Hello LSPDFR community!

 

Today I'm announcing a new plugin/application that I'm hoping to release in the next few weeks. This is the San Andreas Record Data Access System - SARDAS for short. It's a Windows application you can run on a computer in real-life that will allow full access to ped/vehicle records, IN GAME!

Here are some screenshots of it in action:

 

Login screen

 

The database screen:

 

The database, after searching for a vehicle:

 

It automatically searches for the owner of a vehicle, much like Computer+ does with its vehicle records search.

 

In-game at launch:

 

The client app running on my Toughbook, while LSPDFR runs on my main PC!

 

This plugin will require a little bit of technical skill to run - namely, you'll need to be able to open the required ports in the firewall and figure out the IP address of your "server" machine. I'm also planning on integrating other mods, and additional features, similar to the callout management of Computer+.

 

In the future, I'd like to add the ability for mods to create windows and notifications on the client computer, making it truly act like a police "MDT".

I'll keep this thread updated as I progress, and I'll try to add what features I can.

 

Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there!
 

 

 

I've now released a RC (Release Candidate) version of the app here:

It's still in early stages, and may be buggy - don't blame me if it crashes your game!

Edited March 17, 20179 yr by sloosecannon

This seems a lot of work for such little reward... considering everything this application does, LSPDFR does on the main screen.

 

When you call in details LSPDFR already brings up how many times they've been stopped, DOB, insurance/registration status etc. 

6 minutes ago, CouthInk4 said:

This seems a lot of work for such little reward... considering everything this application does, LSPDFR does on the main screen.

 

When you call in details LSPDFR already brings up how many times they've been stopped, DOB, insurance/registration status etc. 

That's true, but it's more convenient to me to have it on another screen entirely. If you've got a random computer lying around or something, it's really no harm to run it.

 

Plus I'm planning on having more functionality than just the records check. That's just version 1.0!

Awesome idea! I had thought of making this myself, though with a web-based interface, but seems you've beat me to it. Good work, looks awesome!

I love this idea. Especially since I have a small laptop just sitting around that I could use this with.

5 minutes ago, 5Rya said:

I love this idea. Especially since I have a small laptop just sitting around that I could use this with.

Yeah, mine is a spare computer I use to program radios (hence the radio-related things on the desktop :P) but I figured why not use my toughbook to do the database searches?

 

Development is going swimmingly, I've actually gotten a chance to refactor some of my...... less than ideal code I wrote at the start :)

I may be releasing it sooner than I anticipated though - keep an eye out!

This could actually prove to be pretty useful... especially for RP Clans. Even more so if LSPDFR is ever able to be run on FiveReborn.

 

Looks good so far!

On 1/6/2017 at 6:11 PM, LaHomie said:

This could actually prove to be pretty useful... especially for RP Clans. Even more so if LSPDFR is ever able to be run on FiveReborn.

 

Looks good so far!

I actually did think about using it for that - there's really no reason that wouldn't work, although the "server" would probably be something run by the clan. I may look into making a standalone server for precisely that purpose at some point.

Is this something that will be released in the near release or is there still a while before release?

2 hours ago, 5Rya said:

Is this something that will be released in the near release or is there still a while before release?

Very soon. Probably within a week or so, if nothing goes wrong.

I think it's a great idea, but the implementation seems like a lot of overhead. Personally I'd prefer websockets over HTTP, and and RPC plain socket over HTTP or websocket. 

5 minutes ago, ainesophaur said:

I think it's a great idea, but the implementation seems like a lot of overhead. Personally I'd prefer websockets over HTTP, and and RPC plain socket over HTTP or websocket. 

Well, websockets go over HTTP AFAIK, so the overhead would be about the same...

 

There is a fair bit of overhead, but I'm intentionally limiting what it's doing. I'm also using the most lightweight lib I could find to run the "server". It doesn't seem to affect anything ingame, even when I iterate over all peds/vehicles searching for a name.

Websockets are their own protocol and their only relation to the HTTP protocol is the Upgrade command which is just HTTP friendly and not necessarily HTTP only. HTTP has a lot more jobs and points of attack as well as a HTTP requires more dependencies. In my production projects, I see far less attack attempts across the WS cluster vs the HTTP cluster. Undoubtedly it's because 80 is a more commonly defined/used port.

 

With the scope of your project being specifically intended for use with GTA, it's probably unlikely your intended use will have security issues.. But since it's an HTTP server listening globally, it's susceptible to being leveraged in attacks. The only reason I care is the growing number of attacks against vanilla/unsecured HTTP servers, where attackers at just looking for any open HTTP server to exploit the underlying OS.

 

If you're only handling get requests then you'll probably never be in the group of exploitable servers.. But at that point, you'd gain so much more by using websockets.. You could do things like keep the enumerable returned in game and then notify the change in game to your websocket client without blindly polling.

