RO2 Client-side Sound mods..../small rant

[crow125]

so as ive read through almost every post to see why the old clientside gun sound mod doesnt work anymore i see that no one has been able to make them work again. ive talked to sajer ive even talked to a few of the guys i tested with in RS but no one is willing to tell me how the hell i can get my awsome sound pack to work again. i only get smart *** remarks saying "post on the forums" or "wait for it to be white listed" now i understand that the game has been out for quite awhile and that the team itself is small but cmon i need some answers and apparently so do the other few people who used that pack. when the files are placed in the RO2 directory they cause a version mismatch upon joining of any server. this makes me think that A. the servers have they're own files and, instead of using some crumby steam workshop mod that will only work on some servers, they use their own files. B. why have the sound mods announced by ducky not been made a priority to white list? or even jsut make us the players able to modify the sound packs. i thought that maybe i could use the UDK to edit the files personally but im not sure how long that would take nor if it would work....so the question....why cant i use custom client side audio files like i used to be able to a year ago.

 

[dibbler67]

so as ive read through almost every post to see why the old clientside gun sound mod doesnt work anymore i see that no one has been able to make them work again. ive talked to sajer ive even talked to a few of the guys i tested with in RS but no one is willing to tell me how the hell i can get my awsome sound pack to work again. i only get smart *** remarks saying "post on the forums" or "wait for it to be white listed" now i understand that the game has been out for quite awhile and that the team itself is small but cmon i need some answers and apparently so do the other few people who used that pack. when the files are placed in the RO2 directory they cause a version mismatch upon joining of any server. this makes me think that A. the servers have they're own files and, instead of using some crumby steam workshop mod that will only work on some servers, they use their own files. B. why have the sound mods announced by ducky not been made a priority to white list? or even jsut make us the players able to modify the sound packs. i thought that maybe i could use the UDK to edit the files personally but im not sure how long that would take nor if it would work....so the question....why cant i use custom client side audio files like i used to be able to a year ago.

The reason you can't swap your files in is primarily to prevent exploits. For example, it'd be possible to greatly increase the volume of footsteps, or to replace the player skins with bright glowing neon ones.

Someone might try editing the animations and adding a whole bunch of AnimNotify_Script elements to wreak all sorts of havoc too. Who knows what that would do.

Ducky's mod wasn't whitelisted because of memory concerns IIRC (it could swap voices on the fly)

 

[crow125]

okay so there was the potential of exploits yet i know for a fact that punkbuster and VAC are the easiest anti cheat programs to circumvent, not saying i cheat, so there is always a way to cheat. but heres another question why is it that there is a mutator for sound immersion on the steam workshop that does the same and yet only one server runs the files? is there some sort of custom file sig from twi on theyre files? if so then i myself or anyone can circumvent that by downloading any custom signing software and copy the sig from the original audio packs to the new ones i put in place. the repack. the community of this game such as members of "AkA" my old clan "TaT" and "twb" used duckys mod because of the absolute awsomeness of the sound is there no way to petition twi for a recheck on atleast his original files? or atleast for some HQ weapon audio?

Thanks for the reply BTW

 

[dibbler67]

okay so there was the potential of exploits yet i know for a fact that punkbuster and VAC are the easiest anti cheat programs to circumvent, not saying i cheat, so there is always a way to cheat. but heres another question why is it that there is a mutator for sound immersion on the steam workshop that does the same and yet only one server runs the files? is there some sort of custom file sig from twi on theyre files? if so then i myself or anyone can circumvent that by downloading any custom signing software and copy the sig from the original audio packs to the new ones i put in place. the repack. the community of this game such as members of "AkA" my old clan "TaT" and "twb" used duckys mod because of the absolute awsomeness of the sound is there no way to petition twi for a recheck on atleast his original files? or atleast for some HQ weapon audio?

Thanks for the reply BTW

No problem. I develop the Immersion Overhaul Mutator.

The process is known as whitelisting, and it's TWI's way of maintaining the game's integrity. That is to say: maintain the game's fairness and how they feel it should play.

A PM from a dev from almost a year ago:

1) It works by having the design team at Tripwire reviewing the mutator
2) There are no size limits
3) The design team makes a decision that the mutator is not harmful to gameplay and does not impact public perception about the game (ie: if a new player jumps in a server and it is using the mutator they do not think the game is not good because of the mutator).
4) The mutator cannot change core gameplay (with very very few exceptions and everybody at Tripwire has to agree that it is better).

IOM is not whitelisted, but neither has it been submitted. Servers like the one you mention can still run IOM and other non-whitelisted things, but they will be unranked (no stats progress.)

I don't know exactly how the whitelisting process works from a technical standpoint, but I doubt it is as simple as digitally signing off on something. If it were people might be able to do as you describe. Instead I imagine there's some sort of hash function that generates a unique key for each file every time it's submitted based on the file contents (not something you can easily spoof.) TWI maintains a list of whitelisted keys, and whenever a server connects to the rankings and stats server the list of keys on the server is compared to TWI's. If something doesn't match the server is unranked.