LOL! Well, you can lead a monkey to water but he still squeals when you give him a lobotomy... Unfortunately the bottom line is that short of catching up to EQLive or lobotomizing a couple thousand people, fixing the patcher is the only way to keep Shawn319 and Acolyte's sanity. Which was another reason I posted here. I feel your pain guys, I did a little work with Casey and Xylor a couple years back on SEQ when VI first started really messing with the encryption. I was the guy who wrote the first QDecoder module which backfilled spawns... Wound up having to leave because I just couldn't handle the trolls.
So, now that a couple of the right folks have read this... What are the thoughts? Where exactly does the law stop with the patcher? I happen to be one of the lucky ones who, for other reasons, has kept many copies of my full EQ directory. I'm fairly certain that a patcher client could be created which:
1) Receives a list of CRC hashes of most-recent known working files from a patch server.
2) Compares local file CRC hashes to the list.
3) Requests binary/text diffs for files that need changes.
4) Executes the changes when the user agrees with any terms that may appease the legal gods.
You would initially think that many, many diffs would have to be stored on the patch server; that the patch server would have to know how to get between two arbitrary versions of any particular file. In reality, you would only have to store the diff between the most recent EQLive client and the last version known to work with the emu. As long as the user on the other end can still patch to EQLive, they will always be working with a current version of the client.
The real question is whether it's illegal to send information about VI's files, even though we're not sending the actual files themselves. After all, a diff is useless without a file to patch it with.
- Fez
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Fez wants a cookie
/sigh...
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