Llama Punter Network

Llama Punter Network is the first full software suite we have developed. The Projectile Waffle Community (what PWC stands for) was initially a gaming community targeted in the Unreal Tournament 2004 game from Epic Games.

The game did not have a good global blocking system, so other community modders developed a program called “UTAN”, the Unreal Trusted Admin Network. This system helped admins ban users on multiple servers at once, and allowed trusted administrators to globally block known cheaters or hackers from their servers.

The reason we started to build a solution is that UTAN was moved to a for-profit company’s site, and they announced that they were going to discontinue the service.

Software Features

  • Global Blacklist System: Game Server Admins have a choice of receiving our list of globally blocked cheaters, hackers, or pirated keys.
  • Anti-Piracy Algorithm: Our analytics will pay attention to the combination of the key usage and the location of where they are. Keys that travel more than any reasonable person can travel will result in it being locked out.
  • Comprehensive Analytics Engine: All player joins are sent to our server to track what names they use, and what servers they play on. Admins and players can look at what we store and can see what we have on them. Shows total IP addresses, bans, and names they have used.
  • Subscriptions: Admins who trust other admins can choose to receive their ban lists as well as their own. Easy to opt in and easy to cancel if it doesn’t work out for them.
  • White-list System: If they want to white-list a GUID of a player they can.
  • Replication: Game Server Admins can enter bans in an easy to use interface. Bans get replicated to all servers that they are signed into, or subscribe to.
  • Web Join Log: Admins can place a join log on their website to share with other members and players who is in playing and what map it’s on.
  • Hybrid Redirect: Users have 512MB of free uploads for compressed game files. By default our 1.3TB of redirect files will be served. If, however, they have a different version of a file than we do (which happens), they can upload an “override” file to our redirect site and it will serve that instead. It’s a great way to save big on storage! We offer this for free to all users.

While the game is no longer as popular as it once was, LPN is still used by communities to organize their bans and to track player data. It has undergone two rewrites, one to take it from PHP 4.x over to PHP 5.x and recently last year to PHP 7.x