
Fallout 4 Service Discovery and Relay - jnoller
https://getcarina.com/blog/fallout-4-service-discovery-and-relay/
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rcfox
One application comes to mind for this: watch for new screenshots (assuming
they automatically get put into a directory for Fallout 4 screenshots) and add
the in-world coordinates to the EXIF data.

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a_bonobo
Other ideas:

\- a fitbit (pipbit?) for Fallout, track how many km/miles ran/walked, how
many km while carrying how much kg of equipment, theoretical calories lost

\- since it seems to synchronize stats and inventory, you can map where the
player killed most enemies/took most stimpaks so you can get a heatmap of
enemy-rich zones and rank them by difficulty - divide killed enemies by health
lost (or used stimpaks)

\- there are sites like fallout4map.com which track the location of unique and
hardcoded items, you can automate this now

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GeneralTspoon
This could be interesting. I created fallout4map.com, and if it could
automagically track a player's pipboy locations, that would be awesome.

I tried decoding the binary data for the pipboy app, but didn't have much
success. Perhaps someone smarter than me will be able to crack it.

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tokenizerrr
I will take a quick look at decompiling the android app this afternoon

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GeneralTspoon
It's a Unity app, so `apktool` works well to get out all the assets. Nothing
is obfuscated. There's also sample pipboy data file there too (for the demo
mode).

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tokenizerrr
Sounds like you've looked into this already, any chance you published your
findings to spare the rest of us the hassle? :)

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GeneralTspoon
Normally I keep notes on decompiling game files, but this time I didn't
unfortunately :/

But I didn't get too far anyway - the DemoMode.bin file contains the demo
data. There's a list of locations in a custom binary format, but the titles
are readable.

I tried modifying the values to make them all visible, but the app threw a
parsing exception when trying to load my modified file.

Hope that helps!

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tomf64
It would be incredibly cool to have a script that automatically manages your
inventory while playing the game, e.g. the player picks up all items and has
the script auto-drop them if they don't meet certain requirements
(value/weight ratio, duplicates, etc.). I'm excited to see where this goes!

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UnoriginalGuy
I'd be all over that.

I find the way the game displays inventory (particularly guns) quite
irritating to say the least. I want to see one ammo type at a time (since you
need minimum one gun per ammo type) and then to see a comparison (damage, rate
of fire, accuracy, and specials).

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viraptor
Yes, that's also one of the very few complaints I have about FO4. The whole
inventory system is designed as if limited to what you can do with a
controller. Why can't you deposit all junk from your companion automatically?
Why can't you get all inventory not currently used by them? Why can't you
craft/replace with power armor pieces that are in storage?

I hope some patches/mods for the inventory system come out soon.

~~~
akiselev
I find this to be a pervasive problem with Bethesda games starting a few years
after The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind was released. They pack an insane amount
of complexity into their games then provide utterly feeble tools to manage it
or refuse to invest time into them as that complexity grows from game to game
(especially their inventory system which hasn't changed much since Oblivion).
Nothing demonstrates this better than Fallout 4's base building mechanic which
is leagues better (and more complicated) than in any other game I've played.
You can literally build a downtown Sanctuary with a dozen 10 story tall
skyscrapers with farmland and electrical infrastructure but doing so using the
Workshop as it is now (months before the release of the official game editor)
is absolutely maddening and down right impractical. No 2d map or overhead
camera, no alignment with complex terrain like building foundations, no
templating, zero interface to manage the settlers (the current community
concensus is to give each settler a different hat or outfit for each available
job!), and it's just down right Unintuitive in every way. The mechanic overall
feels like it was part of the game design from day 1 but the interface they
give you to use it was made in a weekend.

Bethesda knows their games are bought for replayability and community mods so
it seems that they make a lot of sacrifices no other gaming company would,
knowing that the more annoying it is the faster some modder will totally
replace it with far superior execution. To be fair though, no other company
cranks out fantastic open world games that are as good as Bethesda's on such a
regular basis. All of this pays off when a five year old game has graphics as
good as a newly released one except with half a decade of damn near
professional effort by thousands of modders.

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saiya-jin
the last bit ain't true - from my experience last month. had a off-gaming
period for last 5 years and didn't play Skyrim when it was launched. sat to it
2 months ago, with all datadiscs, patches, put all interesting (not only)
graphic mods, which had years to gain maturity and compatibility. So I thought
I will have the best possible version of the game, better than creators ever
aimed for.

The game looked meh on all maxed, but that isn't a dealbreaker for me (after
all, I still sometimes run old Deux Ex 1, probably the best game ever in its
genre). it was boring like hell, and the whole game screamed quantity-over
quality. FYI - I played all previous TES games vigorously, starting properly
with Daggerfall (didn't have good enough rig for Arena back in those days, but
I played it too a bit). This was just nothing-special experience, and I
uninstalled it after few hours of gaming.

2 weeks ago installed Witcher 3, and those games are uncomparable. 21st
century meets 80's arcade gaming (heck, not even). Visual side is one aspect,
but this game is simply better in every possible way.

