we need psu private server up again

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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby Jovi » Fri Apr 05, 2013 8:11 pm

essen wrote:All I know is that from my level of knowledge I either had to try every single possible attack individually, which would take a depressing amount of time, or give up, because I have no idea where to find all these attack types, and they're probably not in a single file in the client, but likely scattered everywhere in monster files and PA files and such. So yeah, no time, no data, things don't look too good at the moment.


Probably too little too late, but is this something an army of noobs could do if there was a clear, concise tutorial or set of instructions to follow? I can't speak for everyone, but I myself would love to help; I just don't know where to start, what to look for or even what to do. Dividing up the tasks amongst a group of people seems far better than just one person trying to do it all, even if those people are less knowledgeable in the subject. PSO2 is great and all, but a better balanced, custom, playable PSU still sounds great to me.
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby essen » Fri Apr 05, 2013 10:58 pm

We don't know where to start either.
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby Jovi » Fri Apr 05, 2013 11:12 pm

Well, damn. D=
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby PermaNull » Wed Apr 10, 2013 7:05 am

I don't know Erlang, Never liked the language...

But I do have a broad skill set ranging from Reverse Engineering, X86 Assembly, PPC Altivec 64 assembly, C/C++, Python, Perl, PHP, BASIC, among other things.

I used to create game hacks, and reverse engineer file formats for games back in the day created tons of hooks to extended functionality of MMORPG's in the past ( While that was with PDB's server sided, and no debug info client sided ).

I'd be willing to help however I can if you'd ever want to start working on this project again,
I.E.
From my understanding you said that damage calculation is missing such as the formula for hit points

Considering we have the ability to look at the single player/offline side of things wouldn't it be possible to simply figure out the damage/health pointer to a mob then breakpoint that and backtrace until we see the formula functionality and reverse engineer that portion of things in order to break it all down.

That's one advantage we have here is that there essentially isn't any code in the server side that wouldn't be in the client side, considering single player/offline modes are available as far as algorithms or formulas we should be able to obtain any of them from the client side.

Those are my two cents, as I said I've got a wide range of experience while the problem would really be the lack of time I would actually have to dedicate to the project or the lack of an attention span rather if anyone else was willing to attempt continuing this project I'd be willing to put my skill set to use to help.

I'd also be willing to provide any funds needed once I get my working situation sorted ( Another issue with my attention span ), but yeah I loved PSU more so then PSO and I'd love to have the ability to play it again even if that means I have to dedicate hours, weeks, or months worth of work into actually developing, reversing, or such to make it happen.
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby essen » Wed Apr 10, 2013 2:59 pm

You would like Erlang if you actually knew it. It's not really about the language, though the language is nice too for most things.

You can't really use offline to study this packet because the protocol changed in the online client since then. You may be able to if Agrajag ever figured how to convert an online client to offline, but good luck finding the relevant part of the code. It's not about the formula though, it's about figuring out which fields in the packet correspond to what value.
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby PermaNull » Thu Apr 11, 2013 11:12 am

essen wrote:You would like Erlang if you actually knew it. It's not really about the language, though the language is nice too for most things.

You can't really use offline to study this packet because the protocol changed in the online client since then. You may be able to if Agrajag ever figured how to convert an online client to offline, but good luck finding the relevant part of the code. It's not about the formula though, it's about figuring out which fields in the packet correspond to what value.


Yeah I've never took the time to learn it, I'm sure if I wanted to learn a new language I'd find it interesting but currently my mind is already jammed full of different languages, techniques, research among other things so adding anything new to that is quite challenging especially when you're dealing with a syntax unlike any others you've already been dealing with on a daily basis.

Well, I thought the formula for damage was the issue not the placement of where each thing goes in the structure...

Wasn't there a huge collection of logged packets someone had created a while back with community help, and then provided an application to dig through them ( I'm sure those packets contained damage/hitting Mobs type data. )...

I'm quite sure you got that huge batch of data along with *Zero* I think his name was.

Regardless packets in the client still need to be broken down by the client meaning with the appropriate understanding of Assembly and taking the time to reverse the stuff it should be easy enough to step through the packet struct statically figuring out where each piece of the packet is going in memory.

I guess it still comes down to having the ability to test such, with what you've got now though I'd figure that would be possible...

What I mean to say is as long as you have the header/id of the packet that's intended to be sent to the client for the damage it should be possible to figure out how the client handles such in order to determine a basis of the structure from there we just fill the packet in with random data, ( My guess is there's a mob id, player id, damage amount or such, maybe a bit more? I don't suppose there would be too much being sent back to the client other then a few fields ).

And after sending it random data we look at what's happening on the client side (I.E. The damage numbers that appear, or such ) to determine what part of the structure is actually what.

Beyond that it would be possible to assign static data even if we couldn't figure out part of the data in the packet as long as it filled the buffers on the client properly I don't see it causing a crash or anything.

Let me know what you think ( We could accomplish the above by tracing WSARecv/Recv and figuring out how the client treats packets where it breaks down the received data to it's header/id per packet then it would individually call functions to handle each packet also breaking down and using the data in the packet, in theory this is how any application/game/or such would work when being sent packets. )
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby Agrajag » Fri Apr 12, 2013 12:54 am

Unfortunately, the packet in question is one sent from the client to the server. It is possible that they fire one off and then parse it in the offline mode (I've noticed that things like the types list still use the online packets).

Basically, the process goes something like this:
Client detects an attack hit.
--Problem packet is sent from client to server.
Server reads the attack ID (and actor/target IDs, and we think someone's position/angle), calculates damage.
Server sends resulting damage/kill to client.

Last part's understood, first part's done for us (...rather obviously), third part's going to be reworked anyway, but without being able to match an attack ID to an actual attack, the middle's just kind of a fuzzy "and then magic" step.

Do note that while I may be able to match an ID number to a set of stats offline, I can't match that to an actual attack without a very long time spent cataloging values... if I even managed to isolate it, which isn't something I've had any sort of success with. I'm still rather amateurish, heh.

...It's been a very long time since I saw the exact specifics on this issue.

EDIT: Sorry, I know that's a horrible explanation.
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby jericho2242 » Wed May 15, 2013 12:35 pm

i think i still prolly have access to all the logged packets we did back then and i think i can still read and decrypt the data in them fine. but yea once nyu´s server turned into a drama fest and broke down wasnt really any coders left to work on it. its technically possible to make a working server still. just psu is so damn messy its annoying. and still not got that extracter and repacker you promised me essen :p

using new account since cant remember old one and no password reset email is working xD
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby Sakarisei » Wed May 15, 2013 10:13 pm

jericho2242 wrote:i think i still prolly have access to all the logged packets we did back then and i think i can still read and decrypt the data in them fine. but yea once nyu´s server turned into a drama fest and broke down wasnt really any coders left to work on it. its technically possible to make a working server still. just psu is so damn messy its annoying. and still not got that extracter and repacker you promised me essen :p

using new account since cant remember old one and no password reset email is working xD


Lol, there are great news man. I hadn't think that you weren't interested more in psu private servers after the big fail of nyu... (And yes, i was a tester of nyu's private server).
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Re: we need psu private server up again

Postby essen » Wed May 15, 2013 10:34 pm

Extractor, you mean gasetools? It's been released quite some time ago. Repacker, well, there's things to generate files in egs, but you hardly can pack/unpack with the nbl format.

Also, hop on IRC sometimes.
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