Titan Network Presents: Titan Sentinel

Unless the devs specifically implement some way to read in a build during a respec there isn't anything the Titan team could do to implement this feature (except possibly making a bot program which would violate the EULA).

A little late to this reply, Facebook has recently taken Profile Tabs away, so the CoH App for FB is broken, until I can figure out a way to display the information.

We would love to do something like this, but Adeon is right. There would have to be some sort of API to access the game database outside the game itself. If I worked for Paragon Studios, I'd make this a high priority, but... well...

We actually have zilch to do with the Facebook app, it was developed completely independently by someone else. Not that we mind, of course, it sounds really neat, but we have no idea what broke it, what it would take to fix it, and really, didn't even know it existed until around two weeks ago. You'll have to ask the devs of the Facebook app for more info.

I developed it , and Facebook broke it, by removing Profile Tabs from users profiles. although, if anyone wants to suggest how they'd like the data to be shown on their profile, I'm all ears.

This is gonna have to be a flat no. Doing so would require sending input to the game client, which as mentioned, qualifies as a bot (and those are forbidden).


I haven't been maintaining build manifests for the Issue 19 builds because they publish a new one every other day and there are yet more changes to make before the Issue goes live.

Having said that, however, the build manifest for the live build will be kept up to date, and Issue 19 won't prevent Titan Sentinel from working.

Having said that, a few changes like logging out to the character screen and the recent tweak to Inherent Fitness still merit a revision to the tracker software, which will be made available in a few days.


Yes and no.

Yes: Titan Sentinel identifies every power that belongs to your character, including any Day Jobs, Temporary Powers or whatever else, but only the build related ones get exported to the Mids chunks.

No: Mids just has a toggle switch for all Accolades, whether on or off. Any partial Accolades owned by characters can't be exported correctly, and frankly, it's a trivial matter to just click the button in Mids after the export it does provide.

I'm with you, Seebs

I had a guy come to my door selling satellite TV contracts. I need one, and am so sick of cable, but I sent him off without any deal because he wouldn't leave me with a written copy of the contract details to look over, but insisted I had to let him make a phone call, then give the person on the other end enough personal information to do a credit check on me. That right there means it could have been - though probably wasn't - a scam. Might be? Gotta say no. I told him approximately the same thing I'm going to say here...

I completely love the idea of Sentinel - I need exported builds as much as anyone, more than most. I hate having to write a build down by hand before respec'ing and then try to recreate it with the current tools.

But I'm wary of precedent. I am familiar with situations where very reliable seeming groups of coders, for years, wrote add ons and client boosts for other games/online apps that many community members - often well known, super helpful users - relied on because they had added needed features that the official developers were leaving out.

Like this case.

And then it was discovered by one user, or two, that they had been exporting login information to their own server before it went to the official location. They said it was an oversight - but they had a complete database now of thousands of users' login name and IP address. That right there is valuable data, for legit and not so legit purposes...

So, not accusing you of any wrongdoing, or even considering it, but you're setting up a possibly exploitable situation. And you yourselves need warning that someone might come along, be super helpful and join your team, only to be exploiting your network and possibly undermine its good name by harvesting data that should be protected.

For your own good, open source your code. It actually makes it less likely someone will steal your code and put their name on it: with open source code, it would be trivial to detect such thievery, and punishable under regular copyright laws anyway. Criminal ones, so you wouldn't have to raise money to sue, or anything, at least that seems like how it is right now.

And it will raise your reputation immensely. (Not to mention garner extra donations, probably! Think of the high quality microphone you could get!)

That is all...

That is a risk you take with ANY program running concurrently with your game. If you trust Windows Blinds or Skype or whatever, it's no different except for the close link to the game.

That depends entirely on the license used to make it open source.

Personally, I'm a huge advocate of open source software. We pretty much operate all of the Titan Network off of either open source code (SMF, MediaWiki, CodeIgniter, Linux/Apache/MySQL/Php, etc.) or code that we've written ourselves. But here's the thing. Speaking only for TonyV and not the group as a whole (I have access to the repository but I didn't personally develop this), there's actually a really good reason I don't want the code open sourced.

There are a few things we do that, in the wrong hands, could--emphasis on potentially--be used to search for exploits. I will be up front in saying that we have not found any. If we had, we'd be contacting the developers and quietly letting them know about it. But it's probably also important to note that we're not looking for exploits. If we open-sourced the software, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that there would be people out there who snag it for the specific purpose of using the techniques we do to try to cheat.

At that point, even if we're not directly responsible in writing the code that degrades the game, I still feel like we'd have some moral culpability. That's just not something I'm willing to risk.

