What's with the localhost port sniffing?

[76561188078797539]

I'm playing in offline mode. One would expect no network traffic when explicitly launching not just the game in offline mode, but Steam as well... but that's not the case.

I guess the troubleshooter_lsv acts as local server process for the ProtoLion.exe process? Weird, but ok. That still doesn't really explain this weird behavior I just noticed.

Both of the processes, when started, keep incrementing the ports they are testing when apparently communicating through 127.0.0.1. And every time I launch the game anew, it's four more ports attempted to be open, and ALWAYS with higher number than the last game session.

Honestly, WTF? Can't even whitelist the ports for the game not to crash in OFFLINE mode, because the game keeps testing higher and higher ports.

Weird AF, to put it mildly. Last time I saw behavior like that it was a trojan testing ports to download the payload through.

[Dandylion]

To develop both online and offline modes at the same time, we have made the behavior structure of offline modes behave in a similar way to that of online modes.

So offline mode runs a server-client process in a local PC environment to communicate internally. This approach has a disadvantage that internal communication is sometimes blocked by mistaking it as unacceptable communication during the vaccine program's own update process.

However, since it is a communication between multiple processes executed on one local PC, it is not connected to a real external network. This happened because we couldn't develop online and offline separately due to our poor development capabilities.

We apologize for giving you anxiety due to this structure.

We'll do our best to give you more information you want.

Thank you!

[76561188078797539]

Originally posted by Dandylion:

So offline mode runs a server-client process in a local PC environment to communicate internally. This approach has a disadvantage that internal communication is sometimes blocked by mistaking it as unacceptable communication during the vaccine program's own update process.

However, since it is a communication between multiple processes executed on one local PC, it is not connected to a real external network. This happened because we couldn't develop online and offline separately due to our poor development capabilities.

Hah, thank you for replying.

Nah, I figured it was a "server" side-process, what I don't get though is why it constantly uses different ports. A bit more annoying to set up on my end (don't like white-listing wildcards), but no biggie. I wonder if it's because the game doesn't "unregister" open ports on closing, and the next iteration of it that's launched doesn't want to use ports that, as far as Windows is concerned, are being used by something else? Eh, just idle curiosity at this point.

I do wish the offline mode had internal code that just didn't require the server stub to run, but I can understand why it was simpler to just emulate the connection.

That aside, fantastic game, really glad I picked it up. Thank you :)