LBP Union and Project Lighthouse are not affiliated with Sony Interactive 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 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 Lighthouse custom servers for LittleBigPlanet.
Hello, sackfolk! It’s been quite some time since the last R&D-related article. However, following the R&D conference that took place on our Discord Server just a couple of weeks ago, we have some exciting development information to share with you all.
Since the last development article, which took place in December of 2022, and since the release of Beacon Public Beta in March of this year, we’ve made some tremendous strides in terms of development, not just in terms of Project Lighthouse. We’ve begun work on a few new projects since then, with the most notable of these projects being the new Project Lighthouse Rich Presence Client, as well as planned improvements to our status monitoring system. More on those later.
What is Project Lighthouse?
Project Lighthouse is a clean room, open-source reverse engineering effort to bring back online features to LittleBigPlanet on PlayStation 3 and Vita titles. You can learn more about it in our first blog post, or you can head over to our GitHub Repository to check out the codebase and discussions!
Development Conference: What did we talk about?
We hosted a development conference on the 13th of May in our Discord stage channel, highlighting some of the recent development accomplishments and plans that have occurred since public beta launched back in March. Here are some of the things we went over:
- Current development status of Project Lighthouse, PLRPC, as well as a few smaller projects that have been in the works.
- Development analytics since the launch of Beacon Public Beta
- Short term and long-term development goals
- Various ways sackfolk can contribute to our projects
A video-on-demand of this conference was not recorded, but we plan to bring event recordings to the public in the future.
New Team Members
We’d like to take a moment to welcome the new Ministry of Technology team members that have joined the team since December of 2022.
- penguinskillcaps — Research & Development: specializing in reverse engineering
- SkylerDaGirl — Research & Development: specializing in LBP Modding
- jackcaver — Research & Development: PL Garage project lead
- Slipsy — Research & Development: specializing in 3D Modelling
- Metraberryy — Research & Development: C# Software Developer
- … as well as several new Surveyor team members!
Project Lighthouse Improvements
The LBP Union Research & Development Team has been working hard to implement more of the most requested features, as well as patch up various bugs discovered by our team as well as our players! Here are some of the more notable merged Pull Requests (in simpler terms: how we efficiently manage code contributions).
- Add admin/mod badges on UserCardPartial
- Refactor serialization system
- Display a lock icon next to locked levels
- Optimize slot endpoints
- Add basic ability to flag duplicate levels
- Rewrite captcha system
- Add more unit tests
- Rewrite gameserver slot filter system
Search Filters Implemented on Project Lighthouse
Pull Request #763 by Slendy, merged May 31st, 2023 – implemented fully functioning support for the Filter tab on LBP2 and 3, added options for the Organize button on LBP3, and added My Playlists and My Hearted Creators on LBP3. The filters added in this PR were based off of filters originally created by Jackcaver, the developer behind PL Garage, an LBP Karting private server project.
Several hot patches, as well as the implementation of deleting Playlists, were committed and deployed after the fact.
This PR closed several open issues on our issue tracker, specifically the following:
- Implement search filters (#90)
- A checkbox that allows you to exclude games on level list. (#233)
- “Filters” tab not working in LBP3 (#488)
- LBP3 Organizing doesn’t work but it does on LBP2 (#489)
- Most Hearted in LBP1 is broken (#772)
We hope you enjoy, and happy filtering!
History of Lighthouse
A member of the LBP Union Discord by the name of speedyman09 created a YouTube video highlighting the entire Git commit history of Project Lighthouse up until very recently! You can watch the video below.
Beacon × Discord Rich Presence
Ever wanted to show your friends on Discord what you’re doing on LBP? Now, you can! R&D Developer Koko has rewritten the original LighthouseRichPresence client to be better optimized and easier to use.
A demonstration of PLRPC displaying on Discord.
The application will display activity status for Pod, Moon, Adventure, Story, and User-Created levels, with support for more level types as they are discovered. When playing user-created levels, the application will automatically retrieve the level icon from the server and display it. Pretty cool!
You can download the latest release of the application here, and view setup instructions here.
Status Monitoring Changes
Since February 11th, 2023 – we once again began monitoring the server status of Sony’s official LBP3 PS4 game server, as well as LBP Union’s own Beacon status endpoints. Now, UnionStatus v1 worked well, but there was some definite room for improvement.
We’ve now migrated to a new system, which will fully replace UnionStatus v1. You can check it out on our new status page. Push notifications are also still available on our Discord server.
Notable Statistics
We’ve racked up some pretty impressive statistics over the past few months across Discord and Beacon! An image of some of the more notable data points has been attached below.
We could not have reached this point without all of you! From the entire LBP Union team, we extend our biggest thanks to everyone who has participated, is planning to participate, and is currently participating in our Discord server as well as Beacon public beta!
To Be Implemented
New R&D team member Penguinskillcaps has been doing extensive research into the LittleBigPlanet servers. He has discovered how the following features work, but they have not yet been implemented.
- LBP1 News
- Resource moderation
- How to upgrade grief reports with more features
- Genres for LBP3
Plans For the Future
Development within our various projects, especially Project Lighthouse, is far from done. Every day, we continue to work towards the implementation of new features, squashing bug bugs and patching security holes, as well as taking in suggestions from the community on how to better improve our projects.
If you’d like to keep a close track of the development progress of Project Lighthouse in particular, we recommend taking a look at the project’s issue tracker. This page will show you active bug reports, planned enhancements and feature additions, as well as a few other key insights – as well as allowing you to submit your own bug reports and/or feature suggestions!