I am 100% committed to not doing evil or destructive things. We value people's privacy extremely highly. I will say that the application does not write anything to any running processes, and it only transmits to our servers information that is necessary to provide the services you see when you browse around our sites. It absolutely, positively never accesses your NCsoft or City of Heroes login information, and as long as I'm involved with the Titan Network, it never will. For what it's worth, even though the code isn't open source, there is a team of around ten developers that all have access to the Sentinel source code, and they are all fine, upstanding pillars of the community. I genuinely feel that if any of them saw any shenanigans going on, including GuyPerfect (the project owner and lead developer of Sentinel), they wouldn't keep quiet about it.

Having said all of that, you're right. There's no way I can 100% guarantee that that will be the case forever and ever. I may drop dead tomorrow and through some bizarre confluence of events, the site ends up in the ends of someone less scrupulous than the current team of developers. Honestly, I think if there were ever to be a breach of privacy at the Titan Network, it's much more likely to be because, in spite of our best efforts to keep the information safe and secure, someone gets past our security and manages to hack into the server.

However, as Fleeting Whisper pointed out, I really do feel that that is highly unlikely; or at least, on the order of magnitude of likeliness as the risk you run in interacting with any reputable service provider.

Incidentally, as (hopefully!) many people have noticed, we do not run ads on any of the Titan Network sites, not even to recoup the cost of hosting, which runs $90 per month, plus various other minor costs we incur now and then. That's all paid strictly out of pocket, with the help of some donations along the way, for which we're extremely grateful. There are several reasons we do this. One of them is that if we did run ads, it would almost certainly involve allowing third parties to place content over which we have no direct control on our pages. I'm not willing to do that, because that means that through no fault of our own, we could become a vector for things such as malware.

This isn't hypothetical. Around a year or so ago, one of Wikia's ad service companies was compromised, and people accessing the old copy of the Paragon Wiki that is still hosted there were subjected to potential infection if they didn't have some sort of virus protection or modern browser-based security. That's precisely the situation we want to avoid because when all is said and done, we're players just like you. We don't do what we do to make money, we do it because these are the kinds of services that enhance our own enjoyment of the game and we want to offer everyone the opportunity to share in the coolness.

There are some really nifty systems tools out there to verify what I've said in this post. Wireshark is an awesome packet sniffer, and Microsoft's Sysinternals suite of utilities will let you look at some nitty-gritty details about what network ports an application accesses, what reads/writes are happening with what files, and so on. Both are free, widely used, and extremely reputable. A full description of how to use these tools is beyond the scope of what I can describe here, but they are available.

Now, don't take this message as a rant or even an attempt to get you to run Sentinel against your better judgment. I understand where you're coming from because I'm moderately paranoid about apps I run on my own computer. If you don't want to use Titan Sentinel, I perfectly understand, and I stand behind your reluctance 100%. I wish everyone would make such a thoughtful evaluation of risk versus reward when running third party utilities like these before just clicking "YES!!!" to every button that pops up on their screen.

As always, if you have any questions or comments feel free to post a message over on our forums, or if you don't want to post to the world at large, PM me or drop me an e-mail (tonyv@cohtitan.com). I publish my address publicly because I want to make sure I'm as accessible as possible in case someone does have concerns like this. (Well, that and because e-mail via Google apps has a damn good spam filter.)

One of the most-loved features: type /infoself in-game.

Sweet holy Jesus that's awesome. That just saved me a helluva lot of time.. thanks a bundle!

Or just type /info with no target selected. Easier if you want to bind it to a key.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

However, when I try to load it into Mids' using the Import From Forum option (the only one I could find), it gives me an error. More specifically, I get told that:

and

This is on Windows XP 32, so I don't know what the problem might be. I'll try it at home on Windows 7 x64 and see if anything changes.

*edit*
Also got an error in getting updates. It occurs to me... Do I need to have registered an account to use this?

*edit*
It works for my PC at home. Could it have something to do with the fact that this didn't seem able to grab my alignment when I was at work, but was when I was at home?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Just to be clear, what this means is that you will no longer have to right-click the app icon and select "Run as Administrator" from the popup. When you run the app normally, it solicits admin privileges from the operating system, thus the User Access Control ("UAC") popup dialog box.

hiphip hooray!!!

Good to hear. My solution was to make a shortcut to the executable and set that to always run as administrator, which in turn always asks me for permission. It's something I had to do for Ventrillo, or else it wouldn't capture sound with City of Heroes in full screen.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, that's a good trick, since nothing in the way it operates was changed... like, really. The changes made between 0.9.1 and 0.9.2 didn't even touch the tracking code.

Since a new problem that was different from the one that cropped up last time occurred, despite having no apparent cause, I'm hesitant at this point to even consider taking steps to ensure compatibility under WINE--I mean, if random things break depending on WINE's mood.

For now, I'm just gonna have to say this: Linux/WINE is not supported.