Going Further

We made it!

A new release is here, let’s see what’s new.

The “Simularicum” - There is a new Tab in the headerbar. What about that?

The plan was to combine the capabilities of a Warframe builder and the testing room, you know from the game (yes it’s called Simulacrum, pls don’t kill me).

The tab allows you to test how the damage you modded will apply to various types of enemy health and armor. If you didn’t know about that – yes some enemies will suffer less damage from your build than others!

Now I have plans to extend the capabilities to cover firer rate, status and other modifiers as well as an option to test against enemies not only a health type. However, don’t expect this too soon.

The “Worldstate” tab has been updated!

The interface has changed, and allows side scrolling. Also loading times have been improved.

In general, there have been optimizations to the apps performance

The overall interface is different, isn’t it?

Yeah, we decided to remove the old theme and to make our own one! The new theme brings the app one step closer to the game, it’s semi transparent, so you can use it like an overlay for the game. An option to hold the window above Warframe as well as a full-screen toggle have been added.

Rant

We had plans to include another feature in this release … but it didn’t make it. This feature was an option to browse builds from overframe.gg

Now, what was the problem?

First: The site is JavaScript based, means scraping the content is difficult. Also scraping the side would be very inefficient since it contains tons of data. - However the site has an API …

Second: Yeah the API. It’s rather unofficial and undocumented. But that is not the only caveat: it’s slow. And the data is scrambled all across the side. Effectively for each build, we would have to make 12 requests, up to 5 seconds each.

Of curse, that won’t keep us from trying! But, after the main features had been implemented, Cloudflare kicked back. Somehow we must have had triggered their DDoS protection. Normally not a big deal, filling a CAPTCHA is not that hard. But we are relying on raw requests. There is no CAPTCHA, nor even a browser to be checked. Circumventing this protection is nearly impossible.

So, the next attempt was to integrate the whole side into Nitain Crab, as in a browser. The results were not bad, the side was usable, not DDoS block.

However, this approach was relying on a library called “webkit2gtk”. This had its last release for Windows 3 years ago, and no way to get even this working.

So the feature was killed by Cloudflare and Microsoft ._.

Are there any options? Well yeah, for example using a “headless” browser in the background, that loads the page and renders it. This would allow scraping and very rudimentary usage. But I have no idea what Cloudflare would say about that.

So far, there is no simple solution to this problem.