Welcome to the new FAForever forum!

This forum is the replacement for the old phpBB one. You probably have a lot of question, so we try to answer some of them already:

What has changed?

Single Sign On

We now feature a single sign login bound to your FAF account. You do not need to create a forum account, you just login with your FAF username and password. If you change your FAF account name it will also change in this forum.

This allows to always be up to date with playernames. But even more important it is the ultimate spam prevention: a spam bot can't register to the forum without registering FAF first. This prevents all automated spam attack against the underlying software nodebb.

It has a drawback though: If you can't create or access your FAF account you can't ask for help in the forum. We kindly advise everybody to move such request to the #technical-help channel on Discord.

Restructuring

We dropped a lot of sub-forums that weren't really used before. We might reconsider changing more stuff based on your feedback.

Underlying software

We are now running on a software called NodeBB. Nodebb aims to also look nice on mobile devices. Our NodeBB uses MongoDB under the hood which is a much more suitable datastore for a forum (=> better performance)

• NodeBB Documentation
• Community Support Forum
• Project repository

phpBB was running fine, why drop it?

phpBB was not fine! Let me tell you why:

• Recently it encountered a lot of downtimes which we were unable to find a root cause.
• We got spammed really hard and could only partially prevent it (and you suffered from horrible captcha issues!)
• The administration and moderation tools were a usability nightmare.
• phpBB itself was almost a 9 year old version that never received any updates. Undocumented manual changes to the codebase and database to enable features such as the "like"-system made it impossible to upgrade it safely.
• It was running on an outdated php version which is a security threat to our server.

What's going to happen to the old forum?

This is a very good question. We will not migrate it, since this would not work out with the new forum structure and the new account linking (in the old forum we have no verified connection between a forum account and a faf account).

We want to make the forum read-only for now and maybe somebody in this community (wink, wink!) wants to write a script to turn the old forum into a static page archive.

The design of this forum ... ?

... is debatable for sure. It took me 1 1/2 year from the first evaluation to the working solution as of now. Design was no priority topic at this point. But NodeBB offers a lot. If you are interested in helping out, please contact me.

Why did we choose NodeBB instead of [any another product]?

Upgrading to the latest phpBB

The obvious choice would have been migrating to a newer version of phpBB. But as I mentioned before there are some issues that would have made this transition a walk on a tight rope.

Our phpBB installation is 9 years old, the underlying phpBB 3.0 release even older (according to Wikipedia work on phpBB 3.0.x began in late 2002, first release candidate was in May 2007). The web software development world was a completely different one back then as it is today:

phpBB 3 had no concept of installable mods or plugins. If you wanted to extend your installation you would follow the extension developers guide and manually edit php code files and manually run SQL statements against the database, thus adding fields, tables and whatever the developers came up with. Also version control on the running server was not a thing back then.

Unfortunately our installation made use of this. For example the whole like-system is deeply intrusive into every part of the application. The "solved" feature in the help forum is another example. Eventually no active server admin knows what has been changed to the system and there is no way to look it up.

All of these additional features would instantly break on a new version, as there is no corresponding code handling this in a newer version. Furthermore every change to the database could make a potential upgrade fail. And there is nobody out there to help you upgrade a manually fucked up 3.0 installation throughout version 3.1 and then 3.2. And if you then run into some weird unexplainable issues due to some weird migration leftovers nobody will be able to help you.

In addition to that past experience shows that former administrators seems to have manually fiddled with the database as some features in the database are broken or don't work as intended.

An upgrade would have come with high risk, unknown outcome and lots of efforts. This is the reason why we decided to look for a solution with a clean installation. Furthermore phpBB 3.2 didn't even match our criteria.

Our requirements (and how NodeBB matches them)

Before selecting any kind of software (or product) you should know what you want. Knowing the issues of the old forums and from other issues we had in FAF over the last 5 years, I made a list of requirements before I went to search for the market.

Eventually NodeBB was the only product I found matching all criteria, so I'll leave out the comparison with other software out there.

