Contribution

[Amadeus]

As many of you know, I've been developing ISXVG since 2006. I suppose you could say that I'm an expert on the inner workings of the VG client.

Anyway, I've mapped out most of the interesting/useful classes in the client and would be willing to share those header files with specific developers. I am also willing to help work on things when I can and when I have time, providing advice and/or explanations on the client side of things especially. I can also show you how i manually sent packets via ISXVG for things like auction searches and starting NPC dialog (I could also work on detouring the functions that handle the receipt of packets after un-serialization -- but I do not currently need/use such functionality at this point.) Finally, I have a little under 1000 functions in the client identified and named.

I also have just about every client that VG used back to 2006 (i.e., every patch) and headers/offsets to match. This might be especially useful if folks want to compare the client prior to the "big DLL merge into one .exe" back in 2011 (I think it was.)

I've never worked on an emu and am not an expert in network interaction, but I am pretty good at reverse engineering 32 bit applications and have spent time on the client over the years. So, feel free to let me know if any of this sounds useful, or if there are things I could add to ISXVG to help in the collection of data prior to the shutdown date.

In case anyone is curious, ISXVG is still 100% updated and runs the same as it always has I plan to make it free to use at the end of April; however, I do not intend to make it open-source.

[Xinux]

Welcome Amadeus

Yes the information would be a great help and especially your knowledge of the client since we really don't have a ASM person.

I'll shot you a PM unless John beats me to it after i wake up i need a few hours of sleep before work.

[John Adams]

Amadeus, anything at all you are willing to provide us with will be very much appreciated. You're kind of a celebrity around here, so it's an honor to have you stop by. I'll leave the discussions to Xinux and/or Scatman (Xinux being the client/reverse guy and Scat our world coder). I've added you to the private forums area so we can talk openly in the shadows

Thank you in advance.

[Scatman]

As john mentioned, anything you can share would be extremely helpful. Thanks in advance for offering. I'm looking forward to working with you.

[tad10]

Wow. I spent around four hours on Monday trying to see if there was a collection of patches for VG anywhere - I would be very interested in access to patches from the January 2007 to APW era (January 2008). My personal impossible goal (once the the Emu is complete) is to replicate, as best as possible, VG as it was in January 2007 with some modifications for bugfixes, boss "upgrades, player housing and if possible the additional content 2007 content like APW - I never cared about the hitching/chunking. Sigil started screwing things up with changes to crafting and XP in March-May and then SOE really screwed things up post-APW.

[John Adams]

tad, did they actually change the client for the new crafting method? ie., a different UI, or flow? I never crafted, so I don't know. If the current client represents the same "flow" or process, data is all you'd need - not a super old buggy crashing client.

[tad10]

I know they changed the client, just don't know when exactly. I def want the pre-IoD client (GU 6? in 2008) as I loathe everything IoD represents My belief is that there was a new client for the harvesting changes in late 2007/mid 2008 (I'll figure out the exact patch) where harvesting nodes went from visible as to what they were to you had to start chopping/mining to find out what was there. A top 5 mistake by SOE ruined the whole early Vanguard "A-Ha" moment of citing an UR resource in the wild and summoning your guild buddies to help you mine/chop it.

[John Adams]

Gotcha, well if you find pics or details of the 2 different systems, definitely bring them to us and we'll see what effort it takes to do them both. I'm hoping most of it is just data (display/results), because I really didn't think they changed the client much in 7 years. All the same horrors were still there that I disliked in 2007

[tad10]

Yeah I think the biggest change was for IoD. I suppose the harvesting change could have just been done on the server side? I just remember a bunch of patches back in 2007 where I'd swear I was downloading a new vgclient.exe every time. Been a while, so maybe I'm misremembering? They made some pretty significant changes when they were rolling out APW and that's when I think they put that in. Maybe Amadeus can clear it up and tell me I'm totally bonkers????

[John Adams]

Oh no, I totally know they patched the client... I just meant major system overhauls like you see in EQ2 every 2 expansions :/