Hello, as you can see at Suelake.com, I’m stopping to maintain Suelake.com or the software behind it and can’t be held responsible for it anymore.
I’m doing this because I kinda feel threatened by the emails that Sulake Oy, the company behind Habbo and other multi user games, keeps sending us. I don’t think that it’s appropriate for me to keep running a private server.
Suelake.com will keep operating, but I’m resigning as a system administrator and won’t do anything with it anymore. 
You can download the demo of Just Cause 2 for PC at Steam now, it’s 1.2GB. I downloaded and played the demo yesterday and I loved it. In this game, you take on the role of some kind of guerilla guy (?) named Scorpio and you have to wreak havoc to government property on a massive island. You can run, fly and drive all kinds of vehicles ranging from motorbikes to helicopters and aircraft. You also have loads of weapons to play with and this nifty little ninjarope (grapple): you launch & attach it to something with F, and then haul in yourself to climb structures and stuff. Yesterday I was flying a helicopter real high, then I jumped out of it and started swinging below the unmanned heli with the ‘ninjarope’. You can also climb back ontop of the flying heli so I hopped on the nose and started shooting through the windows. After that, I crashed it in a large antenna tower that I had climbed before and parachuted to the ground. It’s kinda like a Latin version of James Bond with DirectX 10.1 graphics. 
This game looks really promising and release is set for later this month. It will come out at the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. As I said, the demo is only 1.2GB so it’s worth checking it out. 
As we speak I’m downloading Ubuntu 9.10 (Desktop, x86) for installing it at an old notebook laying around here. Even though I have used Ubuntu before (back in 2007 or so), I would like to see what it’s like now. Since I’ll be (hopefully) going to college in September of this year, I’ll need a notebook! I’ve decided that I don’t want a Windows laptop this time. I’m all fine with Windows 7 at my desktop and I have been a user of Windows XP for many years, but it’s time for something different now. I’ll be doing ‘Informatica’ at college which is the Dutch equivalent of Computer Science I think, and it will involve alot of programming etc. (Java, PHP) That’s why I think that a non-Windows laptop might be a good choice. So, it will be a Linux distro (probably Ubuntu) or Mac OSX. I would dualboot with Windows or use virtualization for the programs that are Windows-only.
I have owned Apple products (iPod nano’s and recently an iPod touch) and I love it, their products are really perfected and just do what they have to do. However, they are quite expensive compared to non-Apple products. If I would get a Mac machine for school, it would be a MacBook/MacBook Pro 13″. Prices are shown below the image, and students can get a discount. (10% or so)
MacBook 2009: €899
There’s not much hardware difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro at the moment, but the normal one is made from some kind of plastic while the Pro has an aluminium body. If I would buy one of them now, I would buy the MacBook: the Pro hasn’t got any added value for me at the moment. However, rumour has it that Apple will update the MacBook Pro line soon, using Intel’s new mobile Core i5 CPUs. Maybe they will also make 4GB the default amount of RAM. That would make me want to buy the Pro, as it would have better hardware specs, more robust body and in my opinion it also looks better. A Mac laptop would be awesome, the 13″ is very portable and lightweight and will do anything that I want to do at it. I have my Windows desktop at home which is perfectly fine for gaming & other things, so a small laptop for school (with OSX!) would be sweet.
However, when you compare the prices of the MacBooks to the average Windows laptop, you start to wonder. Sometimes they are 2x as expensive for the same hardware specs. I think this is the price premium of Apple’s products and I’m not sure if it’s worth it for me. Especially when you can get any of these Windows laptops and install Ubuntu on it…
Fortunately, I’m not going to college before September 2010 so I have time to save up more money and compare both options (MacBook or Ubuntu laptop). Any of you going to college and doing a similar education? What notebook did you get? Any information is welcome as it will greatly help me making a wise choice.
Oh also, my English appears to be very crappy today. Maybe it’s because of all the German/French stuff I have to do for school at the moment?
Yeah Dominic (Myrax) & me thought it would be cool to put Waldkorn online again. Waldkorn is a modification of the Java server that runs Suelake.com (V5), but it’s modified so it works with the Habbo V1 client. (first version of Habbo Hotel, 2001)
It’s the most complete V1 server ever written, so if you love old-oldskool stuff, it’s sure worth checking it out. If you are looking for something newer & more stable, then Suelake.com (V5) is what you are looking for.
It’s time for another post! This time, it’s about my future projects.
