Multimc and skins

[VivaGabe!]

Anyone else having issues with their skins while using MultiMC? Went to play some BTW with the wifey and neither of our skins are working....we're just a couple of silly lookin steves.

[Gilberreke]

The Minecraft skin servers have been down for a while apparently. I've heard a few people complain about it. It might be a MultiMC issue though, as I think I've only heard people with MMC complain. Will keep you posted if I see anyone figure it out.

[Gilberreke]

EDIT: launchers cannot fix it

Okay, I have the issue figured out mostly. Mojang discontinued the old skins API, so launchers will have to update to support this. What this means, practically, is that certain launchers will never show the correct skin from now on.

Concerning MultiMC, apparently they are working on a fix.

In short: we'll have to wait a while to see how this all plays out, but BTW being on an older version might mean a persistent problem displaying skins going into the future (for certain launchers).

Here's the proof: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/WEB-985? ... ent-434694

[Gilberreke]

Another update: apparently the information above is not correct, launchers will not be able to fix this, BTW will never have skins unless FC decides to support them.

[dawnraider]

As a SSP workaround you can always replace the char image with your skin, but that means everyone will show up as you not steve in multiplayer. That's unfortunate though.

[FlowerChild]

BTW will never have skins unless FC decides to support them.

Any idea what that would entail?

[Gilberreke]

Any idea what that would entail?

Not really no, but here's what I do now for sure (so as not to give out incorrect info to send you on a goose chase):

- There's two skin servers for Minecraft, skins.minecraft.net and textures.minecraft.net, they use different APIs, but I'm not sure how different
- skins.minecraft.net is what BTW uses and was discontinued
- According to destineternel, the new skins are fundamentally incompatible with the old ones, so just replacing the API call to be correct wouldn't be enough (I haven't checked how different they are)
- Skins now have at least one new layer that's being rendered that's not in BTW, so backporting the full change to skins might be costly, but it might just be a one class thing, I didn't look at the code, as I know you don't want help there anyway

[Daisjun]

Further to this if you're looking for your old skin you can access it through one of the older APIs as there doesn't seem to be any other way to recover it.

Mine for instance is: http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/Daisjun.png Just replace my name with your MC name.

Not sure when the last time this was updated though so it might not be your latest skin or even be there.

[TheGatesofLogic]

Three guys in the discord were messing around with a decompiled 1.5.2 and managed to get it working changing just two lines of code. However it appears you have to have uploaded a skin prior to the format change for it to work.

The fix works by grabbing from a cache of old skins at http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/ instead of skins.minecraft.net or textures.minecraft.net.

For example http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/GxLogic.png would link directly to my skin.

Edit: I totally didn't notice daisjun mention the skin cache.

[VivaGabe!]

Three guys in the discord were messing around with a decompiled 1.5.2 and managed to get it working changing just two lines of code. However it appears you have to have uploaded a skin prior to the format change for it to work.

The fix works by grabbing from a cache of old skins at http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/ instead of skins.minecraft.net or textures.minecraft.net.

For example http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/GxLogic.png would link directly to my skin.

Edit: I totally didn't notice daisjun mention the skin cache.

Ah ok. So how would a nub like me reapply my skins to my characters? Do i just wait for professionals to fix it?

[Daisjun]

Three guys in the discord were messing around with a decompiled 1.5.2 and managed to get it working changing just two lines of code. However it appears you have to have uploaded a skin prior to the format change for it to work.

The fix works by grabbing from a cache of old skins at http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/ instead of skins.minecraft.net or textures.minecraft.net.

For example http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/GxLogic.png would link directly to my skin.

Edit: I totally didn't notice daisjun mention the skin cache.

Ah ok. So how would a nub like me reapply my skins to my characters? Do i just wait for professionals to fix it?

You can fix it in single player by just retexturing Steve with your skin. In multiplayer it can't be done without modifying some code.

Someone has posted a fix that reroutes skin requests to another server where they can be accessed: https://www.superfuntime.org/forum/inde ... 3.new.html

It's a bit involved and requires rerouting your traffic so I wouldn't overly recommend it.

The way forward is probably for someone to come out with a mod that allows you to switch skin servers or have it automatically try and request them from a nominated folder located on the server that people have manually uploaded their skins to.

[FlowerChild]

The way forward is probably for someone to come out with a mod that allows you to switch skin servers

I like this idea. I didn't particularly want to point everyone at the same skin server, because I'm a little leery of them, but the above sounds like a great idea.

I'll take a look at trying to put a config file option for that in place later today.

EDIT: Yup, easy peasy. Will try to put out a small release later on containing this, as I know it's important to SMP type persons.

[Gilberreke]

Could you make it so the url you give it for the alternative skin server supports both UUID and username? Seems like there's a bunch of services that offer your skin up, but some have the UUID in the url, some have the username.

Seems like the default that most tools use is Crafatar.com, which uses UUIDs

[FlowerChild]

Could you make it so the url you give it for the alternative skin server supports both UUID and username?

