UT99.org | Unreal Tournament Community

I'm not asking somebody to actually introduce me into native coding or writing the code for me.

I just want to figure out a safe way to open a file, parse or write stuff, and safely close it without causing problems with the engine in runtime.
This will likely happen during the course of a native function call so nothing latent.

Any directions?

Hmm, what do you mean by "safely?" Are these files going to contain user input / data sent to other users?

The native code uses c++, and there are ways to serialize objects to and from binary data. You can do this relatively easily, and do extra error correction / escaping if youre worried about invalid inputs. If you want to be safe, you can attempt to parse / deserialize, and then bail if anything about the data seems "off." Obv you'd want to sanitize strings/names and avoid ANY calls that execute calls to console / command line / operating system calls that directly use this serialized / deserialized data, and if you do, heavily sanitize and think of a worst case scenario (the worst case scenario would be somebody transmitting this data to you / to a client / server from within ut99, and it being able to exploit a RCE vulnerability / use some kind of injection to execute arbitrary code / function).

The easiest example is looking up SQL injection mitigation, php execution mitigation, and JS eval dangers.

Last post was in 2013 and... problem has been solved - nothing here is for client as long as you cannot force client to install new natives out of his will - this was not really accepted in UT community. The problem was concerning Server stuff - sample is GunLoc mutator if I well recall the name.

I was unaware of the date... it showed up at the top of forum posts near others that wre recent, and assumed that list was chronological. Doh!

Kind of a dumb design decision to not enforce it to be chronological, but good to know