LittleBigPlanet Karting Custom Servers: PL Garage!
LBP Union and PL Garage are not affiliated with Sony Interactive Entertainment or their subsidiaries. PL Garage is a clean room reverse engineering project of now defunct PlayStation 3 LittleBigPlanet Karting online features. No proprietary code is distributed. Under no circumstances will we endorse or support piracy. You must have your own copy of the game in order to use the custom features once they become available. When using these features, you release Sony Interactive Entertainment (Sony) as well as any employees or agents of Sony, from any and all liability, corporate, or personal loss caused to you or others by the use of PL Garage custom servers for LittleBigPlanet.
On August 31st, 2016, the online servers for LittleBigPlanet Karting shut down. This made it impossible to play with friends online and to play levels made by other users. However, that's not the end of the story. Seven years later, LittleBigPlanet Karting custom servers are back under development by the community!
Meet Jackcaver
There have been several LBPK projects attempted in the past by the community, but none have come as far as LBPU R&D Technician Jackcaver's custom server project he calls 'Project Lighthouse: Garage'. He says that he started the project because he "bored by the fact that [he couldn't] play the game even though [he] bought the game just a few days prior." It just goes to show that where these games truly shine is in their online connectivity.
Jackcaver joined the LBP Union Research and Development team to share knowledge about his Karting server, get assistance with his project, and to potentially contribute to Project Lighthouse. However, as it stands right now, Project Lighthouse and LBP Karting are currently incompatible. The Karting project is developed primarily by Jackcaver, but he has recently made the project open source just like Project Lighthouse! "I just want to keep it open to anyone," he says. "Everybody should be able to use it, even if it gets taken down by Sony."
About PL Garage
Jackcaver's LBP Karting custom server was originally written in Javascript, but later was rewritten and continued in C#. It's still a work in progress. There are still plenty of features left to implement. Jackcaver says that the project is especially challenging because "the bombd (Bomb Server) connection is forced to use TLS, which means that I cannot get any info from packet captures since I have no idea how to decrypt it."
TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. It's a way of encrypting data so that it can be used by the client and server but not understood by the user or a third party. This is important for security, but bad for reverse engineering projects like this one.
LBP Karting Server in Action
Jackcaver's first beta testers for PL Garage are Kairos (Er_BiyanoXD) and Penguinskillcaps! Together, Jackcaver, Kairos and Penguinskillcaps have tested various parts of the server like leaderboards.
Aside from scores, it looks like the pod computer is usable with online features like community levels.
