It might not be intentional. They may have tried to alter some things to prevent themselves from being kicked or something, and it funked up the system.

I was the one shouting for people to go into char.hide mode in Roumen and Elderine.

I also suggested that if the spammer managed to get to a high-enough level to shout, to filter shouts. I went into hide mode as soon as I logged-in and didn't get dced. Turned hide mode off and launcher shut-down =/

this is a dumb question.. but...

can u still vend in hide mode?

Could that crash all 3 towns at the same time though? Well probably shouldn't talk about it much if it can, don't want to give anybody ideas. ;) I'd understand if it were one map, on one server, one or two times. But all 3 towns coordinated at the same time... and it starting off as a once in a while thing, and now becoming a regular occurence... seems intentional to me.

And if it's not intentional... well... whoever it is should be informed of what's going on so they can stop making the same (rather annoying) mistake over and over again. ;)

Oh that was you, hi! :D Sounds like it works then, that's good. And it's true about shout, though I wouldn't publicize that idea, in case they didn't think of it already... it wouldn't be that difficult for them to get themselves to level 6, and the last thing we want is for them to start crashing entire maps. I filtered out normal chat and was still dc'd today, so if they shouted... I don't know if filtering shout would solve the problem. Then hide mode wouldn't work anymore, and we'd be in trouble.

Nope.

Unfortunately, you can't. :P

^Beat me D:

well i dont play fiesta right now, so i cant tell how the trick works, but my guess is that they send an char that cant be rendered in the current font, so installing a font like cyberbit and changing the font.ini so fiesta uses that font may prevent the trick from working.

cyberbit is free for non commercial use.

anyway, dont blame hackers. It may was a hacker who found that out, but its normal users who exploit it.

What strikes me as odd is if outspark were truely serious about fixing this problem, they should request more information. Instead of just date, time, and events leading up (which are clearly evident by now), they should request the minidump file.

Although I'm not sure if that holds any information that they can use, but normally all games come with some sort of error-handling. Meaning they either keep a log, or create an error-report file.

It appears every time those spammers crashed my game in my outspark folder a minidump file was created.

/Outspark/Fiesta/Dump/MiniDump.dmp

Although getting rid of the people who do this is a good idea, its a short lived solution at best. Fixing the problem at its roots would permanently solve the issue.

All characters are glyphes. As such each font has respectively 256, or 65536 characters depending on whether its unicode or ASCII. So the characters themselves arent the issue as all of them are capable of being rendered. However, at index value 0, exists a null character. The null character signifies the end of a string.

Depending on how strings are handled, a null character can turn a string stored in the computer as "this is a \0 null charactered string" to read "this is a ".

Why is the null character so dangerous? Well if I could place one in my post, nothing in the website beyond that character would exist.

Since it crashes the game, there must be an internal problem, buffer overflow, or null-pointer resolution.

lol someone thing he knows something.

okay ascii has 7bit encoding, so it has 128different characters
unicode has 64bit encoding, and has over 100,000characters(from wikipedia) , and still has a lot of room for more.

in fact the game uses UTF8(if u dont know it, look it up)

and the Messages ingame are build using 2 terminators. a length byte at the beginning and an zero byte at the end. Actually the length byte is ignored, but the message is stored in an much bigger buffer, so it find its zero a little bit later guaranteed.

Anyway the Font used in Fiesta, does not include all the Character unicode contains. So it may help using a font that contains a lot more unicode characters.

addendum:
Its obvious: the game has problems rendering the message, not receiving it. But that doesnt mean im right ^^

addendum2:
Well i just tried sending an malformed message, and yes the game crashes. So screw the font theory. They just messed up implementing a string read function.

ASCII characters are 1 byte.
UNICODE characters are 2 bytes.

1 Bytes = 8 bits.

Maximum values us 2^K-1

255 possible characters.

Signed Value range is -2^(K-1) to 2^(K-1)-1

It can still represent 255 characters, however if you only take the leading positive values than its 127.

Unicode is 2^16-1 = 65535

Having taken courses in computer-related studies in University I would be a little more credible than a wikipedia article thats telling you a unicode character is 64-bits (8 bytes).

UTF-N is a method used to retain the size of the string even though the string may contain a null terminator. UTF-N also allows the grouping of the bytes representing a character to be changed to support different regional codes depending on the inital character range value.

Although the UTF-N still does not prevent misprinting, or improperly implemented algorithms to handle string manipulation.

