LBP Union Research and Development

LBP Union Research and Development
Other names	R&D
Leaders	Zaprit: Minister of Technology Slendy: Lead Developersudokoko: Senior Developer
Notable Members	metraberry: Developer Dagg: Developeracidiclight: Developer ...
Founded	August 2021
Parent	LBP Union Ministry of Technology

The Research and Development (R&D) team is the LBP Union's division of programmers, in-game logicians, and other technical experts discover new technologies, develop applications, and maintain the Union's software operations.

History

Foundation

The Research and Development team was founded sometime in August of 2021and was not initially open to the public. According to Lead Protector m88youngling on August 25th, 2021, "I think if we can combine our knowledge and ideas, we can create really innovative stuff that people will enjoy, like the Codex project." [2] Days prior, ShadowLeviathan was appointed as Lead Developer on August 23rd.

Aside from the LBP Union Codex, a project to add cryptographic dual factor authentication between LittleBigPlanet and Discord,one of the primary focuses of the early R&D team was to investigate the status of the official LittleBigPlanet servers hosted by Sony. On August 27th, an announcement was posted to LBP Union's status history channel on Discord explaining some of R&D's recent observations of the official servers. The announcement explained that Turecross321's self-hosted server status tool had detected that Sony's server was indeed online but wasn't accepting any public connections. This led to the conclusion that Sony could have potentially been performing internal testing of new server security. The announcement also highlighted that the official servers had been periodically going up and down, indicating that they may have been rolling out changes and restarting the server to implement those changes.At some point in August, AcidicLight (then known as Aklnthndr) was also appointed as a Lead Developer alongside ShadowLeviathan. The two answered questions at a press conference on August 28th.

Private Server Development

On September 2nd, LBP Union and the Research and Development team began to turn its attention to hosting private game servers for the community with a dedicated Discord thread.About a week and a half later on September 13th, this speculation turned out to be warranted, as Sony permanently discontinued online service for PlayStation 3 and Vita.This thread was made up of all R&D team members, notably including LoganTGT, Jvyden, Nya0, Turecross321, Acidiclight, and others. On September 13th, the thread's name was changed by m88youngling to 'Project Lighthouse (Private Server Dev)', which was the first time that the name for the project had been proposed. This led to the R&D team pivoting even further toward the development of Project Lighthouse.On October 16th, Jvyden was appointed as Lead Developer due to his contributions to Project Lighthouse. The Research and Development team would continue to develop Project Lighthouse for the next several years.

Later History

Sometime around the end of August, Jvyden resigned as Lead Developer following disagreements with the direction of LBP Union and Project Lighthouse and in response to a series of fake screenshots alleging that he had orchestrated an attack against the public custom server Catbox. Following his resignation, Slendy was appointed as Lead Developer on August 22nd, 2022.

Publicizing Development Discussions

On April 6th, 2024, the lighthouse-dev channel on Discord was opened up to the public in an effort to make development of Project Lighthouse more accessible. Later that month, a blog post was published to LBPUnion.com about Project Lighthouse 2, a project detailing LBP Union's ambitions to write a new LittleBigPlanet custom server from scratch using the lessons learned from Project Lighthouse. This would hinge on making all parts of the development process accessible to the public.