Just as a FYI, it is working only because the incorrect parts are being skipped over by the files. As long as you have "enough right", then it should still work.
This is basically what I learned from reversing the certification stuff back in the day:
- There are many ways to get working configs, the way "official" screenshots are setup is not the only way. In fact, non of my configs match official screens because I removed extra nodes not even needed that they use.
- The direction of the links matters.
- The order of the nodes in the packt.dat matters (at least, the first two)
- The extra fields are a mixture of visual data (such as icon id state), important data, such as ids to link to, service type, etc..., and a lot of extra data that is not useless, but does not need to be figured out to get the files working.
- Editing files by hand is both inefficient and impractical for managing multiple server/shard layouts for the long term.
As a result, I wrote tools to automate the certification generation. Here's a few old teaser screens showing the results (Sept. 2011).
Multiple shards, 1 machine setup each:
This image shows a config that made multiple shards rather than a bunch of different independent ones. Each shard was only 1 machine setup, but it could have been easily extended to more, as the next screen shows.
Single shard, 10 machine setup:
I can certainly assure you I did not do those configs by hand!
How much work is it to setup a 10 machine shard using the tool I wrote? It's as easy as 3 files:
edxonline.txt (fictitious name, lol) - This file lists all of the project files used. For however many shards you have, you'd just fix the count and add a shard# entry with the file name.
eo_global.txt - This file lists the "global" nodes in your server setup. You can easily add Download or Gateways as your server expands. The ID was left for being able to key it exactly how you want, so when you add more nodes, the ids won't change unless you change them yourself.
eo_shard1.txt - Each agent/gameserver is listed. If you need more, it's just a matter of adding the entries, if you need less, you can chop them out and update the count.
Once those project files are setup, I run my tool to generate the inis based on templates. Once the inis are done, it's simply a matter of running my Convert to go from ini->packt and then running the certification server using that packt.
Anyways, point of this post is simple: if you want to learn the VSRO structure, start from scratch. Build your way up to working configurations and reference the old JSRO packt.dat dumped (that's what my tools were originally written for). It's not easy and it takes a lot of time, but if you work through doing what I did with all my tools, you'll be able to come up with automatic tools to easily generate, manipulate, and maintenance larger server/shard setups without having to touch the files again by hand.
Originally Posted by pushedx
Just as a FYI, it is working only because the incorrect parts are being skipped over by the files. As long as you have "enough right", then it should still work.
