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Posts posted by Takka
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Thanks for sharing this!
Have you considered working with UE5? I don't know about UE3, but UE4 content works seamlessly with the new engine. I just mention UE5 because it has an amazing new library of assets, which could be helpful for a one-man operation.
ADMN-0001 likes this -
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This has just now begun dying. Its connectivity to the computer keeps resetting multiple times a day, causing random outages of around 3 seconds where I cannot use it.
Almost 10 years isn't bad, but not as long as I expected!
Anyone have a suggestion for a new mechanical keyboard?
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Ah, gotcha. =]
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3 hours ago, Java said:Yeah that Doppler Effect is a bit strange and excessive for CE, but accurate sadly. Kinda wish they didn't do that
The doppler effect is only found when the velocity between point of measurement and the emitter are different. In this case, they're not different, so that's not accurate.
Java likes this -
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Your profiles now have a field on them for any threads/posts you want to share on OC, such as a project you're most proud of or are currently working on.
Anyone that sets a url in this field will have a badge linking to it beside each of their posts, like you can see beside mine right now.
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Avatars have been made even clearer now with the help of @Kavawuvi!
The thumbnails generated for post avatars were 240x240, however they're being displayed at 150x150. Resizing of images is most cleanly done when divided by an integer, so this has now been changed to 300x300.
I've reprocessed the avatars of those of you that re-uploaded last time, so ya'll are good to go!
Kavawuvi, Sunstriker7, Sceny and 1 other like this -
6 minutes ago, Sceny said:This is going to be a real challenge. I'm not playing any games with a 'sky' atm :U
It's not a rule; just an easy way to earn a ticket.
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39 minutes ago, tarikja said:It's gone again? :'v
Fuck I forgot you use it. It started misbehaving after an update by having an all-white background, which is uncontrolled by the theme. I'll try to fix it.
tarikja and Sunstriker7 like this -
@Chalwk wins 1st, with the entry of his Gravity Gun script!
@mouseboyx comes in second with Detect VPN or Proxy:
Thanks for entering, guys!
Chalwk and Sunstriker7 like this -
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Just now, Sunstriker7 said:Well, what fuck is it???
Looks like some sort of asshole/vagina hybrid.
Sunstriker7 likes this
in Site Matters
Posted
What a shitshow... there's no way to tell this story without giving a lot of credit to whoever began DDoSing the forum, back in April of '22, but that was only the beginning of the drama that got us to this point. I unfortunately wasn't able to speak candidly about most of the events since the beginning of the attacks, but that's no longer an issue, so this thread will serve as the explainer.
For those that don't want to read the drama dump that follows, the short of our current status is that the site is back and there are no plans to abandon it. However given the decline of forums in general, and due to the loss of trust that inevitably followed the long period of outage, loss of community data, and lack of transparency provided by myself, Open Carnage is not returning as a "live" site. OC is in a read-only state for the most part. For the next few months or so, existing members can edit their content if they wish to provide any updates that were lost. Anything on OC after April 18th of 2022 is otherwise gone.
DDoS
The story begins out of the blue with repeated DDoS attacks in April of '22. Despite CloudFlare's mitigation, the attacks were always successful, and I had no way of keeping the site online. Due to the spike in traffic, my host also believed that the site was infected with malware, and suspended the site (took it offline). I was quite out of my depth and had no way of verifying my host's claim.
I asked a friend of mine (we'll call "Rick") for advice, whom as far as those online go was a pretty close friend, and had a ton of technical knowledge. He's the CTO of a tech firm in Canada, and simply offered to host the site in his company's datacenter for free. He was confident that we could then withstand the DDoS attacks due to their more robust security and resources. He said he'd take care of moving it over and that the site would be back up and running over night.
Unfortunately however, he made this estimate with the assumption that our forum was running with a modern version of PHP. Our software version dates back to 2016, because any time you update, it requires about an intense week of work at minimum. Our unique plugins (like the raffle) break, and the styling of the forum (theme) breaks. Considering OC was on a downturn as forums have been going out of style, I didn't feel that revamping the entire site at such an expenditure was worth it. Everything worked fine. Hosts however, including Rick's company, are not very interested in running old versions of PHP. So, his plan was just to force it to run in a more modern environment, and fix PHP issues that arise. He expected that this would take up to a week, and had a couple of his company's engineers tackle it off the books when they had time.
Upgrades
The site then came back up on a more modern version of PHP, however several non-critical functionalities of the forum were broken. You may have noticed that changing avatars and otherwise uploading files to the site only worked sometimes. So now the long-term plan was to just upgrade the forum's software, so that it could comfortably run a modern version of PHP. Rick said that he would bankroll the development for determining the upgrade path, because everyday content can get corrupted with any IPS software update, and this was a very big jump in software versions. Plus he said he would pay for remaking our plugins and the development of a new theme. I said that I could handle making the new theme, but he insisted that his team would be much better at it than anything I could do, so that became the plan.
Sounds too good to be true, yeah? Well this guy once PayPal'd me $1.6k on a whim so that I could buy him a new phone that wasn't yet released in Canada, and at no cost mailed over some spare parts to upgrade my wife's computer (he was tired of her loading time when we all gamed together). I knew him for a while and had the impression he was good for it. He did ask though if I could give an hour-long Zoom presentation on the subject of wireless technology to about a dozen of his engineers, and I figured this was the least I could do, so I did. For those that don't know, that subject is my profession.
