Goonhub
02-16-2022, 10:06 AM
This would be way too abusable to track literally anyone on the station via a PDA. But if you can propose a way to solve that issue it sounds good. Though I think the avilability of this device you propose is too much, it doesn't need to be in four different places.
I don't like the sender_proxy idea. At least not in the form of it being a packet field. An alternate idea I have is that this pinpointer device could be slightly more general "network forensics" device that could sniff packets (wireless as usual, wired... maybe if you are standing on a data terminal?) and clicking on a packet there could let you track the sender of that packet. This way instead of "sender_proxy" being a field in the packet there would be a var/atom/sender_device or something like that on the packet.
This would also solve a different issue: By doing all of this via locate() you run into the abuse of being able to track ANY ATOM if you know its ref (which is not difficult to get in-game, hell, sometimes if you have lag and use a verb on an object and the server reports the object has moved and is no longer in range the ref will appear in your command bar). And even if you managed to get around that issue there's the secondary issue of refs not being unique. Well, they are unique at a given point in time but when an object gets deleted its ref can get assigned to something else. And then there's the tertiary issue that relying on netIDs being convertible to refs is not something you should do because sometime in the (likely distant) future I'd like to change the netID assignment "algorithm" to be more random so it's not (almost) fixed every round. Doing the packet sniffer thing where you click on a packet and track its owner would fix this issue (though not the PDA issue).
I don't like the sender_proxy idea. At least not in the form of it being a packet field. An alternate idea I have is that this pinpointer device could be slightly more general "network forensics" device that could sniff packets (wireless as usual, wired... maybe if you are standing on a data terminal?) and clicking on a packet there could let you track the sender of that packet. This way instead of "sender_proxy" being a field in the packet there would be a var/atom/sender_device or something like that on the packet.
This would also solve a different issue: By doing all of this via locate() you run into the abuse of being able to track ANY ATOM if you know its ref (which is not difficult to get in-game, hell, sometimes if you have lag and use a verb on an object and the server reports the object has moved and is no longer in range the ref will appear in your command bar). And even if you managed to get around that issue there's the secondary issue of refs not being unique. Well, they are unique at a given point in time but when an object gets deleted its ref can get assigned to something else. And then there's the tertiary issue that relying on netIDs being convertible to refs is not something you should do because sometime in the (likely distant) future I'd like to change the netID assignment "algorithm" to be more random so it's not (almost) fixed every round. Doing the packet sniffer thing where you click on a packet and track its owner would fix this issue (though not the PDA issue).