Mercenaries

[Secrets]

Originally Posted by trevius

I though you were born crazy! <3 Secrets

And yeah, it is a unix timestamp. I didn't look much into that function when I stuck that in there. I was just populating fields with data. You may be right that it is returning an undesired result.

I'll be committing what I learned from the disassembly soon.

In the meantime, here's a list of valid merc status update IDs. The packet is used on the client and server, whereas the client sends different data than the server packet. It's not just used for hiring as you can see below:

// [OPCode: 0x5e78 (OP_MercenaryHire?)] On Live as of April 2 2012
/*
Valid response IDs:

0 - Hire me! (Assign Merc after sending this.)
1 - Insufficient money message.
2 - Mercenary-To-Hire does not exist in the server's DB.
3 - Mercenary failed to spawn. (this actually tells us the mercenary should spawn BEFORE recieving this packet.)
4 - Mercenaries not allowed in raids.
5 - You already have a mercenary request pending
6 - You must dismiss the mercenary before hiring a new one.
7 - You must dismiss your suspended one before hiring a new one.
8 - Group is full.
9 - Error creating mercenary
10 - Replacing mercenary(?!)
11 - Your mercenary has quit! You ran out of money to pay for your mercenary!
12 - Your mercenary waived an upkeep cost of %d plat, and %d gold and your mercenary upkeep cost timer has been reset to %s. <-- these values are for GM resets of mercenaries and are generated from the client's
mercenary info. NOT from the packet.
13 - Your mercenary is about to be quit due to insufficient funds! <--- Sent before the mercenary quits, unsure of time sent before.
14 - There is no mercenary liason nearby! <-- hacking attempt check if no mercenary merchant is in the zone!
15 - You are too far away from the liason! <-- Liason exists as type in the zone, but client is too far away. (position update happened)
16 - You do not meet the requirements for that mercenary! <-- For example, if a mercenary is 'unlocked' in some way, send this if they do not have the mercenary unlock.
*/

[Secrets]

So, the assign packet.

It's actually a 16-byte packet that does different things depending on variable size.

I had a screenshot from when I last worked on it. Basically, there's a few fields, and you were right about the unhire struct being the same as the assign struct:

struct MercenaryAssign_Struct {
/*0000*/ int32 MercEntityID; // Seen 0 (no merc spawned) or 615843841 and 22779137
/*0004*/ int32 MercState; // Seen 0 with no merc hired
/*0008*/ int32 MercSuspended; // Seen 1 when no merc is hired - ID unique to each type of mercenary
/*0012*/ int32 MercTimeRemaining; //UNIX Timestamp. The reason the client accepts this part of the packet missing is because SOE stupidly left no size checks. //I assume they wanted it in another packet but never removed it?
/*0016*/
};

I'm not actually sure if MercSuspended is the suspend state of the merc, it could be a list of stances from the client. It might not be. I'm not sure, I haven't observed the packet.

It's also possible the suspended state is a value from 0-4 depending on if the merc is suspended, active, dismissed or two other states? not sure.

Another thing it could be is that I have the initial hire packet and the assign packet screwed up, which would explain the merctimeremaining part being missing.

I forget what values these were but it *was* working at some point: