[Help] *charinfos*.dat

[Piucco]

Someone has the packet structure that is stored in charinfos.dat (byte per byte)? I will use to create an emulator storing all information in SQL.

[bobsobol]

It's a rather complex string of compressed element structs. It's algorithmically defined (along with the warehouse.dat structure) in Gregoos' last release, which converts them to SQLite for easier management. That should prove an excellent template for you. (provided you have no trouble reading classic VB code )

[Piucco]

I read this post a few days ago and did not pay attention that was about it. I'll see if I still remember the VB6 syntax. xD This program only shows the "loop" of the items in the char and warehouse DAT files, still have tons of information stored to discover.

(EDIT))) Some infos that the program read from my DAT is wrong.


How the oficial server files stores it is horrible (DAT files on HD)! Sometimes I think these files were modified in some way and are not the originals.

The DAT files are just the "save" warehouse and char info packets received from the client stored in the server HD to be returned when client order to the server load these infos... practically it is the client who does EVERYTHING. Fully accessible to cheaters.

[bobsobol]

Yes... I think it's reasonably apparent that these packets are the client save game files from before it was made an MMO. The adaptation from multi-player LAN RPG to MMO required that the game save be stored at the server end... but we have all said that the server should map this save file to a structure which may be stored in an SQL database. Not just dumped as a file.

The availability for cheaters is no different to Diablo, and not much different in Diablo II. However, neither of those classed themselves as an MMO-RPG. Online Multi-player Role Play Game; yes. But not Massively Multi-player. The number of players on even the first Diablo BattleNet servers was sufficient to qualify... but the only common point of communication for them all was the opening "forum". (a chat room before you enter the game) Groups of players, usually about 5 to 8, play in a private game world on a shared server, and characters are taken from one shared game to another.

I often suspected that that may have been a preferable development path for PT. But we'd never have had Clans and Bless Castle if they took it in that direction. To have made it MMO, they should really have transported much more of the dice roll and decision making from the client, to the server. But this game entered public beta before such things where well known among game developers, and I suspect they where trying to keep server lag low.

We know that Gregoos' tool was used by Suba on their official public server. So if there are erroneous values, it is probably some problem with packet decoding, or modification of server / client.