OpenRDX

[sigg]

Sigg : I found this interesting post about RDX. I always knew RDX was old, but I 've never thougth it existed before CT_raid.

This is a post from Gibybo.

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*note: there is a lot of background info on me and the guild situation on Eredar, this is helpful in order to fully understand the motives and environment surrounding RDX. If you aren’t interested in this though, you can skip about halfway down the page*

-- WoW Beta

I play solo for awhile learning the game etc. Eventually I am recruited by “The Guardians” (although they were using a different name in beta I think, I forgot what it was). I play with them through phase 2 and into phase 3. I lose interest in WoW and go back to other games, wc3/CS etc.

-- WoW Retail

The Guardians, TG for short, roll to Mal’Ganis and I follow them there to begin playing with them again. The server then goes down for several days and we decide to start anew on Eredar, I go with them again.

I level to 60 in TG and start paying attention to the raid scene. Another guild, “Valor”, starts running open raids on strat/scholo/UBRS with a DKP system. Myself and other TG members join their open DKP system and begin ‘raiding’ with them.

TG gathers enough 60s to start doing strat/scholo/UBRS runs of their own, but fairly unorganized at this time with loot being decided with /randoms.

As time goes on, conflict builds between the open DKP raids and TG’s own raids, as they are at conflicting times and members are stuck choosing between the two. One member of TG joins Valor to continue raiding with them, this increases the conflict. Raiding continues to be fairly casual in TG and they seem to be dead set against using a dkp type system – From their GM: “The Guardians will never use a point system.” This irritates me and I continue raiding with the open DKP crew. Going to the open DKP raids rather than those of my own guild causes obvious problems and builds tension between myself and TG leadership.

About the same time I get invited to the first open DKP Molten Core run which consisted of a mix of Valor, Scions of Destiny (another guild entering the raiding scene), and a few people from various guilds (second MC run on the server) and though we didn’t make it to Lucifron, I was impressed with the dedication of this group for raiding compared to TG. As Valor seemed to be much more oriented around raiding, and conflict brewing between TG leadership and myself, I joined Valor. I consider it to be a fairly peaceful switch, since my goals aligned with Valor much more so than TG.

-- MC/Onyxia

Valor continues to run strat/scholo/UBRS during the week and starts doing Molten Core/Onyxia on the weekends. Scions of Destiny, SoD for short, continues raiding Molten Core/Onyxia with us and Venificus releases RDX 3.

*RDX 3: A raid mod that would help us decurse/keep track of raid HP and mana. CT_Raid did not yet exist. RDX 3 had a public slave version, and a privately distro’ed master version. In order to use RDX 3, someone in the raid had to sync the slave versions with the master version. The master version sent a sync message with a very simple checksum for authentication, the slave versions would only listen to the master version. A master version was given to the leader of Valor. I was curious about the method used to authenticate the master version commands so I began reverse engineering the very simple checksum algorithm (I didn’t know anything about lua at the time). I eventually figured it out and began using it to sync RDX 3 for raids that didn’t have the Valor GM or Venificus in them.*

The Guardians start getting more of their members at 60 and realize more and more that the WoW endgame is raiding. About the same time, conflict builds between Valor and SoD, and SoD splits off. TG and SoD both have about 20 members to commit to raiding so they team up and start tackling MC/Ony, several weeks behind Valor.

Time goes on with two MC raiding guilds: Valor, and the TG/SoD alliance. TG/SoD and Valor build a rivalry that should be easy to understand by now. Venificus continues development of RDX.


*RDX 4: At this point in time you could still only get raid member HP/MP/targets by broadcasting it in a sync channel. Venificus moved away from the master/slave type protection and instead obfuscated the code for RDX 4 and built in some mild protection based on guild tags. If you were in TG/SoD it worked, if you were in Valor it spouted half-joking, half-insulting messages in valor guild chat, and for anyone not in TG/SoD it changed the HP/MP display of everyone in the raid every second to a random value. This took a day or two of digging through the obfuscated code with the Valor GM to find and disable (I was semi adept with lua at that point). After we had a working copy the Valor GM asked for permission from Venificus to distribute it to our raid group. We got permission (I guess he figured he had his fun and wasn’t too concerned about Valor using it at the time) and gave it out to our raid group.*

-- Farm mode

Valor is now on a 3-4 day per week raiding schedule. I am thoroughly bored the other 3-4 days of the week. We down rag and continue farming Ragnaros/Onyxia ahead of the rest of the server.

