Rime: April Progress Report

Hey,

There have been a few things that have been going on in the last few months. I just wanted to give everyone an update on the current status of Rime and the Venice Unleashed interop. First things first, plugin’s are hard, if you have checked the previous post on plugins and open source, I am making use of a plugin system for all external and internal plugins. That way you, the hobby modder can look at what we have to offer, and the functionality of it and be able to write your own code to interact with the Frostbite engine. That’s all fine and dandy, but I am a security-oriented coder. I have been working on for the last week a system to overlay the plugin interface’s to allow the code to be sandboxed, only allowing read/write access to the folder where the plugin resides. This will lessen the chance of someone writing a malicious plugin to steal sensitive information, or execute code that could potentially be harmful.

The way that I was going to get around these issues, is force the sandbox to run as lower-level privileges than Rime itself. (Even though Rime does not require to be ran as administrator, some people will anyway). That a malicious plugin writer won’t be able to gain privileges via Rime. And all of this is where the problem comes in, I have been debugging and researching the best approach to this in C#, and there just isn’t one (publicly at least). So I am making the decision to scrap the secure plugin system for the closed/open alpha of Rime until we get a functional system for the beta. With that being said, I highly recommend that any plugin creator open source their plugins so people can compile it from scratch. If you download a pre-built executable, use caution and only download from trustworthy people.

Fixes:

• Fixed incorrect TextureHeader structure
• Fixed DXT1-3 native C# processing.
• Fixed EBX reading code
• Entire application structure refactoring for prep for release (removing unused/old code etc, that’s why we have source control ain’t it?)
• Abstracted multiple classes to prepare for multi-game Frostbite support.

Broke:

• Internal communication of all parts of Rime. (Yeah… I fudged up bad)
• Plugins in their entirety (which means all the built-in editors for Rime have been disabled as well, Rime’s internals uses the same plugin system)
• DirectX 11 Mesh Renderer (Instead of using laggy WPF for everything)

Additions:

• Battlefield 4 Resource Types
• Proper loading of all game files and resources. (Just like how it gets done in-engine, no longer needs to decompile the entire map/game to mod resources)
• Retrieving encryption information, and real time modding via Venice Unleashed.