8 ms·

Fallout 4 Service Discovery and Relay

322 points by jnoller 11y ago

socmoth 11y ago
thanks for taking the time to write this up. (an upvote did not seem like enough).
- netcraft 11y ago
  agreed. very cool. cant wait to see what someone does with this.
  - suprjami 11y ago
    Sadly I expect the next thing will be Bethesda encrypting this data.
    - akiselev 11y ago
      Why? Bethesda has a history of making games with best in class modability and the tools they release for moders are fleshed out versions of what they use for designing the game (which usually takes a few months, FO4 tool expected early 2016). Hell, with scripting extenders and graphics mods, some of their games like Morrowind can become nearly indistinguishable from modern AAA games nearly 13 years later. Bethesda knows this and I can't imagine them locking down anything that could be used to make their games better by their community for decades to come.
      - yoklov 11y ago
        Agreed. Despite the debacle with the paid skyrim mods (which I still think would be a good thing...), Bethesda definitely understands how important the modding community are to their games.
      - easytiger 11y ago
        Because other idiots are exposing their PS4 to the internet
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      More likely that somebody writes FalloutSheep that invades privacy by dumping the inventory of anybody playing on the same network and then users demand Bethesda encrypt the data.
      - Namidairo 11y ago
        In fairness, the server is disabled by default in the settings.
- lambdaops 11y ago
  :)
rcfox 11y ago
One application comes to mind for this: watch for new screenshots (assuming they automatically get put into a directory for Fallout 4 screenshots) and add the in-world coordinates to the EXIF data.
- lambdaops 11y ago
  OMG. Definitely didn't think of that.
- a_bonobo 11y ago
  Other ideas: - a fitbit (pipbit?) for Fallout, track how many km/miles ran/walked, how many km while carrying how much kg of equipment, theoretical calories lost - since it seems to synchronize stats and inventory, you can map where the player killed most enemies/took most stimpaks so you can get a heatmap of enemy-rich zones and rank them by difficulty - divide killed enemies by health lost (or used stimpaks) - there are sites like fallout4map.com which track the location of unique and hardcoded items, you can automate this now
  - GeneralTspoon 11y ago
    This could be interesting. I created fallout4map.com, and if it could automagically track a player's pipboy locations, that would be awesome. I tried decoding the binary data for the pipboy app, but didn't have much success. Perhaps someone smarter than me will be able to crack it.
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      I will take a quick look at decompiling the android app this afternoon
      - GeneralTspoon 11y ago
        It's a Unity app, so `apktool` works well to get out all the assets. Nothing is obfuscated. There's also sample pipboy data file there too (for the demo mode).
tomf64 11y ago
It would be incredibly cool to have a script that automatically manages your inventory while playing the game, e.g. the player picks up all items and has the script auto-drop them if they don't meet certain requirements (value/weight ratio, duplicates, etc.). I'm excited to see where this goes!
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  I'd be all over that. I find the way the game displays inventory (particularly guns) quite irritating to say the least. I want to see one ammo type at a time (since you need minimum one gun per ammo type) and then to see a comparison (damage, rate of fire, accuracy, and specials).
  - viraptor 11y ago
    Yes, that's also one of the very few complaints I have about FO4. The whole inventory system is designed as if limited to what you can do with a controller. Why can't you deposit all junk from your companion automatically? Why can't you get all inventory not currently used by them? Why can't you craft/replace with power armor pieces that are in storage? I hope some patches/mods for the inventory system come out soon.
    - throwaway420 11y ago
      I completely agree and want these features, but I think Bethesda is faced with the issue of overcomplicating the UI for a more mainstream audience which they're obviously hoping to attract. The UI is probably already completely overwhelming for a lot of mainstream users. At some point, I'm sure adding more options, buttons, commands, and screens might make a lot of people really uncomfortable. Obviously though there's a balancing act at play. The flip side to not having these features is that some of the inventory management stuff is a bit inconvenient and boring and cumbersome. But people tolerate that to an extent if the rest of the experience is worthwhile.
    - akiselev 11y ago
      I find this to be a pervasive problem with Bethesda games starting a few years after The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind was released. They pack an insane amount of complexity into their games then provide utterly feeble tools to manage it or refuse to invest time into them as that complexity grows from game to game (especially their inventory system which hasn't changed much since Oblivion). Nothing demonstrates this better than Fallout 4's base building mechanic which is leagues better (and more complicated) than in any other game I've played. You can literally build a downtown Sanctuary with a dozen 10 story tall skyscrapers with farmland and electrical infrastructure but doing so using the Workshop as it is now (months before the release of the official game editor) is absolutely maddening and down right impractical. No 2d map or overhead camera, no alignment with complex terrain like building foundations, no templating, zero interface to manage the settlers (the current community concensus is to give each settler a different hat or outfit for each available job!), and it's just down right Unintuitive in every way. The mechanic overall feels like it was part of the game design from day 1 but the interface they give you to use it was made in a weekend. Bethesda knows their games are bought for replayability and community mods so it seems that they make a lot of sacrifices no other gaming company would, knowing that the more annoying it is the faster some modder will totally replace it with far superior execution. To be fair though, no other company cranks out fantastic open world games that are as good as Bethesda's on such a regular basis. All of this pays off when a five year old game has graphics as good as a newly released one except with half a decade of damn near professional effort by thousands of modders.