As most of you know, I’m kinda done with Habbo server emulation – it was alot of fun and has taught me great things. It also taught me that a good concept combined with a good technical realization of it makes a great service/product. Since I was young, I loved thinking about stuff, building it, testing it and improving it. I love computers and games. Now, roughly 5 years later, things have changed dramatically. I dove into software development through sparetime projects and rapidly expanded my knowledge to PHP, C#, XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, MySQL/MsSQL and development in general – thinking about better solutions for whatever goal.
Today, I love programming and software design, and I think I got pretty damn good at it. I’m currently in the last year of my pre-uni education, will be doing ‘comp science’ after my finals and I’m sure it’s ‘the way to go’ for me. However, I also know that it’s time for me to start a new big project. Something I came up with, something that I can use as a portfolio for showing my skills & interests to the world. As I said, I have the ideas and realized some of them. I see great potential in some of the ideas, but cannot realize them on my own.
My main idea is an online in-browser game with a Microsoft Silverlight client. Together with Carlos (aka Moogly) we have come up with great ideas, and Joe Hegarty’s ‘Helix’ project got me into developing a stub for a 2D isometric MMO(RPG) game in Silverlight. Being an online game, it needs a server (I love servers!) and I wrote it in C# 4.0 using MSSQL + LINQ for the database backend. Client and server have some shared assemblies, such as for the network layer. Client can connect to server, exchange encryption keys for securing the network traffic, then login to their user account and retrieve a character list of their playable character. Client selects a character and the server looks up the last ‘world zone’ of the character, sends the maps and other players and the client then renders the isometric world zone. Players in the same ‘zone’ can chat with each other by using a chat input field. All currently works great, but for now I’ve used ‘programmer art’ for the GUI of the client – I’m not a designer! See, I can do the technical side, but I lack the creative skills to make sprites and other graphics/sounds. So if you are interested in creating art for this project, hit me up – either through an email or by posting a comment to this blog entry. I can’t disclose much info about this project to the general public, as I’m trying to keep the idea & concept private for now.
Anyway, this post is kinda shorter than I expected it to be. However, if you are seriously interested in ^ above, then hit me up. Note the word seriously, please don’t assume that I’m just another odd noob off the street thinking he got a brilliant idea for a game and “only thing left is to build it! I even got a name already! omg!” – while they actually can’t develop at all. I am not like that, so please only contact me when you are skilled too & have genuine interest.
I just finished my PHP class for Lockerz.com, a site where you can collect PTZ and redeem them for T-Shirts/games/Xbox/PS3 and even laptops. You only have to sign in daily, invite some friends and then just answer to funny pictures etc. It’s legit, search YouTube for videos of people unboxing their gifts!
But… for lockerz.com, you require an invite to get in. So, you would have to wait till someone invited you!
Wait no longer, I made an instant invitation form for all you guys to use. Have fun!
A few days ago, our beloved Suelake.com private server received an email from Sulake and OVH wanted everything down, including the emulator that was 100% written by us. In order to bring Suelake.com back, we had to stop hosting the item sprites (copyright by Sulake) and only reference to them. We also had to move our emulator to a country where emulators are legal. Now, Suelake.com is back on a Windows 2003 dedicated server, we only host our own PHP frontend and the emulator there, which is completely legal.
I have asked Mike (office.boy, owner of the domain) to update the nameservers to the new host and he updated them. However, it will take a while (~ 24 hours) before your ISP resolves ’suelake.com’ to the new IP address. Everything is setup and running at the new host and it runs great, Micky and me have tested it. We have restored all database backups, so as soon as the nameservers refresh you can start doing the Valentines Quest at Suelake.com!
Keep checking back frequently: click here.
UPDATE 16 February 2010 13:50: alright, we had some DNS issues with getting the domainname to point to Suelake.com. Mike (office.boy) added an “A” record directly to the IP now, so it should resolve to Suelake.com very soon now. It’s all up to your ISP now! =]
Today, it’s J-Day 2010. One year ago, at February 12th, 2009, Josh ‘Jeax’ Comery got arrested at his home in Sittingbourne and brought to court later. Accuser: Sulake Oy, the company behind Habbo Hotel. Jeax was the developer of Habbo scripting applications such as Axed 7, which, accordingly to Sulake, did 20,000 GBP damage to them. He was found guilty and was sentenced to community service. Ex-teenagers like Joeh, Jeax, Myrax, SonicMouse, office.boy, myself and many many others, spent quite some time writing Habbo scripting applications or server emulators. For most of them, it’s safe to say that it ‘got them into programming’. With this post I would like to explain why Habbo has been the perfect ‘programming playground’ for alot of us.