<Bloodshed> emerges as a HORDE raiding guild and if I remember correctly is about tied with SoD/TG in terms of raid progression.

Time goes on and it becomes more and more clear that Valor lacks the dedication and motivation to compete in the endgame and only wishes to raid 3-4 days a week. I want a more ‘hardcore’ guild and considering this was the MC era, Conquest was at the top of my list. I reroll to Kilrogg and begin leveling a warlock.

-- Kilrogg

I level to 60 two months later and apply to Conquest. Eventually I get in, at the start of Blackwing Lair. We end up getting Broodlord down and Firemaw to 50% before Conquest jumps ship to Everquest 2 on the Highkeep server. I follow them over and roll a healer. At about level 16 I decide EQ2 sucks too much to play any further, and I begin playing other games

-- Intermission

With no desire to reroll again to a different WoW server I fill my time with other games and activities, WC3, CS, etc. I played WoW every once in awhile with my friends on Eredar, perhaps a duel here or there and a couple battlegrounds etc.

-- 6 Months Later

Conquest comes back to WoW and picks up where they left off, Firemaw. With 1337 strats from other guilds and new recruits from such guilds, conquest kills Nefarian a few days later. I happen to check their forums and notice they are back, so I load up WoW and begin raiding again.

As I get back into the WoW scene, I notice Venificus has released RDX 5 several months earlier. In typical RDX tradition, I decide I need to get a copy and see if I can break his latest protection methods! It is worth pointing out that Conquest knows absolutely nothing about RDX at this point. A few weeks go by and getting a copy of RDX 5 proves to be a little bit challenging. Venificus had individualized each copy of RDX 5 so if someone was to leak it, he would know who and be able to instantly remove them from the guild.

-- Flashback

Back on Eredar while I was still in Valor, Bloodshed became the server’s leading drama production facility. Stealing other Horde guild’s MC instance and stealing Ragnaros kills, ninja looting in pickup groups with permission from their leader, and doing whatever possible to grief anyone any way. Drama and corrupted leadership gave them problems and they eventually disbanded, only to reroll Alliance. Many of these Bloodshed members joined up with TG and started to raid with them. It took a short while for the true Bloodshed colors to shine through and TG promptly kicked them out. Bloodshed was then recreated Alliance side. Bitter with TG/SoD and looking for opportunity to grief anyone and everyone, they devised plans to accomplish such goals. This made them a great source for a leaked copy of RDX 5. They couldn’t use it because the protection prevented them from doing so, but would love nothing more than breaking it to piss TG/SoD off.

-- The Leaked RDX 5 Copy

My skills with lua have progressed rapidly but so has Venificus’s protection mechanisms. The code was lightly obfuscated so I begin de-obfuscating it and digging into its inner workings. I log into a test server with a friend so I have access to a character named “Venificus” that the mod will attempt to talk to. First loading in brings up a “Please activate RDX 5 popup box” – Clicking ok sends an activation request code to “Venificus.” Interesting, I keep digging. I find the activation code and quickly bypass it. RDX 5 now loads, wonderful. Except it is seriously broken. What seem to be UI bugs are popping up all the time and RDX 5 is almost unresponsive. The error is something like “Attempt to call MapUEMPrefs(), a nil value.” Interesting, I cannot find that function defined in RDX anywhere. To cut the story short, it didn’t exist anywhere in the code. The “activation” was actually a request for this missing function, that would be defined on load after Venificus sent it to your copy of the mod in a private tell (this was encoded in hex I might add). Well shit, I had no way of getting this function since Venificus most certainly wasn’t going to give it to me. I discovered some functions with similar functionality: SaveUEMPrefs, SaveUMPrefs, MapUMPrefs, MapGMPrefs, SaveGMPrefs. I looked for the patterns in those and logically recreated the missing MapUEMPrefs function (http://www.warcraftcheese.com/wowscreenies/cracking%20rdx.jpg). Added it to the code, and voila – RDX 5 worked flawlessly. After working with the code as much as I did, it became very clear to me how much work Venificus put into it, I gained a strong appreciation for his work, and I simply couldn’t release it to the public, against his wish.

