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.
Background images are photos uploaded by Union Space Corps beta testers Jvyden, Ture, Arcadius, SyngletOxygen, Swouse_Mouse, The_GlitchBoy, Leafar704, Salamni, Toastbrot, Toyo, and m88youngling
Hello, everyone! I’m jvyden, the lead developer of Project Lighthouse. January was pretty slow for Project Lighthouse development, as everyone was still recovering from the holidays. However, there were quite a few interesting things that were added and updated in January.
If you haven’t already seen our previous Project Lighthouse dev log, feel free to check out what we’ve been doing before this here!
If you don’t know what Project Lighthouse is, you can easily find out from our article announcing it.
PSN Ticket Support
This is an under-the-hood change, but a significant one. Project Lighthouse can now finally read PSN tickets. This means that it can differentiate between a client connecting from a PS Vita, a PS3, and from RPCS3. This means a player on PS3 cannot accidentally dive into a player playing on RPCS3. If this were to happen, it would cause you to get kicked out of the level you’re in or potentially crash your PS3/RPCS3 client, as the two are unfortunately incompatible at this time.
Icon Conversion
The levels list on the Lighthouse developer testing website.
Project Lighthouse can now convert photos and icons captured in-game into a standard .png format. This has been used, for example, to show level icons on the website:
There are a lot of images on the Lighthouse private beta server!
The instance owner can also look at all of the icons, since they’re easily accessible.
Users Page
Speaking of the website, a page has been added that lets you browse through people’s profiles easily!
For those that haven’t specified a custom profile picture in-game, their sackperson’s happy face is shown instead!
Dive In Debugging
The Dive In Debug Room Visualizer
I’ve shown this on twitter, but for those who haven’t seen it, I’ve added a new debugging page that tells what people are in what rooms at the current point in time. It also allows you to create fake rooms for testing, as well as ‘nuke’ all rooms. It also helps us see some other information that may be important for game matching that helps us test for bugs.
Project Lighthouse accurately tracked my session with 2 other people in it!
Discord Integration
Project Lighthouse can now talk to Discord. This has been achieved through Discord’s webhook feature. For now, it will post whenever a photo is published or a level is uploaded, but technically anything could be posted here.
Here’s a quick peek at what we’ve got for webhooks so far, and how they look:
You can immediately jump from Discord to LBP by queueing a level on the website with the link in the embed!
In Conclusion…
January was a slow, but very important month. We laid the groundwork for some of the most critical features, and even implemented some of them. Icon conversion is going to be invaluable for moderation, and the room debugger helped fix all the bugs and quirks that have been happening with dive in.
In February we want to expand the number of people in our Union Space Corps program, do some penetration testing, and increase the performance of Lighthouse. However, as of right now the beta testing program is invite only. We are doing our best to work toward a more public beta, but we need to improve the security of the project first before we attempt to do that.
We plan to continue providing regular updates like this one about the progress of Project Lighthouse. If you would like to stay up to date on development progress and are interested in participating in future public betas, make sure to follow us on social media and join our Discord server to be the first to know. Thank you so much for reading this month’s dev log. Be sure to share the news with friends that you’re looking forward to playing online with again!
