Darkflame Universe

Introduction

Darkflame Universe (DLU) is a server emulator for LEGO® Universe. Development started in 2013 and has gone through multiple iterations and is now able to present a near perfect emulation of the game server.

LEGO® Universe

Developed by NetDevil and The LEGO Group, LEGO® Universe launched in October 2010 and ceased operation in January 2012.

License

Darkflame Universe is licensed under AGPLv3, please read LICENSE. Some important points:

• We are not liable for anything you do with the code
• The code comes without any warranty what so ever
• You must disclose any changes you make to the code when you distribute it
• Hosting a server for others counts as distribution

Disclaimers

Setup difficulty

Throughout the entire build and setup process a level of familiarity with the command line and preferably a Unix-like development environment is greatly advantageous.

Hosting a server

We do not recommend hosting public servers. DLU is intended for small scale deployment, for example within a group of friends. It has not been tested for large scale deployment which comes with additional security risks.

Supply of resource files

Darkflame Universe is a server emulator and does not distribute any LEGO® Universe files. A separate game client is required to setup this server emulator and play the game, which we cannot supply. Users are strongly suggested to refer to the safe checksums listed in the resources tab below when checking if a client will work.

Build

Development of the latest iteration of Darkflame Universe has been done primarily in a Unix-like environment and is where it has been tested and designed for deployment. It is therefore highly recommended that Darkflame Universe be built and deployed using a Unix-like environment for the most streamlined experience.

Prerequisites

Clone the repository

git clone --recursive https://github.com/DarkflameUniverse/DarkflameServer

Python

Some tools utilized to streamline the setup process require Python 3, make sure you have it installed.

Choosing the right version for your client

DLU clients identify themselves using a higher version number than the regular live clients out there. This was done make sure that older and incomplete clients wouldn't produce false positive bug reports for us, and because we made bug fixes and new content for the client.

If you're using a DLU client you'll have to go into the "CMakeVariables.txt" file and change the NET_VERSION variable to 171023 to match the modified client's version number.

Using Docker

Refer to Docker.md.

For Windows, refer to Docker_Windows.md.

Linux builds

Make sure packages like gcc, cmake, and zlib are installed. Depending on the distribution, these packages might already be installed. Note that on systems like Ubuntu, you will need the zlib1g-dev package so that the header files are available. libssl-dev will also be required as well as openssl.

CMake must be version 3.14 or higher!

Build the repository

You can either run build.sh when in the root folder of the repository:

./build.sh

Or manually run the commands used in build.sh:

MacOS builds

Ensure cmake, zlib and open ssl are installed as well as a compiler (e.g clang or gcc).

In the repository root folder run the following. Ensure -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/path/to/openssl points to your openssl install location

# Create the build directory, preserving it if it already exists
mkdir -p build
cd build

# Run CMake to generate build files
cmake .. -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=/path/to/openssl

# Get cmake to build the project. If make files are being used then using make and appending `-j` and the amount of cores to utilize may be preferable, for example `make -j8`
cmake --build . --config Release

Windows builds (native)

Ensure that you have either the MSVC or the Clang (recommended) compiler installed. You will also need to install CMake. Currently on native Windows the server will only work in Release mode.

Build the repository

:: Create the build directory
mkdir build
cd build

:: Run CMake to generate make files
cmake ..

:: Run CMake with build flag to build
cmake --build . --config Release

Windows for ARM has not been tested but should build by doing the following

:: Create the build directory
mkdir build
cd build

:: Run CMake to generate make files
cmake .. -DMARIADB_BUILD_SOURCE=ON

:: Run CMake with build flag to build
cmake --build . --config Release

Windows builds (WSL)

This section will go through how to install WSL and building in a Linux environment under Windows. WSL requires Windows 10 version 2004 and higher (Build 19041 and higher) or Windows 11.

Open the Command Prompt application with Administrator permissions and run the following:

# Installing Windows Subsystem for Linux
wsl --install

Open the Ubuntu application and run the following:

# Make sure the install is up to date
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

# Make sure the gcc, cmake, build-essentials, zlib1g-dev and libssl-dev packages are installed
sudo apt install gcc cmake build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev

Then, Follow the Linux instructions

ARM builds

AArch64 builds should work on linux and MacOS using their respective build steps. Windows ARM should build but it has not been tested

Updating your build

To update your server to the latest version navigate to your cloned directory

cd /path/to/DarkflameServer

run the following commands to update to the latest changes

git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive

now follow the build section for your system

Setting up the environment

Resources

LEGO® Universe 1.10.64

This repository does not distribute any LEGO® Universe files. A full install of LEGO® Universe version 1.10.64 (latest) is required to finish setting up Darkflame Universe.