 

Sorry if it seems like a rant..it's truly not intended to be. I just see many tools for the job and HTTP servers don't feel like the best tool for the job.

6 minutes ago, ainesophaur said:

Websockets are their own protocol and their only relation to the HTTP protocol is the Upgrade command which is just HTTP friendly and not necessarily HTTP only. HTTP has a lot more jobs and points of attack as well as a HTTP requires more dependencies. In my production projects, I see far less attack attempts across the WS cluster vs the HTTP cluster. Undoubtedly it's because 80 is a more commonly defined/used port.

 

With the scope of your project being specifically intended for use with GTA, it's probably unlikely your intended use will have security issues.. But since it's an HTTP server listening globally, it's susceptible to being leveraged in attacks. The only reason I care is the growing number of attacks against vanilla/unsecured HTTP servers, where attackers at just looking for any open HTTP server to exploit the underlying OS.

 

If you're only handling get requests then you'll probably never be in the group of exploitable servers.. But at that point, you'd gain so much more by using websockets.. You could do things like keep the enumerable returned in game and then notify the change in game to your websocket client without blindly polling.

 

Sorry if it seems like a rant..it's truly not intended to be. I just see many tools for the job and HTTP servers don't feel like the best tool for the job.

Right, I understand that. I'm not running on port 80 though (that would be a terrible idea!) and I've got mostly GET for the time being, with POST being used for a few requests. Plus the application design means it's designed to be running behind a NAT or similar, so the computer shouldn't even be directly routable.

 

I'm considering adding websockets as an option for other things, but for now, since the actions are all user-initiated, it works fine.

 

My other issue with websockets is that they've got an obnoxious tendency to disconnect and not reconnect easily, at least IME.

 

 

Honestly, I wish there was a better way to do this than just opening a webserver on the computer. It's gonna be tough to teach people how to find their IP address, and there are all sorts of other difficulties about opening ports. But there's no easy to access network discovery protocol that I could find that would work in this situation...

8 minutes ago, sloosecannon said:

Right, I understand that. I'm not running on port 80 though (that would be a terrible idea!) and I've got mostly GET for the time being, with POST being used for a few requests. Plus the application design means it's designed to be running behind a NAT or similar, so the computer shouldn't even be directly routable.

 

I'm considering adding websockets as an option for other things, but for now, since the actions are all user-initiated, it works fine.

 

My other issue with websockets is that they've got an obnoxious tendency to disconnect and not reconnect easily, at least IME.

 

 

Honestly, I wish there was a better way to do this than just opening a webserver on the computer. It's gonna be tough to teach people how to find their IP address, and there are all sorts of other difficulties about opening ports. But there's no easy to access network discovery protocol that I could find that would work in this situation...

 

If you do happen to experiment with WS, hit me up and I'll give you a C# HOC I created using WS and Rx operators to handle reconnection with a throttle.. After implementing the HOC, I tested it with a RAGE plugin I was working on and it performed perfectly. 

This is awesome! I for one have wanted this for a while. 

Many officers run plates while driving, and you just can't currently do that.

This just opened a whole world of great ideas now that you can simulate using a police laptop on a real laptop. Some ideas that came to mind in additional to running peds and plates were...

• writing tickets
• writing reports
• alpr (it could show the plate number of each car and show if there are any warnings with that plate). Although probably impossible to do wouldn't it be awesome if someone could setup a script that takes ingame pictures of the plates in real time and sends them to the laptop as it is processing the plate.

As i come up with more ideas I will edit the post. 

Edited January 14, 20179 yr by 5Rya

On 1/11/2017 at 11:47 AM, OfficerL6 said:

This is awesome! I for one have wanted this for a while. 

Many officers run plates while driving, and you just can't currently do that.

Absolutely - this lets you do just that!

 

On 1/11/2017 at 4:27 PM, 5Rya said:

This just opened a whole world of great ideas now that you can simulate using a police laptop on a real laptop. Some ideas that came to mind in additional to running peds and plates were...

• writing tickets
• writing reports
• alpr (it could show the plate number of each car and show if there are any warnings with that plate). Although probably impossible to do wouldn't it be awesome if someone you could setup a script that takes ingame pictures of the plates in real time and sends them to the laptop as it is processing the plate.

As i come up with more ideas I will edit the post. 

These are things I'm thinking about adding eventually too. Obviously that information would only be local to the computer it's installed on, but it would still be pretty cool. The ALPR might be possible, but it's probably more work than it's worth.

Any update?

On 1/30/2017 at 7:59 PM, 5Rya said:

Any update?

Last major bug just got worked out. Hopefully within the next day or two I'll have a release ready.