neilquinn

So I work in tech, and am a systems administrator. Granted, for websites, not games, but, puts me in a better understanding than most for this particular problem. Anyway, DDoS attacks are incredibly hard to fight. So here's the thing with DDoS attacks, what happens is hackers infect random peoples PCs with a virus. Maybe the virus doesn't even seem to have any ill effects on the user. Just sits there (often times they throw plenty of other nasty things in there, but, lets keep it simple for now). So now, you have control of thousands of computers under your control, all that are real, have network histories with the ISPs, are on multiple ISPs, all over the world. Now you point them at a server or domain. You hit it with a request that looks somewhat legit. Maybe a login request, or a general ping to see if the server is up (something the game would normally do). Now, you just do that again, and again, and again. You stagger it though. You have 10,000 PCs in your botnet, but not all 10,000 are making requests every second. Say you have 1,000, and they hit a few times in a second. Then they take a break, and swap to the next 1000 and so on. This keeps individual IP addresses from being flagged as trying to access too much, while still flooding the server. So, they're making legit requests to the server the game would make. The question is, how do you filter out the bad traffic? The short answer is, you can't. The long answer involves a LOT of analysis, trying to figure out the IP addresses, what requests they're making, looking for patterns to filter them out (there are programs to assist with this). Now, the other thing to consider is, if you're the hacker, and you're starting to get IPs that are getting blocked, you retire them and get other computers on your botnet. So, ideally, you have something that gives a fake reply to the IPs so the hackers are none the wiser (or at least slow them down). This can be very difficult and much easier said than done. There is no way to 100% filter out DDoS traffic without false positives. It's going to be glitchy for people. What do they need? New data center will help, but it's not a matter of anything physically different, it's a matter of support. They need to either move to a datacenter that offers high level support for DDoS and experience with it, or, hire a company that specializes in it, and give access to firewalls. Not knowing their architecture, my advice would be, move to the cloud with load balancers and a distributed solution. Be able to spawn up more servers when needed, and take advantage of Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure tools as well as hire a company experienced with DDoS attacks

My guess is, and idk why they haven't just outright said it, is they have some kind of network filtering going on. Network filtering is always clunky and annoying at best, because it's really hard to determine good traffic from bad. However, there are things they could be doing, like, whitelisting long time players, setting up queues where if the game hits a certain amount of players, the game doesn't crash, it just forces new people logging on into the queue, etc...

Fair enough, not trying to get anyone else banned, but at this point, if they want to ban me from a game I can't really play... meh. I'll ask around discord. My discord handle is Neilquinn11#4890 if anyone wants to talk to me about it privately

I agree, so I ask again, does anyone know of any good alternatives? Because I'm seriously considering leaving until they get their shit in line. A customer of over 3 years, and I don't see the point in giving them more of my money to pay for a game I can't play

Fucking seriously, it's maddening. I came on after work because I was barely able to hang out with anyone during my lunch break. I've tried being on for 20 minutes, only 5 minutes were actually in game before it fucking crashed again. Seriously, anyone know of any good alternatives to 3dx other than RLC or AChat (tried them, meh). Maybe I'd come back to 3dx when they get their shit fixed, but this is getting infuriating, why am I paying for a service I can't use?

Cool, 4 hours later, and another crash

Agreed, I've been playing for years, and the responses/information from any kind of "staff" are hysterically lacking from any sort of a "company". I've stuck around because I do love the game, and for the most part, it's worked more than well enough. But they treat this like it's just a hobby and not actually a business, which is mind boggling at $20 a month per subscription.

In my job, if I had connections dropping and servers crashing as often as they are here, I'd be fired after 2 weeks. They crash 3-4 times a day (that I see, probably more cause it's not like I'm on 24/7)

So I haven't posted on the forums in a while, but, this is getting stupid. First, I want to say I work in IT, while I don't do games, I have been a server administrator for the last 10 years, so I know plenty about server architecture. You guys had my sympathy for a while, having gone through similar things, after the DDOS attack. They're a bitch to manage, and filter the traffic, and the IT team I'm sure got little sleep during it. However, at this point, I'm now speaking as a paying customer. Literally every time I log on it seems theres at least one server crash during my play time. You talk about it being during peak times, so great, my choices are come on at non-peak, and have no friends online and be alone, or, meet a friend or someone new and have it crash. Not to sound like a "Karen" but the length of time this has gone on is completely unacceptable. It is not cheap to play this game, and while I don't expect extreme support, being completely unable to play something I've been paying for is insane. Also, as usual, the lack of detail from staff is horrendous. The top post in tech support is some screen grabs from Lisa talking in chat? Seriously? That's far from an official statement. It would take less than 5 minutes to throw something in the news section of the game, or a link to a blog post detailing "We apologize, this is what is wrong, this is what we're doing to fix it, these are the timelines we're looking at, and in the mean time here are hopefully some ways you can mitigate it". But no, once again I feel like I'm being told "eh, we'll get to stuff eventually, until then, keep giving us your money"

Thought I'd get some feedback on my current WIP. Nothing outside is really done yet, still adding detailing, but overall really happy with the concept so far.

