thecomputerist

Unfortunate. I've had success just editing the Server.dat with notepad (edit: make sure you're saving in a ascii friendly format, so byte sized char's, no UTC-16, 32, etc). No hooking/ loading required. I only state this for anyone who might come across this post in the future and is looking for answers. Here's an example Server.dat from an older attempt/ project of mines which worked fine (Patch 5065, no modifications just Server.dat). Had the server on another locally networked machine.

Client version 5065 does not require anything, it's clear text. More specifically 5077 and before. So just open server.dat with your preferred text editor. I would question if you have any additional spaces, invisible characters, etc, within your server.dat. There's nothing to block you from entering a local address on 5065, just a loopback/ 127.0.0.1.

As the poster before me pointed out, that epvpr's post is likely your best "tutorial" for FPS, just keep in mind, it'll be trial and error. Sleep is used in different places in the client as you'll see. As far as the resolution goes, on older clients (I'm not sure on modern CO3 stuff), the supporter resolutions of 800*600 and 1024*768 is hard-coded in a lot of places within the clients Conquer.exe, so you'll need to trial and error that too. There's some values that are for the login screen, some for after it. You'll also need to keep in mind the GUI elements of the client, they're loaded in through "ini/GUI.ini" and "ini/GUI800X600.ini", which one's used depends on the Screenmode specified in: "GameSetUp.ini" And there's also some GUI elements that are hard-coded, so you'll need to figure that one too. A reference you should look at: https://www.elitepvpers.com/forum/conquer-online-2/215781-changing-co-resolution.html

It genuinely surprises me there's no open source client projects from the community. Maybe this will change with this relatively new community forming within CoolDown. The obvious answer to this would be to become the change you wish to see. But I know my limit, and I don't know the client well enough to attempt it myself. Maybe one day, and I would move it away from DX to OpenGL for possible support on Linux (Yes I know OpenGL's basically deprecated for Vulkan, and there's translation layers like DXVK, Wine, etc).