That doesn't sound reasonable as it would require other players to possess your UUID as well, so they could display your skin. I could be wrong, but from a quick look that seems like it would take a rather simple task and turn it into something quite involved.

[Gilberreke]

That doesn't sound reasonable as it would require other players to possess your UUID as well, so they could display your skin. I could be wrong, but from a quick look that seems like it would take a rather simple task and turn it into something quite involved.

Ah, that does sound a bit involved. Never mind then.

[Daisjun]

Awesome. Thanks FC!

[Marasambala]

Can someone please put together a step by step for dumbasses? I've never touched the config file, where does it go? I've always used a skin from planetminecraft and just followed the link to tie it to my minecraft account. Is there a better way?

[Daisjun]

Can someone please put together a step by step for dumbasses? I've never touched the config file, where does it go? I've always used a skin from planetminecraft and just followed the link to tie it to my minecraft account. Is there a better way?

Mojang has stopped skin compatibility with older versions of MC, so FC has made a workaround.

To fix it, make sure you have the latest BTW version and have copied BTWConfig.txt to the .minecraft folder.

Go into the config file and locate fcPlayerSkinURL=http://skins.minecraft.net/MinecraftSkins/

Change the URL to http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/ It's an older server so it's only a snapshot of uploaded skins from whenever that server was discontinued, but it's better than nothing.

If you want to be able to change and upload skins you'll need to host the skins yourself. You'll have to have the skin files for each player you're playing with uploaded in PNG format with the player's name as the file.

[LannyRipple]

I'm editing this post to clean up IP addresses and such. You can find the IP address and/or host your own legacy skins-proxy by following through the links provided.

Tl;dr --

Add

Code: Select all

fcPlayerSkinURL=http://IP-ADDRESS-HERE/MinecraftSkins/

into BTWConfig.txt (near the top) of your 4.A8 BTW server.

Gory Details --

I followed up on the links earlier in this thread, specifically
[*] https://www.superfuntime.org/forum/inde ... #msg877218
which leads to
[*] https://github.com/blalp/replacement-fo ... in-servers

The latter works by accepting the skin request, looking up the players UUID from their name via api.mojang.com, and then fetching the skin via UUID from crafatar.com. The author is hosting a legacy skin server at the ip address indicated above.

I also tried dumping the .pngs into a local directory named MinecraftSkins and serving them up as static content (in case anything above breaks one day). It doesn't seem to work. I'm not even logging hits on the endpoint during play though I can curl it directly and recover the .pngs just fine. Hoping someone else will also play around with this and get it working. I'll edit this post if I can find the magic.

Here's what I'm trying locally

Code: Select all

$ mkdir -p /tmp/skins/MinecraftSkins
$ cd /tmp/skins/MinecraftSkins
$ curl http://IP-ADDRESS-HERE/MinecraftSkins/LannyRipple.png > LannyRipple.png
$ cd /tmp/skins
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9980
$ curl -I http://192.168.1.5:9980/MinecraftSkins/LannyRipple.png    # show it serves up content
# edit BTWConfig.txt to use endpoint http://192.168.1.5:9980/MinecraftSkins/ and start server

edit - Maybe the server itself caches? I'm back to plain Steve even with the proxy in place.
edit - Mojang rate limits UUID lookups so it could be this method will only work occasionally.

[Marasambala]

[quote="LannyRipple"]Tl;dr --

Add

Code: Select all

fcPlayerSkinURL=http://158.69.202.67/MinecraftSkins/

That picked up my most recent skin before the change.

Thanks

[LannyRipple]

That picked up my most recent skin before the change.

Thanks

I didn't dive in but looks like Crafatar caches skins as well. Unless you are Mojang you aren't going to have access to skin changes immediately.

[Gilberreke]

I didn't dive in but looks like Crafatar caches skins as well. Unless you are Mojang you aren't going to have access to skin changes immediately.

Crafatar doesn't do usernames, only UUID, so that doesn't work

[FlowerChild]

Code: Select all

fcPlayerSkinURL=http://158.69.202.67/MinecraftSkins/

Whose IP address is that man? The main reason I didn't want to include a default address in the config file was that I didn't want to potentially direct people to a dodgy site, and a raw IP like that has dodgy written all over it. Running a whois on it doesn't provide much clarification on the topic either.

[Gilberreke]

Whose IP address is that man? The main reason I didn't want to include a default address in the config file was that I didn't want to potentially direct people to a dodgy site, and a raw IP like that has dodgy written all over it. Running a whois on it doesn't provide much clarification on the topic either.

Some random dude's IP and the code is provided and is clearly violating the Mojang API. As a result it goes down often. I highly recommend staying away from that IP.

The issue is that there's no real alternative. The AWS link provided works for some players, but not all, unfortunately. I asked Crafatar.com to add username support (as they are the most reliable skin service), but they don't want to support usernames for valid reasons:
https://github.com/crafatar/crafatar/issues/248

[FlowerChild]

The AWS link provided works for some players, but not all, unfortunately.

How is it not working? Do you just that more recently uploaded skins aren't available, or is the a bigger issue there?