So, I recently got an oculus rift, and thought I'd try it out in the game. I honestly couldn't give it a fair test, because it is kind of horribly broken. For those of you who haven't tried it, it is exactly what you'd expect, with the UI just kind of floating in front of you. The problem being, that whenever you hit space, it moves the UI to be directly in front of wherever you're currently looking. This even happens while you're typing. So if I respond to a friend, I look down to the left where my chat box is, as I type I hit space, which moves the chat box down even further, rinse and repeat. As far as I've found, this is not a setting with the oculus, or at least, other programs/games are able to block it (bigscreen vr, virtual desktop, etc... have no problem with me using my keyboard) Anyone know of a way to stop this?

For all the people who say that "they've given up on the game" have no sense about the difficulties of programming. No shot in HELL would they have bothered doing something as massive as the world editor update if they were just "giving up". Sure, I don't think they give the game the attention it deserves, but I don't think it's dead by any stretch. The devs are silent a lot, its not reason to panic, the sky isn't falling. IMO, and I've tried a few others at this point, 3dx is still the best by a pretty good margin.

My current work in progress, a dive bar

Wanted to show off my latest place, pretty happy with how it came out

@SkyDiver It can be done, and I think it's a good idea All it would need in the code is a timer. You would just need to know what second the animation is at, and, click a button to sync your dance to the same second OR wait until their dance resets before starting yours. It would actually be fairly easily to implement I'm guessing (obviously not having looked at the code)

Lol, yeah, apparently. And absolutely, papers could be written on how prevalent linux is in the industry, yet, how relatively unknown it is to the general public. I think a lot of that comes from the different linux distributions. Ubuntu (and its variants, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc...), Fedora, RHEL, Mint, DSL, Slackware, Debian, far too many to name. And then of course, there is Android. Linux master race!

To call Linux an "old OS" is just plain ignorant... Do you even know how cononical does it's version numbers? Ubuntu 16.04 means it came out April 2016. They do a new Long Term Support (or LTS) version every two years, and have intermediate releases every 6 months. So that means there is also 16.10 and 17.04 as well, but they're not LTS versions. Next LTS version will be 18.04 in April 2018. It is very widely used, but yes, not nearly to the point of windows. I actually use it very successfully as my primary operating system, but it depends on your use. I do programming, so it is very easy/useful to run everything in linux, and makes it easier to transfer to servers. It's not great for graphics. Slackware is good, I personally prefer Ubuntu for a desktop environment, and Debian for a server environment. I know a lot of people don't like unity, but, it actually is kinda nice when you get used to it. However, linux mint is rapidly gaining favor, and I hear cinnamon is a great window manager.

Should also note, I seem to be getting a lot better performance with 2.5, almost akin to what I would get in straight windows which was not the case previously

So, I originally started writing this asking if anyone had gotten it working, as I had 2.0 running on Ubuntu just fine. I started off with some problems, and then figured out how to overcome them. DO NOT run it in the same virtual drive as your 2.0 installation. The way playonlinux scans for files, it gets confused when it sees two exe files with the exact same name in them. Just make a new virtual drive, and setup exactly as you had before, and it will work fine. For anyone not familiar: Download PlayOnLinux (plenty of tutorials on how to do this)Hit Configure on the main screenHit "New" in the bottom left corner and name the driveSelect the latest version of wine (2.7 at the time of writing)Then you will go back to the previous screen. Select your drive, and go to the wine tabClick Configure WineSelect "Windows 10" For windows versionGo to the libraries tabSearch for d3d11 under the "New override for library" and click AddIt will now appear in "Existing Overrides", click it, and select "Edit"Select "disable" and hit OK (wine has terrible dx11 support, and it breaks 3dx if you try and use it)Hit Apply, then okYou will now be on the previous screen again. Select the Miscellaneous tab, then click "Run a .exe file in this virtual drive"Select the installation exe and run itAlmost done, after the installation is complete, go back to the general tab, and "Make a new shortcut from this virtual drive"Select the 3dxchat.exe and name your shortcut (so it appears in your playonlinux menu) and you're done! Enjoy the game