1. The software is actively maintained. This sounds trivial, but a lot of projects are in a semi-zombie state and we're selecting a board for the next 10 years, right?
   NodeBB is actively maintained, e.g. they just release the v1.14 release series with two bugfix releases while I was setting it up.
2. The software has to be open source.
   We are an open source project. We live open source. Also we don't have hundreds of dollars to throw out of the window.
   NodeBB is open source and available on Github.
3. The software is battle proven by large installations. We don't want to make a bet on some newcomer thingy with fancy features, we want stable enterprise-like software.
   NodeBB is widely adopted. See their website for examples.
4. It needs to have a large community supporting it. Bonus points for a company backing it with support.
   A large community supporting it + open source means even if the company behind it goes out of business, the community will most probably take over.
   NodeBB is also a company, offering cloud installations for money and paid work on support or customization. [So if everything burns we could throw a bit of money at them and they could help us.]
5. It needs to have official docker support by the core team. This is mostly a server administration thingy but FAF has a few examples where this is not the case and it's a pain in the ass to keep it working.
   NodeBB has official images on dockerhub.
6. It needs to offer a way to integrate our own single sign on.
   Single sign on is a nice feature to sync FAF accounts to the forum. We struggle with lots of support request of people who don't give their account name. Another benefit is, that it keeps the spam bots out, as the FAF registration process is completely unique and spam bots only attack default registration processes.
   NodeBB supports additional login system via plugin. For OAuth2 (which FAF is using) they provided an excellent skeleton to work on with. So the plugin is decoupled from the rest of the code and will not interfere with regular updates (unless there is a rare breaking change in exactly this part of the application - but then they publish it in the release notes).
7. It needs to offer a web api for reading and writing stuff. Reading is beneficial for potential integration with our clients and the website to maybe drop Wordpress at some point. Writing is crucial for the one feature I hate FAF the most: the ability to change your username. Changing your account name is very very very uncommon (usually you just have a display name you can change) and it's not supported by regular authentication providers.
   NodeBB offers seperate read and write APIs via plugins. Utilising this I was able to create username synchronisation with our API in an custom plugin (which also handles the single sign on).

Eventually the points 6 and 7 were the dealbreakers on most forum alternatives out there.

On another side note: As a developer I hate JavaScript for being unreadable, unstructured and totally chaotic. However, when I dived into the codebase for writing the plugins I have seen the cleanest JavaScript code I have ever seen in my life. Therefore I can tell you that the NodeBB guys are really professional and know what they are doing. This gives me additional trust in this system. (Something I can't say about phpBB by the way.)

Excuse me? What the fuck am I reading here?

Yes, the vault (map & mod) could need some love, but there are quite a few reasons why this is diffcult. Nevertheless, your attitude is astonishing:

• You demand something ASAP while
• you didn't even bother figuring out the right forum to post (which would have been "Suggestions") and of course
• you don't offer any help of your own, but expect other people to do it for you?

There is a matching quote that comes to my mind:

And so, my fellow Commanders: ask not what your community can do for you — ask what you can do for your community.
-- Commander John F. Kennedy

Posts like yours make me question my commitment to FAF.

FAF basically can be seen from three perspectives:

The community (+ content)
The community is of coursed not owned by anybody. However we have a leadership structure called the "Council of Setons". For a more detailled explanation have a look at this Youtube tutorial.

The content of the community (maps & mods in particular) are owned by the particular creators. The legal entity is only hosting it.

The community live takes place mostly in

• the IRC chat access by the client (or any other IRC tool)
• the forum
• the official Discord server

We also have some dedicated places to meet, e.g.

• Zulip (invite only, contact a moderator or forum admin to get access)
• Map & Mods discord
• AI dev discord
• Nomads discord
• and some others

The open source project
The open source project runs on Github. As the name implies it's free software, to be used by everybody.

Operations
FAF operates legally as "Forged Alliance Forever LLC" in the USA. This company is owned by Jonathan Taylor aka Visionik.

The legal entity operates the infrastructure for FAF (domains, servers, 3rd party services...) and owns the data on the servers.

However, all work (server admins, developers, supporters) is done by volunteers in their free time.

Let me quote Uvesos summary from our developer chat here (the question pops up every few months):

We are already working with Sprouto (the maker of LOUD) together for month.
He joined our AI-Development Discord and is sharing his knowledge with us.

The changes in LOUD compared to FAF are insane huge. Some examples:
LOUD is using special maps to increase the gamespeed (flat maps to reduce the c-engine pathing)
It has reduced graphic effects on units. (removed blinking lights, optimized build beams etc)
Also sounds like ambient sound on units are removed.

Many people think that's all what it needs to be fast, but the real speed changes are inside the code.
In Loud a Air unit class does not have any functions from land or navy units.
Every lua file does first localize any global used function like WaitTicks(), table.getn() etc. to increase the speed.
Almost every function is optimized/rewritten/moved to a different location.

But FAF itself has also some functions that makes FAF slower than the original game.
The veterancy system (callbacks to every unit that is involved in a fight)
Shield damage overspill (search for overlapping shilds to transfer damage to nearby shields)
Reclaim (unit.lua function SetRebuildProgress is cloning every wreck on the whole map in some cases)
And many other stuff that we have in FAf to prevent cheating or fixing c-engine behavior.

So there is no compatibility at all.
It would be easier to implement FAF into LOUD.

Asking if we can make LOUD as mod for FAF is the same than asking if we can make SupCom2 as mod for FAF.

Basically we are doing this already today.

Apart from the game repo, all software projects on FAF are released under an open source license. And this is intentional, not a side effect of some other software we rely on. So every company could take the code and build a commercial product out of it. (I don't think anybody would want to use the FAF code for anything given all the legacy problems, but that's a different topic.)

I'm coding for fun. If some company takes my work and makes money out of it, it's not like they are stealing anything from me. At that point I had fun writing it, it served a purpose to the community and if someone else can also use it: even better.

