(cross post from the Lavish Software website, www.lavishsoft.com)

The #1 request, and the #1 reason for not using Inner Space as a development platform for gaming services have now been taken care of. A script developer no longer "Has to learn a new language just to use Inner Space". Instead, .NET applications can run inside Inner Space (in the game!) and can be developed to use the additional API provided by Inner Space and Inner Space extensions. For example, Inner Space's input virtualization system allows input emulation (keyboard, mouse, other devices) in any game window, even in the background.

As this new system is just getting underway, the documentation (See Inner Space .NET documentation) as well as portions of the API are still under construction. We will be working as quickly as possible to complete the API through a series of patches to Inner Space, and to ensure that the documentation is as thorough as possible, as well as updating the web site to reflect this change. If any would-be developers have questions or comments, please feel free to email me at lax@lavishsoft.com.

Inner Space does not require the .NET 2.0 framework, except to load .NET applications.

Glider has once again made the case for its customers to not believe in Merc (Merc, feel free to send me an email if you want to license a proven anti-Warden solution that won't require your customers have a Lavish subscription, or of course, feel free to use WardenLink which your customers can have the option of using and protecting your work as long as they have a Lavish subscription). Their forums are packed with posts about everyone being banned.

Reading through posts on the glider forums, I see a lot of incorrect assumptions and incorrect information. So I suppose I'll help clear things up.

1. This goes to prove that rootkits are not failsafe to avoid Warden, and a more proactive approach is necessary, as ISXWarden takes.
2. When Blizzard detects something they want to exterminate, they most certainly WILL hold onto detections for a decent amount of time (there are posts about "why would they hold out on banning us? is it money for BC?" -- I assure you, they are not having money problems with 7.5 million subscribers and reportedly $1b revenue). First of all, if they banned instantly, they would potentially give away information about the detection method. Secondly, they would be limiting the scope of the bans, because people would report the bans and Merc would close the valve to stop the flow. By sitting on the data for a few weeks, they maximize the effects, and they can actually use statistics to find out what percentage of people with that hack they're actually removing from the population. If they sit on it until statistically 90% of Gliders are detected, they're making a huge example out of it and making the majority of their customers happier. I saw a post or two claiming that the detection theory is "disproven" because they got banned while Warden was inactive after weekly maintenance -- laughable.
3. The Governor does not and has never displayed "everything Warden does". Not to call Greg Hoglund (the guy from the WoW!Sharp community that wrote the Governor) out or anything, but he's not the authority on Warden -- and I'm sure I'm not the only one (perhaps the only one outside of Blizzard) that got a chuckle from his Black Hat presentation on the topic. The Governor was desgined to show information about a handful of Warden's scans (something like half of them), many of which have since been removed entirely from Warden.

Interestingly, a couple weeks ago Blizzard pushed a new Warden and the Glider community was seemingly oblivious. Meanwhile, our community was well aware of the updates. I was chuckling to myself, sitting there in a parking lot with my laptop, working on updating ISXWarden. That day I was driving across the country, to my house that hasn't sold yet, to move my furniture out of it, and the house has had internet shut off for weeks. My old neighbors all secured their wifi so I couldn't use theirs ;) At any rate, I was telling people in IRC about the probability that Blizzard started detecting Glider users, and would probably be sitting on it for a while to maximize the pain. Prophetic? I'll let the IRC users decide for themselves.

In light of the massive ban wave, I will now answer the question "Why were they flip-flopping between two versions of Warden?" I'll answer it now because I believe I have a rational answer, whereas I previously would have said "who knows, who cares, all that matters is we're prepared." They enabled a new scan for portions of the last 2 weeks, and as of maintenance and all the bans, that scan is not present. I'm not going to give anyone the nitty gritty details for free because what I know is worth a lot of money to a lot of people, and I've dealt with giving everything away and having people make millions off my work without anything in return before and I don't plan to do that again. But, suffice it to say, Blizzard is not stupid. They flip-flopped to avoid the scan itself being detected, because they likely plan to use it for another, similar ban wave in the future. I'm sure Blizzard is aware of our community and my work, and I'm sure they knew I would know everything about the scan.

Still, I'm not letting down my guard. I'll be further improving ISXWarden to help ensure that our day will never come.

The legal wizards (well, MCaldwell) at Blizzard sent us (and our ISP) an informal DMCA takedown notice via email (note: form letter with URLs pasted at the end, with no name and a random reply-to at blizzard.com, though their SMTP server left some internal information in the headers that indicated it was MCaldwell) for 6 images hosted on ismods.com. These images were screenshots of World of Warcraft. If I had the spare time, I would counter claim, but I don't.

Therefore, until there is legal precedent other than Kopp v. Vivendi (which resulted in a settlement that allowed Mr. Kopp to continue to produce his WoW guide that included in-game screenshots) to show that the usage of WoW screenshots in an ISXWoW review (reviews of WoW would fall under fair use without question, but no idea about ISXWoW) or in a WoWBot manual are fair use, screenshots that show WoW gameplay will not be hosted here. Screenshots of any Lavish GUI (e.g. the UI in IS) are of course allowed, but trim them to only show your UI. Otherwise, host them off-site. I removed a few WoW-related reviews that included screenshots.

