Today in Dunny Does Things: using my training as a Certified Ethical Hacker I sniffed the traffic between my computer (running Star Trek Online) and the service they use to print 3D Models of your little ship to capture that model of my little ship. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with the model, but I’m just happy to have it.
The how: Using WireShark I monitored the traffic between my computer and, well, everything that isn’t my computer. I had that open on secondary monitor while I fired up STO, and watched the connections happening.
Once in STO, I went to the in game vendor that lets you customize starships, and did the “Upload to server” thing required to start the 3D print process. Once that kicked off, I noted the relevant network traffic.
When that was finished, I closed the game and stopped WireShark from recording any further traffic. I then filtered based on the noted destination IP, and followed the HTTP stream to verify what I’d captured would be usable. Since this happened over HTTP, it wasn’t encrypted – and the data was totally in the clear, which meant I could do something with it.
I then just had WireShark export the files transferred via HTTP (since they were captured as part of the traffic) and named them accordingly.
Opening the resulting archive in 7Zip confirmed I had several PNG files, a JSON file, a MTL file and an OBJ file. Everything you need for a 3D model.
I opened both the MTL and OBJ in Notepad++ and confirmed they were what I expected – a quick Google search let me know that Blender would be more than capable of opening the OBJ, so I did that.
And now I can make renders of my ship, or at least I can if I ever learn how to use Blender.