Project Lighthouse | March 2022 Dev Log #3
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! I’m jvyden, lead developer of Project Lighthouse. We’ve been very busy with development this past month since the last dev log in February. A lot of great progress has been made in feature enhancements, beta testing, and security. Let’s talk about some of the latest improvements and news with Project Lighthouse custom servers for LittleBigPlanet PS3 and Vita.
Firstly, be sure to go check out the original article about Lighthouse for an overview about how we are building our custom servers for LittleBigPlanet.
Union Space Corps Open Enlistment | Apply for Closed Beta Testing
One of the most important things we have to share with you all is that this month we have been expanding the Union Space Corps Lighthouse beta testing program. Over the course of March we have been bringing on 10 random users who enlisted in the beta testing waitlist, giving them the opportunity to help us test the server. We are hoping to extend this program into April, but we aren’t sure about the exact details yet. You can enlist in the Union Space Corps beta testing waitlist on our Discord server.
The goal of the Union Space Corps is to not only give people the chance to play LittleBigPlanet online again for PS3, RPCS3, and Vita, but also to help identify possible vulnerabilities that may be debilitating for a public instance of Lighthouse. This server will be attacked or abused in the future, and we want to safeguard it as much as we can to keep risk at a minimum. Our philosophy is that we must create software as if someone is actively trying to break it. That way we’ll be prepared when something does go wrong.
Launching with Lighthouse
Union Space Corps cadets that are chosen to beta test are given some instructions on how to modify their PlayStation or set up their emulator. Union Patcher is improving significantly and has been helping cadets patch their games faster than ever with a new version of the software called UnionRemotePatcher by another one of our lead developers, LoganTGT.
This patcher allows you to remotely patch your game via an Internet connection (FTP) with your PS3 so that you don’t need to go through extra steps to decrypt, patch, and re-encrypt your game. This eliminates one of the largest barriers to entry for playing LittleBigPlanet online in 2022.
Research and Development Team Expands
We are very excited to welcome Slendy to the R&D team. Slendy has been immensely helpful with various enhancements with Lighthouse, such as search features on the website, scoreboard enhancements, and more.
Scoreboard Fixes
One troubling issue that was on our backlog was the fact that scoreboards weren’t working right with Lighthouse. Specifically, there would often be an error where the scoreboard would read ‘score upload failed!’ This feature wasn’t working quite right until Slendy came along and fixed it! This issue was exclusively for the player submitting the score. The score would be submitted, but they wouldn’t be able to see it when they completed the level. Now scores on Lighthouse work just fine.
We were struggling with this for some time due to missing packet captures that would give us hints about how the score uploads to the server. However, Slendy was able to use a different XML tag found in the game’s EBOOT that fixed the problem.