Rather than opening wikipedia, I suggest you open something like Microsofts Development network website and read the information off of there. The difference is, one is published by real-world developers, and the other is posted by some individual who may or may not have accredited knowledge on the subject.

Here I'll even point you to it:

http://msdn.microsoft.com

Yes I remember! It was a dance emote, I think. Or something like that. When someone does the emote, everyone around them crashed. It was like, back in CB. I only vaguely remember. But yeah, it was this game, haha.

And I'm getting a bit confused by this. Is finding who's not d/c'ed the only way to find out if someone is exploiting the bug? D: Or is there some other way to tell?

dude if u want u can read about ascii and unicode as much as u want. But wikipedia has some real good articles about them.

ascci uses 7bits, not 8. the highest bit is NOT used.

and if its 8bit then there are 256characters. 255 is just the highest value for an 8bit long block. UInt8= 0..255.

and that u point to the msdn. LOL
ascii, unicode are not from microsoft.

In short u are just a beginner, but u think u already know everything. :)

They requested that if we know anything, to please PM them. I'm sure they won't turn down theories or any kind of hint as to what it could be. So if you guys know anything that it could be, please PM it to one of the GMs.

For all of the players of Fiesta!!*dresses like William Wallace*

Attention
 

This is not a bug people, is a hack. I recall that a while ago someone on the forum of outspark posted a few links that dirrected the user to a forum where someone (who will remain unnamed due to the fact that it is very likely it was an impersonator and not the person with the designed forum-name) was clearly trying to sell in that other forum a hack that would crash everyone online as far as he/she called that. THE person was selling a home-made hack that would do just that. AT first i though it was BS but now i recalled that and well..... it is pretty possible seeing how that occurs. Also the hack causes Rebuff Overrun or something like which is the main cause your game will crash. At first it will show u the error than it will just automatically dc u.

Since the gms dont want any help from me anymore
i will just publish the sollution here:

The Message we are talking about has the Id 0x2001.
It build like that:

struct ChatMessage
{
char count;
char message[];
}

The hacker did most likley send a message where the count value is lower then the actual size of the message. I dont knew where the bug exactly is, but i know that the client will crash if the count is to low.


And no that not the message that will actually crash the client, its the message the hacker sends.

Everyone who wants can take it to the gms, he may give me the credit but there is no need :-)

Edit: Just to make it clear: i did not found the hack in the first place, nor do i create such hacks. I also NEVER sell my hacks.

Edit2: i just did 1 test. It was with a string filled with 1024 a's, and a length of 0. Of course the server response crashed my client.

You mean that whole thing with Pr0n?

Academic source. Perhaps you should review the validity of the content first before saying wikipedia is a trustworthy source of information.

A unicode character is clearly not 64-bits - as you so pointed out in your initial post.

7 Bits, initial set.

Two complements signed integer. All positive values are used for the initial set.

8 bit, extended set.

Unsigned integer allowing the use of all values.

256 integral values represented. However, 0 is reserved as a null terminator. 255 possible values. More generally 2K-1.

I point to MSDN because its a credible source. Its not editable by anyone out there.

If you want, I can direct you to the java language where they use unicode as the primitive character type - which is clearly not 64-bit.

Assumptions. Perhaps I dont know everything, but you've demonstrated your lack of knowledge about the subject. Furthermore, when intending to insult someone, you may want to use the English language a bit more appropriately, otherwise it just looks bad on your part.

I got hit by this on Bijou yesterday >.> Luckily in my case I was just dc'ed twice in Uruga. My guild leader got dc'ed 10 times in a row Dx

OMG, plz finally start actually informing yourself. But us stop here.

My last words :-)

Unicode encoding is not an easy feat.

As for Ascii, yes there is an extended Ascii, but its an common error to believe that extended Ascii is an newer Ascii. NO its not. Ascii has and will ever use 7bit +1bit padding on most maschines.


the 0byte is an character in Unicode, Ascii and extended Ascii known as terminator.

And my experience goes back into the times where dos was standard. But im quite happy that i never had to write unicode libraries.
And yes english is not my first language.

*sees this stuff flying bye-bye over his head*

@_@;;;

That... was... fascinating. I think?

what do u mean oO?

Ugh...thank god i switched to flyff for awile ><.

Am I safe from the "crash" message when I filter the chatbox to whispers? or does it crash the game anyway?

You're only safe if you stay in character hide mode.

Whilst I think MaxOff wasn't exactly very polite, criticizing someone's english when it isn't his first language isn't appropriate either.