[Tabidzukare]

Hi Steven,

Thanks so much for your information. I checked out the site and the first mention I'll give is to how professional it looks! What a great project and thanks for sharing it. I looked at what files they require to play, lo-and-behold they utilize a patcher. I didn't want to patch myself to find out but luckily they did have a manual download for the files.

They are using a hacked PoP client, so i'm assuming they're using the 3.8-4.3 era EQEmu. I could be totally wrong but when I downloaded the patch they had older Dx8.dll's eqmain.dll and an eqgame.exe. When I loaded up the game to the connection point it was an old PoP login screen. Beautiful to see though I didn't patch the rest of the files or register with them to test their spell graphics.

Can you post a screenshot with the old hand graphics working??

Now that that's covered I'll go ahead and cover some other general to ideas I've had regarding this issue as well as some general inquiries in case anyone knows, I'll be on holiday for about a week so I won't have time to test things myself and in preparation for the holiday have been too busy on other projects to do much save for some quest work:

Ideas:

• Spell editing: I downloaded two versions of a spell editing program, one was WindCatchers spell editing front-end, the other's from GeorgeS's site is Ailia's spell editor. I noticed that there are two entries for spell effects a new number and an old number. I wonder if deleting the 'new' entries and putting an appropriate 'old' number in will do anything positive? This one feels like scratching at a wall, but hey what can you do?

• EQInside SDK: I've heard whispers of this SDK in posts in various archives. But apparently it was a .dll or set of tools that facilitated open the various file type archives of EQ. If we can get INTO the .eff's and see what's been changed perhaps we can patch original spells.eff to make it sync properly with the client (if it is indeed 'hard' coded). Has there been anyone that anyone knows of to have opened or patched .eff's? I'm learning OpenGL now in hopes that I might one day be able to make my own solutions but with all the darn math involved it's going to be almost a year or more before I get to any sort of developmental level with it. If we could get our hands on this SDK it could possibly give us a set of tools to begin extraction of those archives and modding them.

• General Tests: The first idea I had is just to check the ability to alter at least the Z positions of the hand graphics by changing races and casting spells and seeing if the hand particles change height.. Another 'general knowledge' answer I don't have and haven't looked into is, do the new spell graphics make use of hand particles or are they centered around the body?

I think the most important element here and now is to be able to bust open or view the spell graphics themselves. I had thought that Ailia's editor had this feature but I've not been able to get it to do that. Without having access to at least open and view those archives I think we have very little in the way of problem solving tools at this point. I still have other 'throw myself against a wall' kind of ideas but we need more input than just my own efforts to try to solve this problem. I've got an extremely narrow range of knowledge and skills though I'm never lacking in enthusiasm or dedication!

*cough* Sadly in this instance for at least another year that enthusiasm and dedication won't yield any results.

With hope,
and as always,
Kindest Regards~~