Question

Right,

I’m trying to write a wee script in PHP that will send an in game chat package to Minecraft.

//Deliberately low timeout
$mc = fsockopen("localhost", 25565, $errno, $err, 3);

Now, if that connects successfully, then I send 2 “packets”.

A single byte with the integer 3 in it to tell Minecraft that it should handle the incoming network traffic as a Packet3Chat “packet”:

fwrite( $mc, strrev( pack( "C", 3 )  ) );

This appears to work A-OK**.

The second “packet” that is required is the length of the string as a signed short.

$my_string = "Hello World!";
//119 character limit on Minecraft chat messages
$processed_string = substr($my_string, 0, 119);
fwrite($mc, strrev( pack( "s", strlen( $processed_string ) ) ) );

And that also appears to work A-OK**.

And now all that’s left to do is send the actual string, as chars.

I have tried splitting the string using str_split and sending each character on it’s own using both:

//Signed char
fwrite($mc, strrev( pack( "c", $character ) ) );

and

//Unsigned char
fwrite($mc, strrev( pack( "C", $character ) ) );

And I’ve also tried just sending the whole string by those methods without splitting it up, however I haven’t been able to successfully print out the characters received by readChar() (System.out.println just prints an empty line), and I get an fwrite error 10053 at some point during the sending of the characters – i.e. an EOFException is thrown by readChar().

I’m running the modified Minecraft Server on Windows 7 and I’m running PHP 5.x using XAMPP on the same machine.

Any ideas why the connection would be “closed by software”? And why it would close only during the sending of the characters/string and not during the sending of the byte/short?

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** Yes I have used System.out.println to verify the data received by Minecraft.

Answer 1

10053 is the winsock error code for WSAECONNABORTED.
An “understandable” explaination of that error condition can be found at http://www.chilkatsoft.com/p/p_299.asp