Show HN: SSHTron – Play Tron/lightcycle over SSH | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SSHTron – Play Tron/lightcycle over SSH

sshtron.zachlatta.com

104 pointszachlatta21 comments

Hey everyone! My friend and I made this over the weekend.

I'm sorry about all the issues with the freezing and disconnects – the response has been really overwhelming and the game certainly isn't optimized for less than ideal network situations. If you're continually getting kicked, it's probably just because the server is having trouble getting a solid connection to you. If it helps, the server is in SF right now (though I'm able to get a solid connection that's playable from NY).

> If it helps, the server is in SF right now (though I'm able to get a solid connection that's playable from NY).

I don't think your audience is 99% silicon valley, or even 99% United States of American. Having multiple servers might be more advisable than moving it somewhere ;)

This is just a fun project we hacked together in the past day to share with our friends, who are primarily on the west coast. If we were designing it to scale, we'd certainly do that!

Certainly, and it's a really cool project and I love it. Just saying, HN community != (USA | Silicon Valley) :)

Can you add Dvorak keybindings also? ",aoe" instead of "wasd". You see, they do not interfere with qwerty.

Sure! https://github.com/zachlatta/sshtron/issues/2

Will add.

Interesting but...

    Packet integrity error (4144 bytes remaining) at ../channels.c:2421
    Disconnecting: Packet integrity error.

There is another problem with Gnome Terminal. The page is flushed on each frame. I see the previous drawings if I scroll but I can't play.

BTW I like that!

A suggestion for next week-end: same stuff with pixels in VNC ;-)

The usual warning sign here.

Be careful when SSHing into hosts you do not know with an unpatched version of OpenSSH:

http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2016-0777

edit: @Ao7bei3s comment below gives more information on how to protect yourself.

Rather than post the equivalent of "Ignore this Show HN," you should post the steps people can take to protect themselves.

ssh -o "PreferredAuthentications=password,keyboard-interactive" -o "UseRoaming=no" root@sshtron.zachlatta.com

Explanation:

Use a recent ssh version (if you've updated in February you're safe), or put in your .ssh/config file:

  # CVE-2016-0777
  UseRoaming no

Additionally, while you are at it, you can take care of some privacy problems. These are really not a big deal though.

Don't hand your SSH public key to the server:

  # Makes SSH not try other keys than ~/.ssh/id_{dsa/ecdsa/rsa}.
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  
  # And move ~/.ssh/id_{dsa/ecdsa/rsa}{,.pub} somewhere else,
  # including it on a per host basis:
  Host *.example.com example.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my_id_rsa

Or you could just disable pubkey authentication for this one connection with ssh -o "PreferredAuthentications=password,keyboard-interactive".

Including root@ prevents leaking your local username.

If in doubt, man ssh + man ssh_config (they contain other useful things like "CanonicalizeHostname yes / CanonicalDomains ycombinator.com" / example: ssh root@news).

(I don't know what's wrong with the internet that we need "how to SSH" posts now, though. But here it is.)

I assume most people on HN, given the warning and the CVE, would easily find the information they need on google. But sure, if you read this and need information, please read @Ao7bei3s' comment.

Do not redraw the whole display. Use termcap and ncurses to send terminal escapes. It's unplayable for me, probably because of latency.

Good idea :-)

I think this is a great idea, and it looks like a lot of fun, but unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Though I'm sure tested this on "Linux" and "MacOS X" as you said, the real problem you face is most terminal emulators are not standards compliant (assuming there are standards for particular behaviors, and often there aren't any). This means, you got it working on some terminal emulators, but it won't work on others.

The most standards compliant terminal emulator is actually the original 'xterm' [1] program included as part of X. The xterm FAQ [2] and ncurses FAQ [3] have lots of useful information. Though getting your code running in xterm itself will help portability, it won't be the end of your debugging due to the fact that other terminal emulators have bugs and of course, they often do things differently. The story about the color blue [4] in the xterm FAQ should give you an idea of the kinds of problems you'll face.

[1] http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.html

[2] http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html

[3] http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html

[4] http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_b...

Hey this is incredible, nice job! Any chance of sharing the source?

Edit: Nevermind - I see it. https://github.com/zachlatta/sshtron I can't believe you made this in 20 hours, amazing!

Linked on the website in the upper left corner! https://github.com/zachlatta/sshtron.

Great there still are some multiplayer network games for terminal-only systems. Nice work!

Thanks for posting this! It's amazing how something so simple can be so much fun.

Putty keep crashing with weird errors, any reason for this ?

Probably the UNIX escape codes we're using. SHHTron is currently only designed for Linux, OS X, and friends. If you'd like to change that, pull requests are welcome!

Would be more helpful if you specify what these errors are.

Are you using the latest putty release? Some scary looking security fixes in the last few versions. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.ht... and particularly http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/v...

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