Screenshots of other games are perfectly acceptable, as this is nearly universally considered fair use (apparently except for Blizzard).

Write a review, post it on the News & Reviews Submissions forum, and if it gets used, I will give you $50 via PayPal! This offer is extended indefinitely.

What "mods" can get reviewed? Anything posted here! Scripts, Extensions, and IS User Interface mods are all good. I would like to see reviews for ISXWoW, ISXEQ2 and WoWBot, at the very least. Make them good, and supply screenshots where possible.

Update:
As of recently, we now have a team of mod review reviewers that are allowed to read review submissions before their possible acceptance. Do not be alarmed if you get a private message from one of these reviewers about potential improvements to your submission, and do not take offense -- they are only trying to help!

Over at MacroQuest2.com (you know, where we do this same kind of stuff but only for EverQuest 1) I've been working on setting up a sort of convention for MacroQuest and Inner Space sort of topics. The tentative date and general location will be Atlanta, Georgia (USA) and on or including the date January 6, 2006 (it's pseudo-2005...). The reason it's at the end of the year and in the southeast is I'm going to be in the southeast at that time anyway and I decided to set up a convention. MacroCon 2006 will be in the mid-west, and sometime between May and September of 2006. Planning for that will start immediately after MacroCon 2005.

What will it entail? We're kind of working on that. Ideally, this would be in the form of a conventional convention, but that might wait until MacroCon 2006. From our current count, we expect about 50-100 people to attend (that could go up though). So, while we would LIKE to have speakers present topics, this might be in limited form for this iteration. I will happily speak on a topic or two, but as I dont expect a huge turnout, I predict very few speakers. I would like to make sure there is stuff to do though, and allow people to learn something new if they wish.

We are just in the beginning stages of planning this, and we're not really sure what should happen and when, so if you have any opinions on the matter and/or would like to go, visit the MacroCon 2005 forum here: http://www.macroquest2.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=66

ISXEQ is built right into MacroQuest 2, and has been included with the MacroQuest 2 zip for a couple months now. If you have the latest MacroQuest 2, you already have ISXEQ! Open ISXEQ.sln (same place as MQ2Main.sln) -- only available for Visual Studio .NET, no Visual Studio 6 -- and compile. No MQ2Auth action required.

The forums for ISXEQ are on the MacroQuest boards here: http://www.macroquest2.com/phpBB2/index.php?c=14

The documentation for ISXEQ is on the ISMods wiki, here: ISXEQ. The documentation is obviously not complete, so if you would like to contribute to the wiki, please do.

Our forums now have wiki links built in.

To link to a page in the wiki, use the title of the page itself and surround it with two sets of brackets like this:
[[World of Warcraft]] (Result: World of Warcraft)
You can also give the link a different name. To do that, put the new name for the link on the right side of a | within those brackets, like this:
[[World of Warcraft|Name shown in link]] (Result: Name shown in link)
The same system is used in the wiki itself.

I have created a wiki for ISMods at http://www.ismods.com/wiki so that users can more easily collaborate by sharing information about Inner Space and modifications. A wiki, for those that are not familiar, is an easy to use system for open documentation -- meaning, anyone can go in and make changes to make things easier to understand or add things that were left out. This of course brings the question "what about vandalism." Not to worry. Wikis store data in such a way that things that changes can easily be undone.

Check out http://www.wikipedia.org/ for a really cool example of a wiki. Wikipedia is a large online encyclopedia, free for all to browse as well as contribute to. The same system used by Wikipedia is now available here at ISMods for your use. Ideally, each extension and script will be detailed in the wiki, with each command, data type, and Top-Level Object described with their usage and examples. Scripts can actually be released directly through the wiki, rather than posting source code on the forums if you please.

We have an IRC channel on irc.lavishsoft.com
#ismods - everything Inner Space or LavishScript, and discussion and development of extensions

I'm going to explain a fundamental change, which only very slightly affects IS Mods (it will break your sources due to naming changes, but on the outside looks almost exactly the same), but will affect other products such as Fury, and even the Inner Space uplink.

We have separated what we're now calling "LavishScript" from Inner Space, and it is now a library we will use in several products. Previously, it was embedded in the Inner Space session DLL, which meant that we would have to reproduce the same code in each product to achieve the same result. The uplink itself had a portion of this, but was not given capabilities such as variables or actual scripts.

LavishScript consists of commands, datatypes, top-level objects (TLOs), scripts and variables (which for all intents and purposes, are top-level objects). A portion of the commands, datatypes, and TLOs from Inner Space have been moved directly into LavishScript. This provides a common base for using LavishScript, so it will be extremely similar in all of our products.

We will be moving parts of the manual into overall LavishScript documentation, which the Inner Space manual will refer to for LavishScript-related topics.