-- TG/SoD Drama

A couple weeks later, some random drama unfolds in TG/SoD (I don’t know the details), and one of the members that quits releases their protected version of RDX 5 to the Eredar forums, RDX Drama Thread # 173. A week passes and a team of coders continues working through the protection, leaving progress updates in the thread.

Venificus then releases an unprotected version to the Eredar forums, complete with comments.

-- GPoker and Conquest

Another couple weeks pass and start making progress on a side-project, a Multiplayer Poker mod. I get to an alpha stage in the GUI of it and show it off in a screenshot to my guild (http://www.warcraftcheese.com/publicmods/gpoker%20gui%20phase4.jpg). My mistake – I forgot to take my personal copy of RDX out of the screenshot, as it was obviously the star of my UI. CQ is impressed with the unit frames, becomes interested, and I refer them to the public version of RDX 5 Venificus released. After about a week of messing around with it, Conquest adopts RDX 5 as our raid mod to replace CT_Raid.

-- Continued support

A raid mod is nothing without support, so I took on the task of maintaining it for our guild. A week or so passes and Itzlegend (occupation: something to do with programming!) becomes interested in coding RDX and learns Lua. Many weeks pass and we continue to learn more and more about RDX, continuing to add new features and boss mods. We progress through Naxxramas adding boss mods along the way.

-- Déjà Vu

Our private, in-guild version of RDX 5 with our additions (including Naxxramas boss mods) is leaked to a guild on our server, “Vengeance” (who downloads it from our private RDX 5 server). Now, when I found out, even I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of the situation. Only this time it’s not for personal use or the challenge of breaking the protection. The Vengeance guild master is on the receiving end of the leak and is determined to hide where it came from. He goes through the code, file names, folder names, renames any function with Giby/Itz in it, and removes any reference to Conquest, Gibybo, or Itzlegend. He then distributes it to his guild and tells the guild members to ignore any talk about it from outside of their guild. In an effort to find the mole, we confront the Vengeance GM in a neutral IRC channel. The log of this hits the boards from the alt of a drama loving #ti idler. Drama explodes, the filefront link to our private RDX 5 version (after the anti-cq alterations) is posted and copied to R&D where drama explodes again. Venificus finds out and has a field day. He clearly states that he has no problem with us using and maintaining the public version of RDX 5 but cannot help but remind everyone that I ‘cracked’ RDX 3, 4, and 5.

-- The Latest

Rumor has it the Vengeance GM plans to step down as GM in light of the recent RDX Drama.

To be continued…


*If you have any questions or comments please either AIM me (AIM: WorldOfWarkraft) or PM me on irc @ irc.enterthegame.com #conquest (name is Gibybo), the forum trolls have infested the RDX forum threads.*

[Ai]

O god eredar, that was a lovely server i miss being in bloodshed
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Dragonmaw - Aí

[strikerboy414]

Thanks for posting that dude, very interesting and fun to read. Everything seemed so exciting and dramatic back in Pre-BC, the fact that those guilds were at war over RDX is very strange to me, since I can't even get my closest friends to try out the mod. Usual comebacks are "I don't want to deal with all the 'settings'" and "I don't need it, i'm okay with all my mods for now."

To this I say "You don't have to deal with the settings, I can just make things for you and send them"

and "RDX has replaced the need for atleast 5-6 Addons for me, you should consider it"

[Ai]

strikeboy if you think RDX is powerful atm your wrong. way back when TG/SoD and valor was fighting over RDX veni was messing with Valors RDX timers, deleting items with it, blah blah. The old joke in bloodshed was "RDX plays the game for you" and it was almost 100% true lol
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Dragonmaw - Aí

[strikerboy414]

Yeah, I'd say its still powerful though. I haven't come across any other mods that have the capability to provide so many functions, while still being 100% customizable. With RDX you get the sense that you make your own mod, and anything you want, you get (almost lol). Does Veni still play?

[chris]

I haven't talked with Veni in quite some time. It has been about 1-2 years. I wouldn't be surprised if he is more casual now than before.

[Venificus]

I quit WoW several months ago; I dabble a little bit in Warhammer Online now, but I don't really have the time for MMOs anymore.

