gg-struggle

tl;dr

gg-struggle is a program that reduces loading times by caching the Guilty Gear server responses, reducing slowdowns caused by latency. Instead of taking 500+ ms/request, this takes ~20ms/req.

Download here

This should in theory work with totsugeki (which I find very cool) since that consolidates the TLS handshakes which are computationally expensive. Try at your own risk

Installer

Install and run by unzipping the .zip file in releases

1. Use installer from releases releases.
2. Run gg-struggle before playing. Keep this window open during play
3. SLASH!

Updating

Uninstall and reinstall with newest installer.

Uninstall / Remove

Run the uninstaller from Windows.

You can verify it's removed by opening c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in a text editor like notepad. This line should NOT exist.

127.0.0.1 ggst-game.guiltygear.com

If you see this line, open it with notepad as administrator and delete the line and save.

Known Issues

slow first load

The first load is always gonna be slow as normal, but subsequent loads should be faster.

Floor lockout / old data

Ranks and floor progressions would never update for some people.

This should be fixed in 1.5 Please report instances of this in issues.

Logs

Crashes are hopefully stored in the logs. If experiencing an issue, please paste relevant screenshots of the log.

Windows: %TEMP%/gg-struggle/all.log linux: $TMPDIR/gg-struggle/all.log

FAQ

Is this a virus? How safe is this?

This isn't a virus, people can check the code. It's common webserver software.

Will I get banned?

I'd say it's highly unlikely because gg-struggle runs as a standalone program that does not touch the game in any way. It reads your game's network traffic and relays it without any tampering.

We are sending slightly stale data back to the game client, so there can be some client-side bugs with out-of-date info, like showing a lobby list with someone who already left.

Why does this need admin privileges to install?

We need to do two things with admin:

1. Force windows to redirect all traffic from the game to your computer running the proxy, gg-struggle. We do this by editing the hosts file
2. Spoof the authenticity of the gg-struggle with your own self-signed cert. We need to assure windows that it can trust gg-struggle is the real ggst-game.guiltygear.com, even though it's really not.

There's no way to distinguish if the HTTP request was made from the proxy or the game.

What does installation do?

1. Modifies the hosts file
2. Locally generates a Self-Signed Certificate (cause you can trust youself)

• installs to the windows root store
• copy stored at %ProgramFiles%/gg-struggle

3. Installs the gg-struggle proxy to your program files.

Why is GG:ST so slow?

The only GG servers are located in Japan.

When the game loads, a 100+ of HTTP requests are sent serially. Each request can take ~200-1500ms due to latency from a region like NA to Japan. This adds up to roughly 100 * 800 = 80+ seconds in the average case.

Why doesn't the game just lump the requests into one big one?

In Japan, the devs probably didn't experience this problem. 100 requests at 10ms/req is a 1 sec load time in Japan. With such low latency, sending them one-by-one is trivial.

The game server API and infrastructure may also be outsourced to a 3rd party contractor and not the game devs themselves. Assuming their devs specialize in games and not network infrastructure, it would make a lot of sense for them to pay someone else to do this while their devs overwork themselves on the game itself.

How does gg-struggle fix this?

We remember the data from previous connections and serve that to the game while fetching from Japan in the background.

I've written an in-depth non-tech explanation in the form of a movie heist in EXPLANATION.md

How do we trick the game to use the gg-struggle instead of the real servers?

We add the redirect rule in the hosts file. This file is Windows' global override for what IP address a specific domain is located. Since this is a system file, we need admin to edit it.

What about the SSL certs? Why does it need to install this cert into the root store of my computer?

We can lead the game to the proxy, but it will reject the connection if gg-struggle can't prove its identity. Installing the cert tells Windows that it can trust the authenticity of gg-struggle.

With the cert installed, we can lead the game to our proxy and the game will believe it's the real server and not a spoofer.

Isn't using a self-signed certificate insecure?

Well, no. Not as long as you generated it yourself and didn't share it. Installing a cert means you trust the identity of anyone who owns the key. You're the only one who owns it, so you're just adding yourself to the list of people you trust.

Installing a self-signed cert means nobody else except the owner can vouch for its authenticity. Usually certs are signed by a trusted CA but this one is signed by just the owner. Since you generated it yourself, you can safely trust it even though nobody else does.

Can an attacker use this self-signed cert to spoof other websites?

Only if they manage to get ahold of it by reading your hard drive. And if they can, your computer's already compromised.

Even if they did read it, they'd also need to spoof your DNS to redirect you to the IP address of their fake site.

What was the old security concern with the self-signed SSL cert?

In previous versions, I gave out my pre-generated SSL cert that I used during testing instead of generating it at install. This would allow anyone with the key (everyone) to spoof any website and steal the victim's data with no warning. But even then, that would only be possible if victim mistakenly went to the wrong IP address via a separate DNS exploit.

As of v1.3+, this no longer exists by generating the cert locally. The previous insecure releases have been removed from GitHub.

Is this a private game server?

This is NOT a private server. This is a proxy-cache that your game downloads from the server.

Where is my data stored/sent?

Data is never sent anywhere besides your computer and the real game servers. All the magic happens locally.

The HTTP response/request payloads are stored in your temp directory, %TEMP%/gg-struggle/dumps. Request headers can be viewed in a sqlite3 database named %TEMP%/gg-struggle/gg-struggle.db.

Does this affect gameplay at all?

Nope. The gameplay itself doesn't deal with this HTTP api endpoint to coordinate gameplay. This only affects out-of-game stuff like menus.

Removal

! FAILSAFE !

If everything goes wrong, edit the hosts file to remove any line that says ggst-game.guiltygear.com. You must restart the game afterwards. It wouldn't hurt to also run ipconfig /flushdns afterwards.

You should also remove the gg-struggle certificate by

1. Run certmgr.msc as admin
2. Navigate to "Trusted Root Certifcation Authorities"
3. Delete gg-struggle