~~~
stuxnet79
Had an off-gaming period of 5 years as well, and trying to get back into it.
Just built a nice rig, to max out these new games. Is there a texture pack I
can get for the original Deus Ex (1) or something? I played Deus Ex HR two
years ago and I was blown away by it. Had a talk with a friend of mine who is
also a Deus Ex fan and he told me that Deus Ex 1 is better than HR in every
conceivable aspect. Of course I can't wait for Mankind Divided to come out,
but I'd very much like to play Deus Ex 1 (for historical reasons) without my
eyes smarting. If not I just might get Deus Ex HR Director's Cut off of Steam.

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FLUX-YOU
It's possible that the client is capable of more than just being a server.
Running

    
    
        help "Bethesda.NET" 0
    

in the console reveals some interesting commands, such as login, checking if
the player is logged in, getting some profile stats and whatnot.

So of interest is whether the scripting engine (Papyrus) is capable of
accessing the network or changing anything about the network commands
(especially destination/content). If so, that's possibly bad because a lot of
players have a propensity to just run as admin[0] due to script extenders in
the various games, which are required for a lot of the most popular plugins
(e.g. SkyUI).

Used innocently, this could be really cool for modders. Check for updates or
even download patches while the game is running for example. Or, hell,
multiplayer.

There's also a couple of other commands I found interesting in the game
console, such as PyConsole and LuaConsole, which are described as Python and
Lua consoles, but running these didn't do anything for me. Those would be fun
to play with in game.

[0][http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt](http://skse.silverlock.org/skse_readme.txt)

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misterdai
Would be interesting to play around with. Imagine having a "Twitch plays
Fallout 4", but with someone playing the game properly but Twitch gets to
control the inventory, armour, weapons, map etc... all via the pipboy api.

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socmoth
thanks for taking the time to write this up. (an upvote did not seem like
enough).

~~~
netcraft
agreed. very cool. cant wait to see what someone does with this.

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suprjami
Sadly I expect the next thing will be Bethesda encrypting this data.

~~~
akiselev
Why? Bethesda has a history of making games with best in class modability and
the tools they release for moders are fleshed out versions of what they use
for designing the game (which usually takes a few months, FO4 tool expected
early 2016).

Hell, with scripting extenders and graphics mods, some of their games like
Morrowind can become nearly indistinguishable from modern AAA games nearly 13
years later. Bethesda knows this and I can't imagine them locking down
anything that could be used to make their games better by their community for
decades to come.

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easytiger
Because other idiots are exposing their PS4 to the internet

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praseodym
So there is no authentication on the API endpoint? I have my PS4 connected
directly to the Internet to avoid NAT issues, and I wonder whether the API
would be available openly as well.

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Roby65
Theorically, knowing your ip, people would be able to connect to your fallout
4.

~~~
praseodym
Or practically, if they would scan the entire IPv4 space, which doesn't take
too long on a decent connection (5min with 10Gbps,
[https://zmap.io/](https://zmap.io/))

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soylentcola
Wonder if any relevant strings have shown up in Shodan searches yet.

Still, I'd imagine most PCs and game consoles are behind a firewall and ports
aren't forwarded.

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zxter
With this we can prioritize healing items and auto use them when on low
health!

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robmcm
Would be nice to auto cook all meat when at a cooking station.

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joonoro
This is very cool. I have to wonder though what you could do with it, like I
don't mean to devalue the OP but I see a lot of people here discussing the
possibilities (inventory management etc.), but what is there to stop you from
doing that with traditional modding? I guess with consoles this might be
useful (although I heard consoles can play PC mods this time around), but as
far as the PC goes its probably far easier just to use make an actual mod for
the game that does what you want instead of bouncing it around wirelessly with
a relay.

~~~
joonoro
If people downvoting me could explain why, that would be nice. I'm not trying
to downplay the OP's creation and I think it's really cool. I was trying to
reply to the people in this thread because I feel like they are praising it
for the wrong reasons. It's not like we can finally access your inventory
programmatically and script it for the first time ever, you could already do
all of that stuff with regular modding, and it'd probably be a lot easier too.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if so I'd like to know how.

As an analogy, to me it'd be like praising WIFI for finally allowing us to
communicate between computers on a network.

~~~
lambdaops
Didn't downvote, am the author of the write up. Since I don't run Windows in
the house any more, there's little opportunity for mods (I'm playing on the
PS4). Tinkering with the network was fun in its own right.

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nosideeffects
Only level 12 by November 20th? The desire to play must not have been that
strong. He already got side tracked with something that isn't getting him any
more loot.

~~~
lambdaops
Between settlement building and figuring this out, what else is there? ;)

In all seriousness, I made a new character for investigating the relay and
fuzzing the server when I wanted so I wouldn't be screwing with my first
character.

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voltagex_
If someone wants to chip in for a copy of XBox One Fallout 4, I'd be happy to
look at adding support for it this weekend - it's 100AUD which is a little
crazy.

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newman314
Incidentally, flexlm/port 27000 used to be how a variety of apps were
licensed. Much pain was had when the license manager would occasionally go out
to lunch.

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pinchn
Just love the level of sniffing you can do to learn.