zxter 11y ago
With this we can prioritize healing items and auto use them when on low health!
- robmcm 11y ago
  Would be nice to auto cook all meat when at a cooking station.
newman314 11y ago
Incidentally, flexlm/port 27000 used to be how a variety of apps were licensed. Much pain was had when the license manager would occasionally go out to lunch.
praseodym 11y ago
So there is no authentication on the API endpoint? I have my PS4 connected directly to the Internet to avoid NAT issues, and I wonder whether the API would be available openly as well.
- Roby65 11y ago
  Theorically, knowing your ip, people would be able to connect to your fallout 4.
  - praseodym 11y ago
    Or practically, if they would scan the entire IPv4 space, which doesn't take too long on a decent connection (5min with 10Gbps, https://zmap.io/ https://zmap.io/)
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      Wonder if any relevant strings have shown up in Shodan searches yet. Still, I'd imagine most PCs and game consoles are behind a firewall and ports aren't forwarded.
- easytiger 11y ago
  why not telnet to it? <yourip>:28000
- axx 11y ago
  Since most people have their console running behind a firewall, this should not be an issue. Unless you expose those ports to the outside world...
joonoro 11y ago
This is very cool. I have to wonder though what you could do with it, like I don't mean to devalue the OP but I see a lot of people here discussing the possibilities (inventory management etc.), but what is there to stop you from doing that with traditional modding? I guess with consoles this might be useful (although I heard consoles can play PC mods this time around), but as far as the PC goes its probably far easier just to use make an actual mod for the game that does what you want instead of bouncing it around wirelessly with a relay.
- joonoro 11y ago
  If people downvoting me could explain why, that would be nice. I'm not trying to downplay the OP's creation and I think it's really cool. I was trying to reply to the people in this thread because I feel like they are praising it for the wrong reasons. It's not like we can finally access your inventory programmatically and script it for the first time ever, you could already do all of that stuff with regular modding, and it'd probably be a lot easier too. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if so I'd like to know how. As an analogy, to me it'd be like praising WIFI for finally allowing us to communicate between computers on a network.
  - lambdaops 11y ago
    Didn't downvote, am the author of the write up. Since I don't run Windows in the house any more, there's little opportunity for mods (I'm playing on the PS4). Tinkering with the network was fun in its own right.
- lfowles 11y ago
  I think it's mainly being able to use a language you are familiar with vs working with Bethesda's custom scripting language[0] [0]: http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Papyrus http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Papyrus
misterdai 11y ago
Would be interesting to play around with. Imagine having a "Twitch plays Fallout 4", but with someone playing the game properly but Twitch gets to control the inventory, armour, weapons, map etc... all via the pipboy api.
voltagex_ 11y ago
If someone wants to chip in for a copy of XBox One Fallout 4, I'd be happy to look at adding support for it this weekend - it's 100AUD which is a little crazy.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
FLUX-YOU 11y ago
It's possible that the client is capable of more than just being a server. Running help "Bethesda.NET" 0 in the console reveals some interesting commands, such as login, checking if the player is logged in, getting some profile stats and whatnot. So of interest is whether the scripting engine (Papyrus) is capable of accessing the network or changing anything about the network commands (especially destination/content). If so, that's possibly bad because a lot of players have a propensity to just run as admin[0] due to script extenders in the various games, which are required for a lot of the most popular plugins (e.g. SkyUI). Used innocently, this could be really cool for modders. Check for updates or even download patches while the game is running for example. Or, hell, multiplayer. There's also a couple of other commands I found interesting in the game console, such as PyConsole and LuaConsole, which are described as Python and Lua consoles, but running these didn't do anything for me. Those would be fun to play with in game. [0]http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt
nosideeffects 11y ago
Only level 12 by November 20th? The desire to play must not have been that strong. He already got side tracked with something that isn't getting him any more loot.
- lambdaops 11y ago
  Between settlement building and figuring this out, what else is there? ;) In all seriousness, I made a new character for investigating the relay and fuzzing the server when I wanted so I wouldn't be screwing with my first character.
pinchn 11y ago
Just love the level of sniffing you can do to learn.