Now while the team was supposedly working on the upgrade plans for OC, I wasn't given any sort of back end access to anything. Not the database or even SFTP. So I was very helpless any time someone asked me why something wasn't working, and even worse, I couldn't give Kavawuvi any sort of access to her Chimera or Invader subdomains, which were necessary for her to easily provide software updates. A short-term inconvenience was the thought... Rick had said at this stage that the team would only need about a month to complete their work.
Stagnation
A month turned into another month, and another month, and another month. Rick over time became less responsive, and I was getting more and more frustrated. Eventually he had some account manager lady reach out to me to get in writing everything that I wanted done for the site. Then she provided a quote to Rick (I was CC'd) for numerous thousands of dollars with a timeline of completion at around 2 months out. He then approved the quote in the email thread. Apparently he wasn't bankrolling the project prior, and it was still some side project for his team. I feel a new little bit of relief that progress might finally happen, though that quickly fades after nothing seems to happen for the next few months months.
At this stage, any time I'd bring up any sort of frustration with the pace of things, lack of updates, or no evidence of actual work being done, Rick would ghost me for an additional month or two. I tried calling his cell a couple times, emailing, and many Discord messages. After being ghosted like this a second time I wrote him a scathing Discord message, and ended it with threatening to do my best to embarrass him at his company by bringing my frustrations to his CEO (which Rick had me converse with before, and so I had his phone and email). I was going to make a fuss to anyone that I could get a hold of there, about how I'd made a well-documented contribution to their company and received no compensation in return. I wasn't expecting to get any compensation or anything like that as a result of this approach, but if Rick fucked me, I wanted to at least make him regret giving me the ability to make a scene in front of those important to him.
Rick decided to respond for the first time in I think more than 2 months after this threat, and said "I'll respond to you tomorrow". The next day he asked if I would be willing to meet with a couple of his engineers so that they could give me an update. I said yes. They then emailed me to set up a Zoom, and when I spoke with them they were apologizing profusely that my project had "slipped through the cracks", and asked what they could do to "make it right" with me. I asked that they just get it done, and keep me in the loop on a regular basis. They said that would be no problem, and they did keep me in the loop on a somewhat regular basis, about once every couple weeks. Around the very last moment the site was still living (July of '23), they claimed to have finished planning the upgrade path on a development copy of the site, and had completed a first draft of the new theme. We were about to do another Zoom meeting to review it.
Outage
When the site went totally offline this July, the company had posted a bulletin on their site to inform that all of their hosted services are down as the result of a cyber incident in their datacenter, and that they were working with a forensics team to solve the problem and restore services. About 3 weeks later, their website reported that services have been restored for all customers. OC was however still down, so I sent an email to the team that was working on our site. I'll let the email exchange do the talking for this: Screencap
Stuck
I tried not to share most of the details that make this situation so screwed, because it rightfully casts Rick in a bad light. Rick is a member of our Discord server, so I didn't want him to read what I say or any following discussion from everyone, and say "fuck it" and delete everything. I was totally at his whim on this; I had no actual hosting agreement with his company, and I had no access to pretty much anything related to the site.
Why couldn't I tell them to stop bothering and give me back the site so that I can host it elsewhere? Well, they hacked the shit out of it to make it work on their hosting environment, and database was ported to some odd format because they don't run mySQL. Getting OC to work with another host would definitely require that I hire someone to do the porting, which would likely be quite an involved process without documentation. So in the meantime, I couldn't totally burn what bridge was left.
I decided to stay the course until they determined whether they could recover the corrupted data, and until they properly revamped the site to work with modern PHP. I then intended to move the site to some other hosting. However I also decided that if they failed to recover the lost data, that I would take the site live with the copy of OC I had from right before this whole mess, which was only slightly older than the backup they apparently had. A couple extra lost months when more than a year was already lost seemed like a small sacrifice to get OC back from this nightmare, in a state where it can easily be moved to a number of other hosting options if needed. As you read in the email exchange, they weren't able to recover the data, and so here we are back in April of '22.
In Closing
I made a big mistake in trusting Rick, but I really don't know that there was much of any other choice. A lot of you wouldn't know his name because he never had a presence on the site, and barely messaged in Discord, but I'd known this guy on and off for longer than OC's been around. He was someone that I thought could be trusted with something which at first seemed so simple. But now we're here, and I'm truly sorry that this impacted so many of you. Sure, livelihoods weren't involved with any of this, but I understand that this has had a significant impact on the Halo modding community at large.
Because of the more than year and a half of lost data, and decline of forums in general, I'm not making an attempt to reinvigorate the site. I fully intend to maintain it as a resource best as I'm able, but in a read-only state.
Thank you very much to all of our community members over the past 11 years. It was one helluva trip. And hey, we were around longer than ModHalo, and were even the last active Halo CE forum! I don't think anyone would've bet on either of those odds.
Discord Server
Our Discord server has never been known for its modding discussions. It's served as a general chatroom for the long-time members of the OC community, and made it easy for anyone to keep up to date on new community content. That latter utility is effectively gone with the closing of the forum, and just about any subject for a Discord server can still keep friends together. So what's next? I don't know, but we'll probably try doing something new with it. I'll talk with you guys there!