Known good SHA256 checksums of the client:

• 8f6c7e84eca3bab93232132a88c4ae6f8367227d7eafeaa0ef9c40e86c14edf5 (packed client, rar compressed)
• c1531bf9401426042e8bab2de04ba1b723042dc01d9907c2635033d417de9e05 (packed client, includes extra locales, rar compressed)
• 0d862f71eedcadc4494c4358261669721b40b2131101cbd6ef476c5a6ec6775b (unpacked client, includes extra locales, rar compressed)

Known good SHA1 checksum of the DLU client:

• 91498e09b83ce69f46baf9e521d48f23fe502985 (packed client, zip compressed)

How to generate a SHA256 checksum:

# Replace <file> with the file path to the client

# If on Linux or MacOS
shasum -a 256 <file>

# If on Windows
certutil -hashfile <file> SHA256

Setting up client dependencies

• Darkflame Universe can run with either a packed or an unpacked client.
• Navigate to sharedconfig.ini and fill in the client_path field with the location of your client.

Client database

• On the initial sever start, the server will do the following

• Extract the file cdclient.fdb from your packed client (if you have an unpacked client this step is skipped.)
• cdclient.fdb will be converted to CDServer.sqlite.

• Optionally, you can also convert the database manually using fdb_to_sqlite.py using lcdr's utilities. Just make sure to rename the file to CDServer.sqlite instead of cdclient.sqlite.
• Migrations to the database are automatically run on server start. Migrations address issues with data in the database that would normally cause bugs. When migrations are needed to be ran, the server may take a bit longer to start.

Database

Darkflame Universe utilizes a MySQL/MariaDB database for account and character information.

Initial setup can vary drastically based on which operating system or distribution you are running; there are instructions out there for most setups, follow those and come back here when you have a database up and running.

• Note that all that you need to do is create a database to connect to. As long as the server can connect to the database, the schema will always be kept up to date when you start the server.

Configuration

After the server has been built there should be five ini files in the build director: sharedconfig.ini, authconfig.ini, chatconfig.ini, masterconfig.ini, and worldconfig.ini.

• All options in shardconfig.ini should have something filled in.
• worldconfig.ini contains several options to turn on QOL improvements should you want them. If you would like the most vanilla experience possible, you will need to turn some of these settings off.
• masterconfig.ini contains options related to permissions you want to run your servers with.
• authconfig.ini contains an option to enable or disable play keys on your server. Do not change the default port for auth.
• chatconfig.ini contains a port option.

Migrations

• Both databases are automatically setup and migrated to what they should look like for the latest commit whenever you start the server.

Verify

Your build directory should now look like this:

• AuthServer
• ChatServer
• MasterServer
• WorldServer
• authconfig.ini
• chatconfig.ini
• masterconfig.ini
• sharedconfig.ini
• worldconfig.ini
• ...

Your sharedconfig.ini file should have:

• The client_path option filled in with the location of your packed client.
• A MySQL/MariaDB database is setup with the credentials filled in

Running the server

• If everything has been configured correctly you should now be able to run the MasterServer binary. Darkflame Universe utilizes port numbers under 1024, so under Linux you either have to give the binary network permissions or run it under sudo.

First admin user

• Run MasterServer -a to get prompted to create an admin account. This method is only intended for the system administrator as a means to get started, do NOT use this method to create accounts for other users!

Nexus Dashboard

• Follow the instructions here to setup the DLU Nexus Dashboard web application. This is the intended way for users to create accounts.

Admin levels

• The admin level, or Game Master level (hereafter referred to as gmlevel), is specified in the accounts.gm_level column in the MySQL database. Normal players should have this set to 0, which comes with no special privileges. The system administrator will have this set to 9, which comes will all privileges. gmlevel 8 should be used to give a player a majority of privileges without the safety critical once.

While a character has a gmlevel of anything but 0, some gameplay behavior will change. When testing gameplay, you should always use a character with a gmlevel of 0.

User guide

• A few modifications have to be made to the client.

Client configuration

To connect to a server follow these steps:

• In the client directory, locate boot.cfg
• Open it in a text editor and locate where it says AUTHSERVERIP=0:
• Replace the contents after to : and the following , with what you configured as the server's public facing IP. For example AUTHSERVERIP=0:localhost for locally hosted servers
• Launch legouniverse.exe, through wine if on a Unix-like operating system
• Note that if you are on WSL2, you will need to configure the public IP in the server and client to be the IP of the WSL2 instance and not localhost, which can be found by running ifconfig in the terminal. Windows defaults to WSL1, so this will not apply to most users.

Brick-By-Brick building

• Brick-By-Brick building requires PATCHSERVERIP=0: in the boot.cfg to point to a HTTP server which always returns HTTP 404 - Not Found for all requests. This can be most easily achieved by pointing it to localhost while having sudo python -m http.server 80 running in the background. On Unix based systems, you may need to run python3 instead of python.
• You may also need to set UGCSERVERIP=0: to localhost as well.

In-game commands

• A list of all in-game commands can be found here.

Credits

Active Contributors

• EmosewaMC
• Jettford
• Aaron K.

DLU Team

• DarwinAnim8or
• Wincent01
• Mick
• averysumner
• Jon002
• Jonny

Research and tools

• lcdr
• Xiphoseer

Community management

• Neal

Former contributors

• TheMachine
• Matthew
• Raine
• Bricknave

Logo

• Cole Peterson (BlasterBuilder)

Special thanks

• humanoid24
• pwjones1969
• Simon
• ALL OF THE NETDEVIL AND LEGO TEAMS!