322 points by jnoller 11y ago

socmoth 11y ago

thanks for taking the time to write this up. (an upvote did not seem like enough).

netcraft 11y ago
agreed. very cool. cant wait to see what someone does with this.
- suprjami 11y ago
  Sadly I expect the next thing will be Bethesda encrypting this data.
  - akiselev 11y ago
    Why? Bethesda has a history of making games with best in class modability and the tools they release for moders are fleshed out versions of what they use for designing the game (which usually takes a few months, FO4 tool expected early 2016). Hell, with scripting extenders and graphics mods, some of their games like Morrowind can become nearly indistinguishable from modern AAA games nearly 13 years later. Bethesda knows this and I can't imagine them locking down anything that could be used to make their games better by their community for decades to come.
    - yoklov 11y ago
      Agreed. Despite the debacle with the paid skyrim mods (which I still think would be a good thing...), Bethesda definitely understands how important the modding community are to their games.
    - easytiger 11y ago
      Because other idiots are exposing their PS4 to the internet
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    More likely that somebody writes FalloutSheep that invades privacy by dumping the inventory of anybody playing on the same network and then users demand Bethesda encrypt the data.
    - Namidairo 11y ago
      In fairness, the server is disabled by default in the settings.
lambdaops 11y ago
:)

rcfox 11y ago

One application comes to mind for this: watch for new screenshots (assuming they automatically get put into a directory for Fallout 4 screenshots) and add the in-world coordinates to the EXIF data.

lambdaops 11y ago
OMG. Definitely didn't think of that.
a_bonobo 11y ago
Other ideas: - a fitbit (pipbit?) for Fallout, track how many km/miles ran/walked, how many km while carrying how much kg of equipment, theoretical calories lost - since it seems to synchronize stats and inventory, you can map where the player killed most enemies/took most stimpaks so you can get a heatmap of enemy-rich zones and rank them by difficulty - divide killed enemies by health lost (or used stimpaks) - there are sites like fallout4map.com which track the location of unique and hardcoded items, you can automate this now
- GeneralTspoon 11y ago
  This could be interesting. I created fallout4map.com, and if it could automagically track a player's pipboy locations, that would be awesome. I tried decoding the binary data for the pipboy app, but didn't have much success. Perhaps someone smarter than me will be able to crack it.
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    I will take a quick look at decompiling the android app this afternoon
    - GeneralTspoon 11y ago
      It's a Unity app, so `apktool` works well to get out all the assets. Nothing is obfuscated. There's also sample pipboy data file there too (for the demo mode).

tomf64 11y ago

It would be incredibly cool to have a script that automatically manages your inventory while playing the game, e.g. the player picks up all items and has the script auto-drop them if they don't meet certain requirements (value/weight ratio, duplicates, etc.). I'm excited to see where this goes!

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
I'd be all over that. I find the way the game displays inventory (particularly guns) quite irritating to say the least. I want to see one ammo type at a time (since you need minimum one gun per ammo type) and then to see a comparison (damage, rate of fire, accuracy, and specials).
- viraptor 11y ago
  Yes, that's also one of the very few complaints I have about FO4. The whole inventory system is designed as if limited to what you can do with a controller. Why can't you deposit all junk from your companion automatically? Why can't you get all inventory not currently used by them? Why can't you craft/replace with power armor pieces that are in storage? I hope some patches/mods for the inventory system come out soon.
  - throwaway420 11y ago
    I completely agree and want these features, but I think Bethesda is faced with the issue of overcomplicating the UI for a more mainstream audience which they're obviously hoping to attract. The UI is probably already completely overwhelming for a lot of mainstream users. At some point, I'm sure adding more options, buttons, commands, and screens might make a lot of people really uncomfortable. Obviously though there's a balancing act at play. The flip side to not having these features is that some of the inventory management stuff is a bit inconvenient and boring and cumbersome. But people tolerate that to an extent if the rest of the experience is worthwhile.
  - akiselev 11y ago
    I find this to be a pervasive problem with Bethesda games starting a few years after The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind was released. They pack an insane amount of complexity into their games then provide utterly feeble tools to manage it or refuse to invest time into them as that complexity grows from game to game (especially their inventory system which hasn't changed much since Oblivion). Nothing demonstrates this better than Fallout 4's base building mechanic which is leagues better (and more complicated) than in any other game I've played. You can literally build a downtown Sanctuary with a dozen 10 story tall skyscrapers with farmland and electrical infrastructure but doing so using the Workshop as it is now (months before the release of the official game editor) is absolutely maddening and down right impractical. No 2d map or overhead camera, no alignment with complex terrain like building foundations, no templating, zero interface to manage the settlers (the current community concensus is to give each settler a different hat or outfit for each available job!), and it's just down right Unintuitive in every way. The mechanic overall feels like it was part of the game design from day 1 but the interface they give you to use it was made in a weekend. Bethesda knows their games are bought for replayability and community mods so it seems that they make a lot of sacrifices no other gaming company would, knowing that the more annoying it is the faster some modder will totally replace it with far superior execution. To be fair though, no other company cranks out fantastic open world games that are as good as Bethesda's on such a regular basis. All of this pays off when a five year old game has graphics as good as a newly released one except with half a decade of damn near professional effort by thousands of modders.