That post from Gibybo is somewhat accurate, although obviously it was written to make him look good in the aftermath of a scandal and so it's skewed in that direction. Fact is he flat out stole every version of RDX I ever made, tried (to varying degrees of success) to crack whatever protection scheme I put there, and gave them to his guild once he figured it out, usually over my objections. But that's neither here nor there.

The real history of RDX goes back to roughly the second week after release. At this time, a few of us hardcore gamers on Eredar had hit 60 and we were wondering what to do. We got together all the level 60s on Alliance side (spread out across many guilds) and decided to push into places like UBRS and Scholo.

At the time you could bring as many people as you want into those instances and we used to zerg it as a giant raid group. But we were having the obvious issues that you'd expect when nobody knows anyone else's health. Healing was terrible and we died a lot. I knew there was an API, so I sat down and learned it. I did most of my learning by looking at the Cosmos series of mods (in fact early versions of RDX up to V3 had dependencies on Chronos and Sea) and the Lua.org online manual.

I learned that you could send and receive messages between players by manipulating the chat channels, and thus RDX1 was born. At the time, there were no other raid health mods that I was aware of. Although I won't claim that RDX was the first, I am quite sure it was within the first 2 or 3 raid health mods ever made.

From the outset, it sorted people by life remaining, thus making it the first ever "emergency monitor," which was a staple feature of RDX until they nerfed it; it was obvious to me that a mod of this kind would only be useful if it could tell the healers where best to direct their heals. It also had filtration by group and class, and the ability to create a separate "watchlist" section to watch a specific person or tank.

However, other than that it was pretty laughable. I didn't know how to make buttons, so you couldn't click on people; you had to find them in the zerg (healers using RDX1 got pretty good at memorizing what people's characters looked like). I also didn't know how to make graphical status bars, so the mod literally just printed the person's name and a number for their health. All the interface commands were based on slash commands (i.e. you had to type /rdx add Venificus to add Venificus to your watchlist)

Despite how primitive it was, the effect of RDX on our little ragtag raid group was astonishing and immediate; amongst those of us who used it, we went from constant deaths to almost none. This gave me motivation to continue working on it, and a mission statement: the purpose of RDX would be to use the WoW UI to maximize the performance of my raid group.

RDX2 was released 2 weeks after V1 and added buttons and dynamic frame pools. Now you could click on people to target them.

RDX3 was released a further 2 weeks after V2. It added the Curable list, which was a list of people with a debuff you could cure. Clicking on any of those people would target them and cast whichever dispel was appropriate. I'm fairly sure this was the first "decursive."

RDX3 was really the version that started all the drama Gibybo mentions in his post. A few weeks after RDX3 was released, Lord Kazzak was put into the game. My guild was the first to organize serious raids on him, but we didn't have very many 60s and the raids, of necessity, included people from other guilds, including Gibybo's guild, Valor. Those of you who are familiar with old-school Kazzak can understand why something like RDX3 would come in very handy, and so I just gave it out like candy to anyone who came to a Kazzak raid. This resulted in essentially the whole of Valor having a copy of my mod, and at the time I didn't mind because we were working with them.

Of course, eventually we had the usual drama when you stick guilds together, people getting cut from raids and what not, and it was decided that we couldn't roll with Valor anymore. The split got pretty nasty and competitive, to the point where I asked myself why I should be allowing those douchebags to profit from my ingenuity.

They already had RDX3, so I was left with no choice but to create something superior. Thus RDX4 was born. RDX4 was the first version of RDX that approaches the power that it had up until the UI nerfs. Arbitrary filtering and sorting were possible, as were click-casting for all buttons. RDX4 introduced an automated buffing system as well, where you could set up a buff assignment and then press a single button to execute it repeatedly until everyone was buffed.

RDX4 also included a number of protection mechanisms primarily directed at stopping Gibybo and Valor from ripping it off. Some of these were just amusing and some were downright malicious in hindsight. The first one, which is the one Gibybo mentioned in his post, simply crippled the mod and printed a hilarious message. The second one, which Gibybo never found and remained in Valor's live copy of RDX4 up until I started abusing it, allowed me to execute arbitrary Lua commands on any Valor member who had it installed. I had a lot of fun crashing Merodin, Destin, and Dingle's WoW clients when I knew Valor was in the middle of fighting a hard boss.

