Yeah, ChaosSlayer, I listed that as one of the cons for starting this work. If it was going to take nearly as much work as it took to get SoF to where it is now, then I wouldn't even bother. But, I am pretty confident that I have everything I need (or most of it anyway) to get the SoD expansion working with the Emu within a fairly short amount of time.
Getting every opcode we have on SoF right now converted into SoD opcodes will be trivial thanks to some information I have from around that time. It will still take time to adjust them all, but I was able to update the entire opcode list for SoD and get it on the SVN last night already. At least 50% of the ones on the SVN now should be correct for SoD and I can get the other half correct as soon as I can get past the Login Server and run a couple packet collects.
The item packets were a big part of getting SoF to work as they had changed how those work considerably from Titanium to SoF. But, the item packets in SoD are exactly like (or very very close) the SoF ones, so there should be no changes needed there.
Most of the packet structures that were created for SoF were exact copies from Live during SoD, so that means they should work without any editing. Only a few key packet structures should need any work, and I can get most of that info from ShowEQ's forums/svn.
So, I should have everything I need to get this running in a pretty short time if all goes well.
I do agree that a retail release would be MUCH preferred over a digital download, but I don't want to wait another year to see if the next expansion is retail or only digital like the last 2 have been. The community manager on the SOE forums pretty-much confirmed that they probably won't be doing any more retail releases. That could always change, but I don't think it is likely at this point.
I think the Steam version will likely stay the same until Underfoot replaces it as the new starter pack once the new expansion comes out at the end of 2010. We will have to cross that bridge when we get there, but hopefully we can just upgrade to Underfoot at that time like we are for SoD now.
One nice thing about digital download like this is that people can get it instantly (not including download time of course) from anywhere in the world. Shipping to certain places is hard to find, so many people wanting a retail release would have a hard time getting it when they could now just download it.
I hope that the price of SoD doesn't jump up too much after the sale is over. I don't think it would go back up to $19.99, but maybe up to $5 or $10 tops (pure guess). Again though, I recommend that anyone who thinks they might want it to get it now before the sale ends. It is practically free at this point!
Derision,
Thanks for checking it out! I didn't think about using the same account and password to verify if encryption had changed or not. That is good news! So, it sounds like it may just be the 2 extra bytes on the end of the packet from the client that is throwing it off. My guess is that the LS is just ignoring the packet because it doesn't match the size it wants for the struct. I don't know what those 2 extra bytes are for, but I have a feeling they can probably just be ignored. They may be for telling the server if you have read news/voted/etc recently, or something like that, which we don't care about.
I wonder if simply adding 2 unknown bytes to that login struct would allow the SoD client to log in. If so, it should be a pretty easy solution. Then we will just need Rogean to make the needed adjustments for the Public LS and we should be able to move to the next step of getting SoD going
Hybrid Mode