zxter 11y ago

With this we can prioritize healing items and auto use them when on low health!

robmcm 11y ago
Would be nice to auto cook all meat when at a cooking station.

newman314 11y ago

Incidentally, flexlm/port 27000 used to be how a variety of apps were licensed. Much pain was had when the license manager would occasionally go out to lunch.

praseodym 11y ago

So there is no authentication on the API endpoint? I have my PS4 connected directly to the Internet to avoid NAT issues, and I wonder whether the API would be available openly as well.

Roby65 11y ago
Theorically, knowing your ip, people would be able to connect to your fallout 4.
- praseodym 11y ago
  Or practically, if they would scan the entire IPv4 space, which doesn't take too long on a decent connection (5min with 10Gbps, https://zmap.io/ https://zmap.io/)
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    Wonder if any relevant strings have shown up in Shodan searches yet. Still, I'd imagine most PCs and game consoles are behind a firewall and ports aren't forwarded.
easytiger 11y ago
why not telnet to it? <yourip>:28000
axx 11y ago
Since most people have their console running behind a firewall, this should not be an issue. Unless you expose those ports to the outside world...

joonoro 11y ago

This is very cool. I have to wonder though what you could do with it, like I don't mean to devalue the OP but I see a lot of people here discussing the possibilities (inventory management etc.), but what is there to stop you from doing that with traditional modding? I guess with consoles this might be useful (although I heard consoles can play PC mods this time around), but as far as the PC goes its probably far easier just to use make an actual mod for the game that does what you want instead of bouncing it around wirelessly with a relay.

joonoro 11y ago
If people downvoting me could explain why, that would be nice. I'm not trying to downplay the OP's creation and I think it's really cool. I was trying to reply to the people in this thread because I feel like they are praising it for the wrong reasons. It's not like we can finally access your inventory programmatically and script it for the first time ever, you could already do all of that stuff with regular modding, and it'd probably be a lot easier too. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if so I'd like to know how. As an analogy, to me it'd be like praising WIFI for finally allowing us to communicate between computers on a network.
- lambdaops 11y ago
  Didn't downvote, am the author of the write up. Since I don't run Windows in the house any more, there's little opportunity for mods (I'm playing on the PS4). Tinkering with the network was fun in its own right.
lfowles 11y ago
I think it's mainly being able to use a language you are familiar with vs working with Bethesda's custom scripting language[0] [0]: http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Papyrus http://www.creationkit.com/Category:Papyrus

misterdai 11y ago

Would be interesting to play around with. Imagine having a "Twitch plays Fallout 4", but with someone playing the game properly but Twitch gets to control the inventory, armour, weapons, map etc... all via the pipboy api.

voltagex_ 11y ago

If someone wants to chip in for a copy of XBox One Fallout 4, I'd be happy to look at adding support for it this weekend - it's 100AUD which is a little crazy.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

FLUX-YOU 11y ago

It's possible that the client is capable of more than just being a server. Running help "Bethesda.NET" 0 in the console reveals some interesting commands, such as login, checking if the player is logged in, getting some profile stats and whatnot. So of interest is whether the scripting engine (Papyrus) is capable of accessing the network or changing anything about the network commands (especially destination/content). If so, that's possibly bad because a lot of players have a propensity to just run as admin[0] due to script extenders in the various games, which are required for a lot of the most popular plugins (e.g. SkyUI). Used innocently, this could be really cool for modders. Check for updates or even download patches while the game is running for example. Or, hell, multiplayer. There's also a couple of other commands I found interesting in the game console, such as PyConsole and LuaConsole, which are described as Python and Lua consoles, but running these didn't do anything for me. Those would be fun to play with in game. [0]http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt

nosideeffects 11y ago

Only level 12 by November 20th? The desire to play must not have been that strong. He already got side tracked with something that isn't getting him any more loot.

lambdaops 11y ago
Between settlement building and figuring this out, what else is there? ;) In all seriousness, I made a new character for investigating the relay and fuzzing the server when I wanted so I wouldn't be screwing with my first character.

pinchn 11y ago

Just love the level of sniffing you can do to learn.