Project Lighthouse Dev Log July 2022: Development Continues
LBP Union and Project Lighthouse are not affiliated with Sony Computer Entertainment or their subsidiaries. Project Lighthouse is a clean room reverse engineering project of now defunct PlayStation 3 and Vita LittleBigPlanet 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 Computer 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 Lighthouse custom servers for LittleBigPlanet.
Hello again, everyone! It’s been a long time since our last dev log. A lot has happened since we last shared our work in March. Development on Project Lighthouse has come a long way, and we’re excited to share what we’ve done over these past several months. Let’s talk about the biggest highlights of our work on creating our LittleBigPlanet custom server for PlayStation 3 and Vita.
New Team Member
We are very happy to introduce Zaprit as our newest member of the LBP Union Research and Development team. He’s been focusing a lot on Lighthouse by helping us add new features like a page to reset user passwords. He’s also implemented a system for creating one-time invite links to help bring more players into the Union Space Corps beta testing program.
Expanding Beta Testing
In the past, we have struggled to maintain a growing beta testing team. At the moment, there are 279 users on our beta testing instance of Project Lighthouse. Creating accounts, performing password resets and account renames must be handled by an administrator, not by the user. This is because we want to keep the beta testing instance closed down for security.
To tackle this problem, a lot has changed and is being developed to make administrating and moderating easier.
One-Time Use Invite Links
We invite users periodically to join beta testing on our Discord server. However, this is a tedious process because we have to create accounts manually. However, Zaprit and Jvyden created a new system that allows us to send users one-time use invite link for them to create their account on their own. This link can be distributed by a bot for further automation.
Expanding Moderation Tools
The team is working to create a set of new moderation tools for Project Lighthouse. This includes an upcoming moderator panel and role. In addition, grief reporting has received several updates. One of the most interesting bits about grief reports is that we now can receive grief reports directly to a channel on Discord. This helps us become aware of reports and respond to them more quickly.
UI Changes
There are a number of changes to the UI that have been made to the project over the past few months. These involve ways the user can interact with the current website, as well as how it's presented. Keep in mind this may not be what a final release will look like. It's also possible that in the future, instance administrators can create their own website with custom visuals that can use Lighthouse's API to load level data instead.
Password Reset
Zaprit added a way for users to reset their password without help from an admin. This significantly reduces the workload of our admin team and makes everyone’s life easier!
reCaptcha
Instance admins also have the option of using Google reCAPTCHA for verifying user humanity, rather than hCaptcha. Captchas help to make sure that spammers and bots aren’t maliciously creating accounts on websites like Lighthouse - and up until this point, Lighthouse only took advantage of hCaptcha, which can be thought of as a third-party replacement for the more common Google reCAPTCHA. This should make logging into Lighthouse instances even easier in the future, thanks to a few key improvements over hCaptcha;
reCAPTCHA is more accessible for users with visual impairments - hCaptcha does not offer an audio option
hCaptcha will always force you to do an image verification
reCAPTCHA v3 supports noCAPTCHA, so if your browser has proof that you are a real person through usage with a Google account, etc., you will not even be given a captcha.