future to predict that xenocode would be broken, or for not coming back and fixing it, he has moved on from this community, it is the community's fault for not coming up with a new alternative in his absence (we've had some 8? months since .NET 3.5 b came out)
It isn't MS's fault if Xenocode is borked by the latest .NET either.

[Grimmwolf_GB]

b) Pook has come back and fixed it. The new version will be released soon. There is some lag to give people the opportunity to install the more recent .net.
b)++ It is MS' fault that an update of 2.0 or 3.5 kills an 1.1 application. They were supposed to be seperate (according to MS' specifications.

Same with the nVidia driver problem:
Who am I supposed to blame for nVidia's fault (lousy drivers) or the dev team for using older direct X calls? nVidia of course, because newer drivers should not kill old applications.

[Orion]

All my .NET 1.1 applications work perfectly fine with .net 3.5, Xenocode presumably does some monkey business which causes an incompatibility.

[badpazzword]

I get the following error when loading Allegiance.exe under WINE, but I was sure it got half-way into the loading screen the first time I tried.

Code: Select all

badp@bPortatile:/media/disk/Programmi/Microsoft Games/Allegiance$ wine Allegiance.exe 
fixme:actctx:parse_assembly_elem wrong version
fixme:actctx:parse_manifest_buffer failed to parse manifest L"E:\\Programmi\\Microsoft Games\\Allegiance\\Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest"
fixme:actctx:parse_depend_manifests Could not find dependent assembly L"Microsoft.VC80.CRT"
ALSA lib conf.c:3949:(snd_config_expand) Unknown parameters 0
ALSA lib control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL default:0
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk "MSVCR80.dll" failed to initialize, aborting
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L"E:\\Programmi\\Microsoft Games\\Allegiance\\Allegiance.exe" failed, status c0000142

PS: If you're wondering why am I running it from my Windows partition, well, this is what the Alleg installer said when I tried to do it the clean way: (with MONO installed)


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