Monday 30 June 2014

Gandanur 14.7.0 for Halo 1.10

You can now download Gandanur 14.7.0. This version supports the latest Halo 1.10 update.

There are no additional features in this update. The version number of Gandanur reflects the year and month of releases, that's why those numbers keep increasing ;)

Let me know whether something is still not working!

Tuesday 27 May 2014

Hello World

Due to the recent patch for Halo, I will update Gandanur to work with 1.10 in the next few weeks. I can't give an ETA, but there will be an update.

It was a bit of a surprise to see people still using Gandanur, but that's a good thing! Halo is still a special community, as evidenced by this patch to an 11 year old game. And the fact that community members such as Technut, kornman00, and btcc22 helped made the new Halo 1.10 patch possible is an amazing thing to see.

Update: patch will be released before, or on, 30 june 2014.

Monday 1 April 2013

Gandanur 13.3.0 & HaloRank

Today marks the release of Gandanur 13.3.0 (see downloads page). The main addition to this version is the updated integration with HaloRank, and it's also not a coincidence that today HaloRank has opened its doors. When playing on a Gandanur enabled server you can now let HaloRank track all your games, matches, stats, etc.

Additionally I want to remind you of the sv_blockicmp command. I highly recommend you include the command "sv_blockicmp true" in your init.txt. This solves the problem where, on some servers, players randomly disconnect from the server.

And as you're aware, development for Gandanur happens on a random basis. Behind the scenes a scripting backend is slowly being made, but unfortunately it isn't ready for release yet.

Monday 23 July 2012

Status Update

The website has been updated! Gandanur now has a forum where you can discuss everything about our awesome server tool. The manual has also been updated and should now load faster. All downloads will now go through mediafire to ensure the download links will remain working in the distant future.

About Gandanur itself. I've been working together with HaloRank to provide player and game statistics using Gandanur. Apart from this I've also been working on the other parts again. A few small updates here and there are already done. New features will also be added, but more about that in the future!

What I can provide you is the release date for the next version: 30 November 2012. On that day Gandanur 12.10.0 will be released in the wild (unless my new jobs requires more time then expected). The new features will be slowly revealed in the coming weeks! During September possible patches will be released in case bugs are found.

The future is looking good :)

Wednesday 18 July 2012

Wireshark Gamespy Protocol Dissector

When working on the gamespy CD key authentication protocol I quickly threw together a wireshark LUA script to dissect the packets. Although the CD key validation protocol is already widely known [1], it's still very usefull that wireshark automatically decodes the traffic for you. Essentially it applies the gamespy XOR cipher to decrypt the gamespy packets [1]. A screenshot explains this best:




If anyone is interested in the code, you can download the lua dissector script for wireshark. Copy it to the main directory of wireshark and add the line
dofile("gamespy.lua")
to the end of the file init.lua (also located in the main directory of wireshark) [2]. Note that's just a little script aimed at other programmers, feel free to improve.

References:
[1] Aluigi, Explanation of the authentication method used by the GamespyCD-Key SDK 0.1.
[2] The Wireshark Wiki: Lua.

Sunday 9 October 2011

Gandanur v11.9.1

The previous update of Gandanur contained a very annoying bug: At random times clients would get the "server closed down" message while the server was still running. This resulted in random players being "kicked" from the server. Considering this is a serious bug I have spent the last few days debugging it and the cause has been found.

The bug occurred because Gandanur incorrectly handled an obscure error that was thrown by Windows when the server receives an ICMP unreachable packet. Without going in too much detail, some firewalls actually block those packets (and those hosts weren’t affected by this bug), while other firewalls allow this packet (those hosts were affected by the bug). Thanks to several testers the bug is now fixed in version 11.9.1 of Gandanur!

So everyone who is having this problem please update to Gandanur 11.9.1.

Also notice on the right side of this page that there is a link to report bugs. So if you have a problem with Gandanur first check if someone else already reported the problem, and if not please report it so I can fix it.

Sunday 2 October 2011

Gandanur v11.9.0

As mentioned in the previous post I wanted to release the next version of Gandanur this month last month. At the time I started writing this post it was the last day of the month, but Gandanur still needed to be tested a few more days to be sure I knew it was stable. Hence why I'm a few days late. However the new version of Gandanur appears to be stable and running well, so with pleasure I'm announcing the public release of Gandanur v11.9.0!

In this update there are three new main features: AFK kicking, Ping kicking and Stats uploading.

AFK Kicking

The first one is AFK kicking. This enables you to automatically kick inactive players. To increase the usability of this feature it has an option that kicking is only enabled once a certain number of players are in the server. Another advantage is that Gandanur will always monitor players but not necessarily kick them. In practice this means you can disable automatic kicking but can still manually check for afk people by using sv_afk_list. For more information see the manual on AFK Kicking.

Ping Kicking

Similar to ping kicking Gandanur can also kick people with a too high ping. Again it's possible to enable kicking only after a certain number of players are in the server. Another similarity is that you can use sv_ping_list to manually monitor players instead of letting Gandanur kick them automatically. The consistency between these two features should make them easier to learn and understand. Find more information in the manual on Ping Kicking.

Stats Uploading

The third major feature is the ability to upload player statistics to the HaloRank project. HaloRank is a next gen HaloPC and HaloCE statistics tracking and competition platform. Basically it will track the scores of all the players on your server, automatically record games, assigns ranks to players, and so on! For more information check the manual on Stats and the HaloRank website.


Apart from these three new features several bugs have been fixed:

  • Chat messages send when someone connected when game has ended are ignored, as they should be.
  • A bug that could potentially crash the server when executing sv_players_more has been fixed.
  • Correct ping of players is displayed in a server query.
  • The output of sv_cdkeycheck is now correct.
  • Performance "bug": The server will no longer lag when a new players joins and you have a big Alias file.

    Other improvements and additions are:
    • Several performance upgrades. Attention has been given so Gandanur doesn't affect the pings of players. This has been tested in detail on several popular servers and also tested in collaboration with HaloRank. In short special attention has been given so server hosting companies will know that Gandanur won't cause any lag.
    • The command sv_dep_enable has been added. This command can provide improved security against potentially unknown exploits in the future. Read the manual for more information.
    • During mapvote players can also vote by simply typing the number of the option. This means that typing both "vote 1" or "1" will be registered as a vote for option 1.
    • I have created an xfire community for Gandanur. Feel free to join!
    • All Gandanur servers are now displayed as "classic" game servers. This means that Gandanur servers will have the little ring in the server lobby. This is especially useful if you want to find a Gandanur server since only few servers are classic game servers.

    Another important addition for administrators that is Gandanur is now available in two versions: Unrestricted and Restricted. The unrestricted version contains all the functionally that Gandanur can offer. The restricted version doesn't contain the sv_cdkeycheck command. This is useful because some server hosting companies will not allow you to run a server that can potentially accept players who pirated the game. In such a situation the unrestricted version of Gandanur will be prohibited, but you will be able to install the restricted version of Gandanur!