Eulora's Client Core - Basic Docs



May 4th, 2019 by Diana Coman

As I'm doing anyway the work required for a saner Eulora client, I'm stuck as well with writing a minimal documentation for it, since on one hand there's no one else who can quite write it anyway and on the other hand there is no such thing at all1 for the old piece of inherited gnarl so the slate is blank, the space infinite and the need impossible to know in advance. So I'll just jot it down here for future reference and if you have anything to say about it, the sooner you write it down in the comments section below the better for you.

As general structure, the current plan for the new client is to have essentially 2 main parts: one is the actual Core, written in Ada and - hopefully2 - provided as a standalone library, blissfully unaware of ANY of the C/CPP legacy tangle; the other is an updated version of the current C/CPP tangle of a "client" that will use the Core for pretty much everything except the actual GUI. The GUI remains provided via CrystalSpace and cal3d, as it currently is. In other words, the Core offers an implementation of a basic Euloran client, to be used from/by any UI, graphical or otherwise as you care to make for yourself. Note that the interface is NOT the only thing you can build on top of the client Core. Essentially any client logic, bots and anything of the kind would still be the sort of thing built on top of / around the Core. A quick diagram of the whole thing looks like this:
2019_05_04_clientcore_struct_narrow

The Core itself is currently made of 3 conceptual layers, in order from bottom to top: encryption utilities (EuCrypt), SMG communications (SMG_Comms), client data cache. The encryption utilities are those of EuCrypt: CRC32 calculation, Serpent encryption/decryption, Keccak encryption/decryption, RNG interface using Fuckgoats, RSA key generation, RSA encryption/decryption using TMSR OAEP schema. The SMG communication part provides mainly: UDP with fixed-size but configurable payload, in/out message queues and attached "consumer" tasks, config file reader, packing/unpacking (i.e. raw, bottom-most layer of SMG communication protocol), read/write of messages conforming to SMG communication protocol specification, thin layer on top for encapsulating a "communication link" i.e. required addresses, ports and keys for both ends. The client data cache keeps effectively the whole world of Eulora as the client knows it at some specific time and provides thread-safe getters and setters for anything and everything that it can possibly hold.

Note that the client's knowledge of the world is by definition a cache as it flows always from the server and entirely in response to client's own requests - there is by design no "push" of information or anything else from server to client at any time. So the client may request from the server anything and everything it wants to3, having however to decide for itself what to make of the answers it receives and even what "obsolete" means in various contexts. At the moment this cache is still in the works and for this reason the least fully-fledged but at any rate, it has to grow around the structuring of data that is discussed in the SMG protocol specification: a potentially infinite hierarchical structure of "objects"4 having each a subset of an overall set of potential "properties"5 with their corresponding "values"6. Due to this trinity of objects-properties-values with its corresponding trinity of ID spaces, I took to calling the whole thing a tricache but the name as the design are still in the works so they'll have to enjoy their own detailed description at a later date. Until then, what have *you* been working on and how is that going?


  1. Perhaps you count this spaghetti piece as documentation but even so, just note who extracted it in the first place, anyway. 

  2. I'm holding quite tightly to this idea as I certainly do NOT want to have it depend on any of the current C/CPP mess. This being said, I can't know in advance what I might still uncover so for now and until it's all done, the qualifier remains "hopefully" rather than surely. 

  3. This in practice is of course quite severely restricted by what it *knows*, unsurprisingly. 

  4. Where "world", "map", "actor" or "pot" are equally objects and not even the only objects. Essentially an object is anything that is present in the game's world. 

  5. A property is a pre-defined and public structure that specifies the *type* of values that make up the property and their actual meaning. 

  6. The values may be given directly (e.g. "3" or "somename") or by reference aka as an ID. This ID may be itself either the ID of a suitable object or the ID of a value that is essentially too big to pass around every time - in the protocol's specification this sort of ID is currently called for historical reasons "filename" but it's worth noting that there is no imposition for it to be stored as a file at any point. 

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10 Responses to “Eulora's Client Core - Basic Docs”

  1. I like how the smallest box in reality is also the largest box in description. "Because nobody has any fucking idea what the fuck these idiots did with the rest of the design -- themselves included." Yes, yes, precisely because of that.

  2. Diana Coman says:

    Oh yes, this is a clear case of the more lines of code there are, the least they do.

    Design seems to have become somewhere down the line a luxury and nobody has - rather nobodies ever had - the means for it. After all, if nothing is ever meant to live - not even in memory, what actual life - for more than a year or two at the very most, what's any design good for, I suppose.

  3. [...] its place is rather close to the data cache mentioned previously and at any rate inside the new Client Core since it's certainly not some additional part of client logic nor some bit of user interface. [...]

  4. [...] functions that I have in mind, this will retrieve any information it needs about the sector from EuCore / EuCache (via a CPP-to-Ada layer, as needed) and then either retrieves the required sector from [...]

  5. [...] A working initial1 implementation (both on client and on server side) of the SMG protocol parts that are already clearly defined, namely network communication, account request/creation, serpent keys request & management, file request & transfer. This part meant Ada implementation of the protocol but also wrestling the legacy Eulora client into using the network communication structures of SMG Comms as encapsulated in the standalone Ada lib called EuCore. It also included some server-side work so that the end result is proper communication: the client can now ask for a new Eulora account and the server will reply according to SMG Comms; the client can also use its already established Serpent keys to communicate with the server and the server will reply accordingly. As required part of this work, a broad mapping of the client and its dependencies had to be done as well and basic docs for the client were published. [...]

  6. [...] EuCore (data acquisition logic, Ada): [...]

  7. [...] the lively Euloran development grounds: the GUI is shedding code and growing in usefulness, the Core adds to its services the packing and unpacking of all user actions known so far, the Data cache [...]

  8. [...] work shrank and shrank. But then, when I finally got to update the data hierarchy in my own EuCore component on clientside, there was indeed very little required: simply the addition of the new [...]

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