OpenArena Message Boards

i was talking to a guy the other day on OA and he had two symbols in his name
i was wondering how to get them, i have the quake 3 name changer but it doesnt work with oa

He's the bottom one
(http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/277/92220161.png)

I'm also interested in the answer to this...

I heard the quake 3 name changer has something to do with it but if your saying it doesn't work with OA, then this is quite a mystery...

Never tried Quake 3 name changer... but maybe there could be more similar programs with the same name... or it may "simply" need some configuration tweak to work with OpenArena...

The namechanger works for OA too, not sure how it exactly worked but it did ;)
This tool is often used for anti-fake so I don't link it here, but you can just google it.

I believe it an ASCII character.

Right.
We had great problems with faked names in the past, so we decided to use this symbols in our clan tag.
Fakes are gone ;D

Warning. I tried to add some stange character (like ◄ and ►) to my name inside q3config.cfg with notepad. Saving the file with standard "ANSI" coding causes it lose that characters (replaced by "?")... so I tried saving it with "Unicode" coding. OpenArena was then unable to read that file and recreated it from scratch (losing all my settings).

Luckily, I did a backup before try! :-)

As i have been told by quite a few players that most ASCII characters do not work on oa.

Also, don't forget that ANSI and ASCII are different encodings.

Well, if they are not currently in OA maybe they should be
That's something for the Idea Pit

The use of extended chars is actually a security risk when the game is launched in a shell terminal on linux system ( but I can't exclude it could be the same on windows ) and not only for the player using them but for all the players , because extended chars are interpreted when received by various linux shells types and versions.

I've personally experimented myself with my old system ( Ubuntu Hardy and the bash version coming with this distribution ) a lot of collateral effect eg corruption of the diplayed chars on the shell , corruption of the logs , at least for two times a system freeze while I was playing ( I had to hard reset my system ).

Why not redirect standard output and standard error to /dev/null then?


If you want to save standard output and standard error, you could strip the unprintable characters from the output to avoid trouble:

In my opinion the best solution would be for the coders to simply strip the unprintable characters from the client output (and perhaps a cvar to turn them on again, like ttycon_ansicolor) because that's what's causing the security risk. The problem occurring with names is just a symptom.

Oh really, unbelievable they didn't manage to isolate the logs from what can be interpreted by your shell.

I thought stuff like "cout << random_gibberish;" were safe.

It is supposed to be anything else is a bug. Of course it can leave your console unusable but if it crashes it is because it has hit a character set that triggers a bug in another system.

It is a feature but every time I do a "cat someimage.jpg" by mistake I feel quite annoyed.

ttys (terminals) interpret ANSI escape sequences (http://ascii-table.com/ansi-escape-sequences.php) so stuff like cout << static_cast<char>(27) << more_gibberish; could mean trouble if cout is connected to a tty.

Edit:
I don't think I've made it clear enough why piping data unfiltered to a tty is a security risk, so here goes.

With (extended) ANSI escape sequences you can do more then change character sets, blank the screen etc., you can also reprogram the function of almost every key on the keyboard, even with the standard sequences. This means you could bind "rm -rf ~" to the enter key for example, so when the user types something in the terminal and hits enter after playing OA, he's screwed. (That's also the reason why the keyboard sometimes doesn't work right after "cat someimage.jpg".)

*delete this message*

NO @ post above me ^^^