The game repo is a more difficult topic, and I'm not working on it, but to me the end result is the same. The copyright owner could demand us to stop sharing original parts of the code base on Github anytime - which would make work on the game as we currently do mostly impossible. But despite this constant threat, people have spent thousands of hours on improving the game.

So if someone came around and would give a legal approval on what we are doing, that would be great but also the way we work wouldn't change.

Regarding the company -> community model:
FAF is a shiny example what a community can achieve (but not the only one). No company in the world can or will spend the amount of money to achieve the same amount of contributor time that the community is spending for free. Yet I have never seen a company actually bringing paid employees and the community together. I assume this is natural as the community grows and forms after the game is released, while the company makes the money in the first few months and after that everything is a cost factor.

In theory the community doesn't need the source code per se. I don't think we would immediately benefit from it (we don't know if it would still compile today, most of our devs have no background in this, 3rd party libraries might still be missing and they are not available for free, it opens the door for cheaters... ) .

But imagine how FAF would look today given two things:

1. If the company would publish all documents about networking protocols and file formats used right on the launch of the game . It would have saved us years from reverse engineering.
2. Imagine one of the original game developers would still work 5 hours a week diagnosing and fixing bugs we find and adding lua functions the community game devs ask for.

Forged Alliance would be the most polished game ever and probably sold a 2nd, 3rd and 4th expansion pack + being a major thing in eSports.

@foodlfg The forum name is your FAF player name. If you change your FAF name your forum name will get updated.

Upvote this Github issue and annoy the author

Funny. I'm developing for work and for FAF on Arch, but to play FAF I reboot into Windows because I'm a noob and don't have the time to read and setup my Arch installation for gaming.

I added a post on why we selected NodeBB

What you suggest is the equivalent of a no-cd protection. And these get hacked, even without being open source.
But the game files are open source and so is the client. We can spend 100 hours in building a solution, and it takes like 1 hour to remove it again.

@MrMarwinka You can now reset your password via Steam using the password reset feature for Steam:

https://www.faforever.com/account/password/reset

(Use the Sign in via Steam button.)

Good news @sidehugs ! I was finally able to implement password reset via steam. Just go the password reset page and use the "Sign in via Steam button". After the login to steam you will be redirected to FAF to a page where it gives you your username and the ability to set a new password.

https://www.faforever.com/account/password/reset

If ui mods get integrated into FAF they become part of the fa game repo. At this point it's no longer a ui mod, but part of the regular ui.

And as I stated before adding anti-cheat measures into lua code (which is what you would need to do to send confirmation messages to the server) can also be removed (e.g. as a cheater I would always send an empty list so that officially I wouldn't be using ui mods at all).

There are plenty of reasons, why a game was not rated. Here is the official list in technical order:

• game had too many desyncs
• game had wrong victory condition (e.g. sandbox)
• fog of war was disabled
• cheats were enabled
• prebuild was enabled
• norush was enabled
• unit restrictions were active
• map was unrated
• game was too short
• mod was unrated
• game was coop
• game ended with mutual draw
• single player game
• game mode was free for all
• teams were uneven
• unknown results (as in "there was an issue with the server receiving all game results)
• teams were unlocked
• game had more than 2 teams
• game had AI players
• civilians were revealed
• wrong difficulty (hu, I have no clue what that is)
• expansion was disabled (same here)
• spawn positition wasn't fixed
• other

In particular the reason "unknown results" is an ongoing issue with FAF as we seem to have problems to get game results sent to and parsed by the lobby server

Your whole implementation idea cannot be achieved from lua code and changing the core engine in this regard is out of the question for FAF regardless how many times some people claim it is.

Avoiding blacklisting and whitelisting the simple way: I just fake my sim mod to run as a whitelisted mod.
More advanced: I just remove/disable all the ui-mod checks in my local lua code.

Nobody will ever be able to see what is happening on a player computer. He has free reign to modify everything, even the exe, as long as it doesn't affect the simulation.

It's basically the same thing as wallhacks in FPS games. You would need external anti-cheat tools to ensure that the game is running unmodified files, but we also know that none of these anti-cheat tools work reliably (+ cause other issues) and we will certainly not introduce one.

Looks like their is an issue with reading the preferences from your windows user directory.
What is your windows username? It looks to be completely non-ASCII character set.

I tested wget in archiving mode and httrack. The results were underwhelming in both cases.

@Psions As stated above this only affects the game repository. All other projects were written from scratch.

The legal entity of FAF (details here) doesn't own any copyright or trademark regarding Supreme Commander or Forged Alliance. We also do not have an explicit permission of the current rights holder Square Enix, however GPG explicitely mentioned FAF as a replacement before shutting down GPGnet.

So basically FAF operates in a grey area of the law. To protect ourselves, we decided to make sure that each user of FAF owns a valid licence of Forged Alliance.

As of now, the only way to technically verify that each user owns a Forged Alliance copy is by looking up your Steam accounts game list, which is what happens during the Steam link process.