Spirited

@soulfly I mean this in the most sincere way I can express this: I think you could really benefit from some online programming courses or something (maybe a community college near you?). At this point, you really should learn how to debug more thoroughly, and learn more about client-server architecture, data types, data structures, and networking. I think you could really use some online supplements to bridge the gaps you're experiencing. Especially with how long you've been interested in private server development for. Feel free to ignore this advice, but it may help unblock you with a lot of the work you want to accomplish.

Hey all, A new feature has been added to the board! You can now become a donor to help keep the board running. To be clear, there's no danger in this board going away. However, there is an annual cost for maintaining our domain, hosting, and software license. When donating to the board, you help support these costs and our ability to keep the board up-to-date. You also gain access to the Donor tier, which comes with a few benefits: the purple username, increased message storage, an annual name change credit, a higher upload limit, and animated photo uploads for profile pictures. I'm open for feedback on these benefits, as well. To my surprise, it seems that quite a few of you have already discovered donations and tested the system on your own! Thank you very much for your support, it's very appreciated. I'll be adding more payment options and polish to the system over the coming week. Thanks again for all of your interest and support for our little board. Best, Spirited & Staff

In newer versions of the client, it no longer backs you out to the login screen. Instead, it logs directly into the game. Nothing changed on the server side, but because most private servers incorrectly implemented character creation, it broke a lot of servers. In order to do this, a specific server message needs to be sent to the client using MsgTalk. The contents are ANSWER_OK, and the chat tone is 2100 (character creation screen). Can you check to make sure your server is sending this when responding to MsgRegister?

Thanks for volunteering me for project manager, but I must politely decline your offer due to non-competes I've signed. If I can follow up on your positions list, what is your contribution?

I think you might be looking for the "veil" effect. Or "veil1" if you want a quick dip to darkness. You can play the effect using the MsgName (1015) message and type ROLE_EFFECT (10). And then for the skill effect, I never got that far into implementing skills, but I'm pretty sure those are tied to skills already. So casting the skill on another player should set a status effect that plays that effect automatically? I'm pretty sure... at least.

Good job! I haven't looked through the project too much, but it looks like you're following the hosted services factory pattern? Would be interested to know your thoughts around using it, and if you'd recommend it for C# game server development. I experimented a little with it for Comet's randomization service (BackgroundService using the host service pattern), but never implemented any game systems with it. Best of luck with your development!

Huh! That's cool! I wonder if there's a higher level function that would allow you to target a role by their mesh ID or role ID... and then perform this detour for it. Would be pretty cool being able to apply some special modifier to a specific mob, like blinding someone / something tints them black or something (like they're in magical darkness). What are your current plans for using something like this?

Wait, is it actually being used for items? I thought it was just included but unused.

I don't think the server actually utilizes its MongoDB database...

Woah! This is awesome!!

I'm not familiar with what chat.dll does! What's the advantage of detouring these functions?

Should be the same as modifying any other interface in the game now. It should be all DirectX. Optionally, I'd love it if someone open sourced a new login screen that replaces the flash one for flash-based clients.

A good lesson that you should always understand what a script does before you run it.

Can it be reproduced with another server project? I'm like 95% sure it's not a server problem.

Have you tried the mouse cursor fix yet?

Welcome to our little community! I know a few people have dabbled in other game emulations / mods, but Conquer was my sandbox for like a decade and a half. Still is, but my work and house keep me away from hobby projects. I guess my house is my new hobby project. Lol Anyways, hope you have a fun here! I was a C# engineer in finance / business solutions as well. Haha

Hm. To me, that sounds like a graphics driver issue. Maybe you can try using a different server as a test and see if the problem still exists. I think that's been reported in the past, and the solution was replacing the custom animated cursors in the game with your system cursors, or hooking WndProc to override the GCL_HCURSOR value to set the cursor in WNDCLASS to the current cursor. Haydz described that process and provided a pre-made hook here: https://www.elitepvpers.com/forum/co2-programming/3142253-release-cursorhook-old-client-cursor-blink-lag.html. It doesn't say much, but it does say he hooked SetCursor to achieve that.

Hey! This seems like a cool thing to have up in GitHub, if you want to keep things updated / have people possibly contribute.

I think the cipher for that is here: https://gitlab.com/conquer-online/wiki/-/snippets/1840786

In some server projects, I've seen an exploit where you can log in as anyone (including GM and PM accounts). When logging in, the account server handles MsgAccount and authenticates the player. Then, it sends MsgConnectEx to the client with the IP address of the game server and an identifier. The client disconnects, connects to the game server, and sends MsgConnect with that identifier. In a lot of projects I've seen, that identifier is either the account ID or an incrementing counter. If it's an account ID, then a proxy can just fill that in with any account ID you want. If it's a counter, then a proxy can just keep sending MsgConnect requests until it steal's someone's new session when they try to log in. Fun stuff. Encrypting the identifier with one that uses cipher feedback is likely enough to patch that. If you wanna go above and beyond, then you can replace it with a cryptographically random access token that has a max life of a few seconds. It's a shame the identifier is max 64 bits though.

Glad to hear, but make sure you post your answers as well! This forum is about open-sourcing information. The message type is MsgChangeName, and it's type ID 2080. I don't have it documented at the moment, but I'm also not in a position to finish the wiki enough to document it.

Well, I think the first step might be to stick to one launcher at a time. ConquerLoader is great, but some servers require a special launcher to work. Canyon is probably one of those servers, seeing how it's stuck at logging into the Account server.

Hi all, A new rule has been added to our site guidelines against the use of generative AI for programming and art. Game preservation is a human task involving careful learning and attention to detail. It's the product of a very passionate community who has spent time to learn, document, and teach others. Generative AI has no role in that. From now on: if you are asking for others to review your solely generated code, then your post will be removed and you will be issued a warning. Generative AI is still allowed to be used in projects for feature content (such as NPC dialogs, translation, and other text-based content). It is not allowed for art using image generators. This rule isn't meant to be prescriptive on the use of AI, but it is meant to protect this community from generated slop. Thanks for your understanding, Spirited

This forum has a different mindset than the other forum, for sure. We're about open information and examples here. Showing how to do things to empower those who want to do things on their own. The mindset for the longest time was hording information in private groups. But I think there's enough people here now that recognize the strength of sharing information and getting more people involved. It doesn't mean share everything, but sharing knowledge is huge.

Depends on how old the client is. The original client was made using DX8.1.