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.