The birth of ‘Habbo scripting’
I think it’s because Habbo started out really hobby’ish and amateur, Aapo was kinda a pioneer back in 2000 when they (Sampo wasn’t the techie, he was the concept & designer guy) made Mobiles Disco, Hotelli Kultakala and ofcourse the first Habbo versions. Old Habbo (V1 etc) was a popular game for teens, and people would be strifing to all kinds of exclusive stuff to show off how awesome they were. Habbo was very prone to ’scripting’. By simply using memory editing apps such as ArtMoney, people could edit the figure of their avatar or place posters ‘outside of the room’, aka Posters-In-Black. To do more advanced ’scripting’, they would need a ‘man-in-the-middle’, a program that stands between the Habbo server and your Habbo client. Such a program allows you to view and alter network traffic and these apps could be quickly made in Microsoft Visual Basic. For alot of ‘Habbo scripters’, this was their first step into programming. Alot of these mini programs could easily do alot of ‘cool stuff’ to Habbo. If you see the stuff that they could do to Habbo back then, you would say to yourself ‘how was this even possible?’, server quality & security must have been hella poor back in the old days -- probably because Sulake was a pioneer at this market. They didn’t expect that kids would catch up to them so fast?
Advanced Habbo scripting
When Habbo kept developing through the years, alot of these old scripts were patched. But with the introduction of new features, there were always kids around that found out how to exploit them. It encouraged them to find more and better exploits, pressuring the developers to do something to it by filtering client data, changing encryption implementations and security-through-obscurity. This made Habbo a challenging ‘opponent’, it forced the scripters to innovate in their programming skills. Later, when the RC4 encryption class (Java sourcecode) was ‘leaked’, people worked out how to encrypt and decrypt data themselves in such a manner that the Habbo server accepted their data. With this, they could send their own data to the server with the click of a button, while the server ‘thought’ that it was the Habbo client issueing that data. By creating alot of Habbo users, connect them to the Habbo server all together, sending the data that the original client sends, people could make ‘bot raids’, Habbo users that were controlled by a computer instead of a human. This was good fun, and programs such as Jeax’s Axed 7 (it got him arrested though), allowed people to load in lists of Habbo accounts and then march them through the rooms. You could make them chat, dance etc all together, making military style operations and spamming rooms with your websites etc.
The original Axed 7 app in action
Modification of Axed 7, to work with the new encryption algortithm
Habbo bots got even better, when a group of Dutchies (naming themselves ‘Moderators of Death’ aka MoD), found out how they could mass-submit Habbo user creation, allowing them to create hundreds of accounts with the same avatar figure and a random name in a few seconds. They wrote a small application that created alot of Habbo accounts, automatically logged them in and made them enter the rooms. The bots were all dressed in the same and only said a few things, next to spreading the URL where people could download the program. The end-user just had to download the program, start it and leave the process running -- they would automatically contribute to the chaos. Alot of newbies didn’t know what they were doing and got IP banned for all their accounts because they were running bots from their IP too. Next to this massive (!) bot attack they also did some other scripting exploits, and all together it has been the biggest ‘Habbo scripting operation’ so far. This only happened on the Dutch Habbo Hotel, habbo.nl, and I don’t know how many bots were involved, but all rooms were crammed with bots, causing panic among the children playing.
The Moderators of Death (MoD) bot raid at Habbo.nl back in 2007
Habbo server emulation and private servers
Then, the most challenging Habbo programming thing: server emulation. People have been writing complete server emulators, for educational purposes or for running their own ‘Habbo Hotel’. This allowed them to run their own copy of Habbo with it’s own staff and moderation team, giving them access to all features. It started out with a buggy ‘V1 client’ server emulator in VB6, but the servers have been rewritten and improved over the years, they were adapted & developed constantly to support the newest Habbo client versions. Basically it involved writing a multi user socket server with a database, and then process data from clients and performing the appropriate server logic that the Habbo server did too. I have written the majority of the DebboProject V3 and up server, which was the most used Habbo emulator back in 2007. End of 2007 I started the Holograph Emulator project, which, even though it was ‘open source’, was mainly written by me. Meth0d wrote a frontend site similar to the real Habbo’s, called ‘HoloCMS’. Together it allowed any noob off the street to start his own Habbo Hotel, and today it’s used to power most of the private servers, the small ones (~50 users online) and the bigger ones (hundreds of users online).
