Great news regarding Worms World Party (Online)

Hi,

so I was looking around on google and found the name "Martin Randall", who supposedly did the online part of Worms World Party for Dreamcast.


And so I emailed the guy after I found his email address somewhere.


I asked him how the servers operated, and what it takes (besides packetlogs) to get this up and running again.

This is Martin Randall's answer:

 

This is awesome info, hopefully someone will be able to make use of it. Thank you petterk!

 

With this info, it should be possible to set up a irc-server, redirect the DNS or target-address with a codebreaker or something in the game itself, to the irc-server and see if it works by using a minimum of 2 Dreamcasts!

 

My thoughts exactly. I don't have a proper DC modem setup or else I'd give it a shot myself but it does sound that easy and while I'm hopeful it will be I'm not going to bet on it being 100% flawless the first time.

 

Im waiting for a new power-transformer for my Viking phone line simulator before I can test it out, but I will be setting up a irc server on my FreeBSD box in the meantime. What would really help though, is if someone can find out what server (ip, url) the game is trying to connect to. Then all I need to do is redirect the Dreamcast to my own server and wait for someone else to give me a helping hand by joining the game

 

If you cann send me the executables I can take a look if I have some time.

You should at least be able to sniff that out once your network setup is done though.

 

I've looked into this a few years ago. With the IRC server I had set up then, I determined the following:
For "#/#/#", the first two are the game type and the last number is possibly the terrain type.

These are the IRC sprintfs pulled from the game:

<%c:%s>%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d
<%c:%s>
<%c:%s>%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d,%d
<%c:%s>
<%c:%s>%d,%s,%s,%s,%s,%d,%d
<%c:%s>no

And I determined what these do from communicating with the IRC server:

<en!hash> (GAME FULL)
<q:gn>pn!hash (CALLS GAME ENTER)
<nn!hash> (EXITED THE GAME)
<cn!hash> (PLAYER LEAVES A GAME)
<dn!hash>pn (PLAYER ENTERED)

* gn = (game's name)
* pn!hash = (player's name)!(8-character hash)

As I had mentioned over at http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com, the game won't start. The best guess is that there may have been a bot on the server that negotiated part of the connection or was there for authorization.

 

Thats great info right there, but regarding the issue with the game not starting, look:

_IF_ the game doesnt start when we set up the game, we could try finding the 'start game'-command ourselves, and parse it via the server manually to see if that helps.

 

If someone has any interest in this, theres a parallell thread going on a Dreamcast-talk.com.

http://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6059

 

If someone uses PC-DC server (or can connect their DC to the PC anyway) and could fire up wireshark or another packet analyzer we could probably find out what port WWP tries to connect to so that we can try to forward the game to a standard irc server.

 

I wish I hadn't throw away my modems years ago :-(

 

The game has already been forwarded to a standard IRC server (see my post above). I tested the game several years ago. I was able to create a game, but the game couldn't be started, if I recall correctly. Either that or another player couldn't join the created game without being forwarded directly to the room, and then the game wouldn't start.

 

I have seen your post and I know theres something missing, but Im going to take a deeper look at this in a few days, testing it out etc. Would help to shave off some time if anybody happen to know the port to set up the server on so I can jump right into it.

 

Any progress on this?

 

Not a priority for me right now as I only have BBA access atm. Working on getting UT back online.

Anyway, the ports for the PC-version was:

17010, 17011, 17012

One could set up a local irc server on a computer and try to connect with the correct ports.

 

I wouldn't mind playing a few games of worms haha. I hope you guys get the server going, I can help test if you want.

 

Any news?

 

Try the dreamcast-talk thread linked above, it's a bit more lively there - the last post is from july

 

The game isn't compatible with a standard IRC server and a custom/modified server needs to be setup for the game to function properly