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Old 2015-07-30, 11:58 PM   [Ignore Me] #35
Chord
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Re: PSEmu - PlanetSide Emulator


Originally Posted by OpolE View Post
A note from EQ forums.

"I think a big component of building eqemu was having a live server to do packet captures from. If PS1 is no longer available it would be pretty difficult to emulate it just having clients and no server....

Regards,
Mg"
Glad to see we're getting a lot of support from this and other communities.
As for packet captures, I feel the same way. If that server goes down tomorrow or next week, this project just got a whole lot harder, if not impossible. Essentially all of the analysis would have to be static instead of dynamic.

Static analysis is always slower as it requires you to read assembly. So far I've mostly done static analysis for insight and for ideas of where to hook. Combined with this, dynamic analysis does wonders for insight in to how the code actually works.

I've been considering dropping any actual server development for now and instead just focusing on capturing packets. If I made a tool to easily capture and record packets, then I could distribute it and have you guys help out. Then if the server goes down, we'd still have an awesome record of a ton of packets containing server responses. This is pretty good, but still difficult as there is no context beyond time for such a packet dump. That's why I've considered making a FRAPS-like capturing tool that captures at a super low frame rate, records packets, and logs all in-game keypresses and mouse movements. For example: an old game called Shadowbane had an emulator created for it after the servers went down. The key to their success was Shadowbane's ability to record replays. These became a primary way to reverse engineer the game's functionality without an active server.

It's hard to say what the most important thing is I should do right now, but maybe packet capturing should be it. Code can be written later. What do you guys think?
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