I haven't yet tried "International Postcards" playing mode. Let's try it. I'm curious about the connections that does.
For that mode I start a single player game but add an Blue International Tunnel.
I've sent a train into the Blue Tunnel and... nothing on the network side. I see... that train had no postcards on it, that's why.
This map doesn't even have a post office, so I'll create a simple test for this next.
To ease testing with multiple players I made LEGO LOCO run on startup via a registry key. The method in Windows 98 still exists today:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"LOCO"="C:\Program Files\LEGO Media\Constructive\LEGO LOCO\Exe\Loco.exe"
Ah, I forgot to mention that I wrote a small diff tool to try to figure what was fixed on the messages of a specific train and what wasn't. This is in part because I suspect/suspected that there are extensive regions in a message that are/may be uninitialised.
What this differ tool does is I can feed it hex string from the same type of message and it will check for each nibble which values were found among the messages. Then it represents that by writing lines of hex and spaces where each column represents all the variations found for that nibble.
The screenshot below shows an output example, with a section of a message. Where there's only one value per column it means those nibbles were always the same, so they are probably constant for at least this type of train. There's an highlighted part which is something I had already the theory was constant and this output agreed with.
You'll notice many nibbles with value 0x2. This was purposely caused by filling Sarah's map with "nature" (0x2) elements such that any uninitialised memory had a higher probability of being filled with a recognisable pattern.
I suspect many of the parts in this section of the message (as an example) are uninitialised. But maybe if that was the case I'd have even more nibble values. So I don't really know...
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Neue QoL Patch für AC Shadows kommt am 25.6.
Hoffentlich entfernt Ubi mit dem Patch zumindest auf dem PC den unsäglichen 30 FPS Cap in den Cutscenes.
In short, I can say for now I'm beat. (Or that at least I'm not willing to invest more time in this right now.)
I started this thread with the idea to explore a bit how things worked. I thought maybe it was a simple protocol which I could figure out and send some trains! Turns out it's not that simple.
But still, I found a few interesting things both in terms of gameplay and on how things work in the background to support that experience. So I still consider this a success in that regard.
Lastly, I thought maybe I was missing something... maybe there was another message other than those three main ones which had to be send to say "okay, that's it, that' the train right there in the previous packets!"
So I tried to replay a set of packets exactly as I captured them. To do this I filtered a set of James's packets, saved a pcap with them and used #tcpreplay to send them.
Again... no train.
Worth to consider though that with this test I used the correct source address for James (with iptables rule), and sent exact packets seen before, so any counters or similar that may need incrementing were left as is, which may be problem.
Next, I had the theory that maybe the game was checking the source IP address of the packet to see it if matched the expected player's address based on the DirectPlay protocol phase.
So I added the following #iptables rule such that any traffic coming from the host towards Sarah's VM (192.168.1.242) would appear as if had come from James' VM (192.168.1.243).
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p udp -s <my ip> -d 192.168.1.242 -j SNAT --to-source 192.168.1.243
In the packet captures I could see that the source IP changed as intended and Sarah's game responded to these messages, but no trains were produced.
Regarding being unable to send trains... It's a shame I'm unable to send trains because that would allow me to run experiments and understand the protocol much faster... And probably find some weird stuff/quirks.
As a test I've tried to essentially replay trains that I captured in pcaps. I did this in multiple ways.
My basic attempt was just to send messages with perl + #ncat as follows. I sent the three main messages by putting these commands in script with a sleep of a few milliseconds between them.
perl -e 'print pack("H*", $ARGV[0])' <hex string> | ncat -vu 192.168.1.242 31415
As that didn't work I tried changing the message counter, the train ID, etc. I thought maybe the game checks for duplicate messages or something based on the counters, which would mean the replay of an exact previous message would fail.
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When a player right-clicks on a tunnel a window shows the overall look of each player's map and how they are connected. It also shows the location for players' trains.
When this view is opened there are two 14 and 24-byte messages that are exchanged between players every second. One of these clearly contains the coordinates for trains. I only did a cursory analysis of it though to verify the hypothesis.
One interesting thing I found is that the messages sent when the Toybox is closed (that contain map information) don't have information on the exact map elements as I thought before.
I tried placing different elements on the map to get a notion of their codes and found out only four below values (this wasn't an exhaustive test though).
From what I could understand each byte is just transmitting which colour should be shown on the map overview for each tile of the map. I've found the following approximate meanings for each.
0x02: nature (green)
0x03: buildings (brown)
0x05: track (black)
0x07: pavements (grey)
The images below show a screenshot of a map (from one LEGO LOCO's presets, which brings memories) and its representation when right-clicking a blue tunnel.
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Some bytes seems to be the locomotive or carriage types. I've taken note of the hex string for each type as I've understood it.
0418. yellow loco
0618. silver loco
0818. steam loco
6618. silver carriage
6818. blue carriage
6a18. green carriage
6c18. yellow carriage
6e18. gas carriage
7018. mail carriage
There's a one byte that seems to indicate the direction of travel between the maps of two players, as follows:
00 ↑
0e ←
5a →
b4 ↓
To figure out what I did of the messages, I sent quite a few trains with varying locomotive and carriage types, and among multiple players and their configurations on the overall map.
The first screenshot below shows two of the configurations I used. The remaining screenshots show what the map actually looked like for each of the three players.
It's cool that depending on the zone of the map LOCO creates for you a track that connects the tunnels in a way that make sense for your location on the map. So those three screenshots are from what LOCO did, it wasn't me creating those track configs.
If You Like Indie Games & Anomaly Spotting, Then I Something For You!
I figured out a few more things in the "send train" messages. But I can't figure it out fully. Nor, more disappointingly, can I manage to send trains.
The image shows what I know about the messages involved in sending a train.
And here are some conclusions:
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Take a look at Avalone's Adventurers: My Parents were Assassinated so I've Started an Adventuring Party to Avoid a Political Marriage!
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Take a look at the #CityBuilder #RPG Where Noble Plans Lie.
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MSI announces beautiful Toy Story 30th anniversary PC — plastered in branding from the GPU down to the CMOS battery