Around this time, BWL was released. Comparing the difficulty of BWL with the difficulty of MC, it was obvious that things were moving to an entirely different level, and another paradigm shift in the UI would be required. Furthermore, at this time, CTRaid had been released, and many people felt it had advantages over RDX4.

I couldn't let them sully my name like that, so RDX5 hit the drawing board with the specific design goals of getting us past the tough gateway bosses in BWL, particularly Vaelestrasz and Firemaw -- and beating the !#%@ out of CTRaid in every possible way.

RDX5 was a quantum leap forward compared to 4. RDX5 built on VFL via a modular design, and introduced the RPC system which allowed things that CTRaid had, like ready checks and inventory checks, to be done in RDX as well. It also introduced the built-in bossmod system and the encounter pane system, and the RPC calls to synchronize encounter information across the raid group. I believe (and I'm not 100% sure on this because I know BigWigs came out during the BWL era as well) RDX5 was the first mod to use the bossmod timer bars.

RDX5 also had a protection system, and it was basically exactly as Giby described. In order to use RDX5, you had to authenticate it with me; each copy had an embedded code which would tell me who it was supposed to be for and if the code matched, I would send back a response containing a missing snippet of code without which RDX would not be able to run. This was my most effective protection ever.

It wasn't until months later, during the AQ era, when Giby figured it out and leaked it to Conquest. So now my guild and Conquest had it. And so it remained until the Naxx era, when Conquest started plastering screenshots of RDX all over their website. People asked questions. Other guilds on their server obtained copies, from which Gibybo had so wisely removed the protection.

Everything exploded. Heist made their own enhanced version and released it. I was getting 30 PMs a day from all over the world about RDX. (I don't know if he's still around but Superraider was probably the biggest spammer of my PM box in those days.)

I didn't really want to release it, and I decided that if I was going to, I'd want something in return. Thus I decided to make it a paid service, and you all know the history from there forward.

At any rate, I do pride myself on the fact that each release of RDX was a quantum leap ahead of what was out there at the time and I hope you guys can pull off the same thing with 7. (It looks like you're well on your way!)

[sigg]

Thank you Venificus for helping us to know more about history of RDX and about all what you have done.

History is always important for people to remember authors, contributors and the community users.

This is my point of view, as far as I 've been in the code and learning RDX6, I believe that this addon is so superior to any other mod and framework. All the concepts are genious.

It is not fair that this addon don't have all the glory it should have. But I hope to change this. We are preparing with all the community to show the new RDX. The release for wotlk will become RDX7.

And again thanks a lot.

Sigg

[Gibybo]

Oh man the good ol' days.

First of all, I agree what I wrote is obviously biased from my point of view and this is really the first time I've heard it from Veni's - very interesting read

Secondly, I sincerely apologize for the trouble I've caused you and the drama that spawned from it. Your RDX really inspired and intrigued me, I really loved learning how each version worked (and consequently cracking it). I did what I did because I really loved RDX, not because I wanted to screw with you (outside of 'friendly' server competition, of course). Besides, I was young then and I like to think I've matured at least a little in those years.

However, everything I said in that post was 100% factual, and you have posted some things that are not which I must address.

I never gave a copy of RDX to my guild (Conquest or Valor) without your permission. Not once. You gave us permission with RDX 4 (as it turned out, you had more devious plans in mind like crashing clients after I left). RDX 5 never left my hard drive - Conquest has never used any code of yours that you did not publicly release. I was indeed using an unauthorized version of RDX 5, but no one else ever got a copy. In fact, Conquest didn't even know of RDX until after you had released the RDX 5 code. Your time line of RDX in our guild screenshots and it being leaked to other guilds is simply off (only your public code was leaked, and my private code). And of course, we paid for RDX 6.

Also, your RDX 5 protection only lasted a long as it did because I was not playing WoW at all during that time. I had a working cracked copy within a week or so of me finding out about it, pfft

Why can't we just be friends Veni

[chris]

I remember those days as well, from an outside (wayyy outside, think right field) observer. Anyhow, topic locked ;p


-Chris

[sigg]

Last post :

Yesterday, someone ask me what VFL means ?

VFL - Venificus' Function Library

lol