The BugEyed Review Blog

Due to recent foreseen circumstances, games.saix.net (aka SGS) had to Retire their Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory servers.

The foreseen circumstances are that of idiot players generally being idiots, swearing, cheating, etc. That in itself is easily solvable by good admins being vigilant and banning trouble-makers. However, Enemy Territory being a free game, and banning works on the ‘cd-key’ concept, it’s fairly easy to get around being banned…

So, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to write a semi-admin mod for ET, so that banning a player is a more permanent solution.

The idea is simple. Have players sign-up on a webpage, providing their e-mail address, a username and a password, with a default flag of AllowedToPlay set to True. The player then needs to type two commands inside his ET console to add his username and password to his ET configuration, and then join the server. The mod will then check read the username and password of each joining player against the database, authenticating them to the server. If the player is not authenticated (incorrect password or some such), or if the player *is* authenticated, but his AllowedToPlay flag is set to False, the server will promptly disconnect them.

That’s the basic idea. So, if a player is abusive, or cheats (or is suspected of cheating or whatever), or swears, or breaks the rules, or for whatever reason, the admins can just change that player’s AllowedToPlay flag to False, kick the player off the server using the conventional means, and from then that username will not be allowed to connect (or will get disconnected soon after connecting anyway…)

With some good logging, this mod will be able to keep track of which nicks and GUIDs a specific username uses, for tracking of otherwise useless information, you never know…

The one limitation I have for the SGS servers, is that this mod needs to run on a Windows machine… Ick. Doable, but not preferable.

So far I’ve got Activestate Perl and cygwin installed on my machine at home.

I’m open to suggestions on what to add to this mod, or how to better do the authentication, or what not…

Please comment here if you have any ideas. For the moment I’ll be calling this mod the userpass_etmod.

References: I found a mod for ET called the etadmin_mod, which I’m using as a reference on how to do the userpass_etmod.