Sunnieday.net, one of the biggest Habbo private servers around. Pay attention to the amount of online users…
The big private servers have turned into ‘money machines’ for the people who run them. I have seen AdSense bills of people squeezing 500 euros/month out of their private server, and this is solely off Google advertisements. Next to the ads and similar to the real Habbo Hotel, they sell ingame properties such as credits, badges and special furniture items. These ‘Habbo retros’ have been causing alot of issues for Sulake, taking away their potential customers and, according to Sulake, scamming & “installing harmful software on your computer” -- which is impossible by the way. Sulake even held their international ‘Keep It Real’ campaign in all Habbo Hotels worldwide, to discourage people from going on the private servers. Sadly, this generated alot of attention for the private servers and only attracted more people to them…
Conclusion
Myself, I have enjoyed scripting & programming Habbo stuff over the years. My projects taught me (and others) programming languages such as BASIC, C#, Java, PHP and work with databases like MySQL. It also was a good lession on security and reverse engineering. What started out as fun ‘n games, evolved into the strife for better and complex computer programs. Sulake’s product was a challenging ‘opponent’ that kept getting tougher over the years -- and so did we.
Today I tried to update to the newest ATI Catalyst drivers for my GPU. However… I was instantly reminded of the fact that I can’t install/uninstall with their uninstaller anymore – it crashes silently when I either click ‘Install’ or ‘Remove’ , I think I broke it when I was meeping around with the Visual C++ redistributables when installing Visual Studio 2010.
My Windows 7 RTM installation dates back from August ‘09 and was performing really nice, however it got bloated more and more because I wasn’t really focused at keeping it clean: I was just slapping it around, installing X, removing Y, regediting this just so I could continue with my projects etc. That’s why I decided to just do a clean reinstall now, Windows 7 Ultimate x64 RTM.
I already had my Users folder on the D drive, so I just backed up any other things like Steam savegames etc and reinstalled Windows 7. At the moment I’m reinstalling Windows Live Messenger, WinRAR, Visual Studio, Eclipse, XAMPP etc. Steam games (Garry’s Mod, Half-Life 2 etc) and other games (GTA IV, Bioshock) will follow.
The box runs great again, looking forward to playing Bioshock 2 and GTA IV: Episodes From Liberty City when it’s coming to the PC and PS3 at March 30th! Specs of my PC, built for a mere ~ 500 euros back in April ‘09…
Anyway that’s it, see I promised by making a blogpost soon and even though it isn’t that interesting… I actually made another blog post!
As some people have noticed, suelake.com looks down! And yes, it’s indeed down – for now.
If you don’t know what Suelake.com is, well in short it’s a Habbo Hotel private server running with one of the oldest versions of the Habbo client, dating back to 2002/2003. Mike (office.boy) and me wrote a server from scratch in Java to revive this version of Habbo for people to enjoy. It is truly unique, always up and fully featured, including my PHP frontend site with my own design and without Habbo related/copyrighted images. Suelake is not a Habbo clone, it is there for educational and ‘monumental’ purposes.
Yesterday, Jordan, the guy who hosts me, said that he received an email from Sulake, and even though I haven’t seen it myself, I know it stated stuff about copyright infringement. It kinda makes no sense that Sulake wants to take down Suelake.com – we don’t make any profit, we don’t use their images, we don’t take away their users and so on. Sulake appearantly ignores the ‘high rollers’, the private servers with 500 – 1000 users online, making thousands of euros (yes!) off advertisements and selling ingame properties. These private servers try to emulate the current version of Habbo, taking away alot of their users and potential customers. Yet… they only seem to take action against Suelake.com!
So, what now? We have worked on Suelake.com for a long time and I’m not planning to let it die. There are alot of people out there who enjoy Suelake.com, especially with the new way Sulake is heading to with their product. It doesn’t do any harm to them and I don’t think that it ever will, so we are working on getting it back up somewhere else. All data is backed up, including database, server build (stable, > 12 days uptime) and my PHP website. Sulake either just hates me or isn’t aware of the ‘high rollers’, which seems weird to me as eg, Habbo.co.uk has ~ 5000 users online and there are private servers with 1000 users online…
Anyway, expect more posts on this soon while we work stuff out. Until then, peace.
