Valhalla Legends Archive

Yes, my general feeling too when looking over various vL work and docs is that vL members know a lot more about the bnet protocol (and thats nothing offensive) than any member of the pvpgn team. That however is actually good for us as we have at least one place to learn from easily , and also we are not very focused only on battle.net right now as actually we try to stay away from it as much as we can (we cant very much right now) and in the future we will try to have some kind of common game network framework with a clean specific protocol API that would allow separate developing of a bnet protocol implementation or other gaming protocol implementation easier.

Unfortunetely even that I dont know anything about win32 internals to look what exactly d2gs.exe is doing (and I DONT WISH to know anything about win32 coding heh) I suposed that it does something similar as you said, and that makes sense, otherwise it cant have the exact game logic. But I would like to see some complete reimplementation of it, that obviously without using original d2 code will mean that will have thousands of small game logic issues but thats a price that will have to be paid.

Speaking about other gaming protocols, would be nice to know about sites similar in quality as vL but about protocols such as gamespy (v1 and v2), WOL etc

Ok I feel kinda stupid right now, in "our world" (server emulation) d2gs used to refer to the d2 game server and thus "d2gs open source" sounded like a d2gs open source implementation, ie the server part.
I understand from what you are saying that your project is a client/bot, so like emulating a D2 client from the protocol perspective ?

Right now the single (AFAIK, other than I think the one who vL used some time back, dont know if they still have it online) d2gs server implementation was one of some chinese guys. They released the win32 binary without no source and also it was a hack over existent D2 code both issues creating problems for us distributing or incorporating into pvpgn.

Our short term aim is to have a 1.11 working d2gs server (binary o rnot), our long term aim would be to have our own open source implementation which would allow us to really offer support to it (now users complaining about bugs in d2gs server just get a "kick" from us as we cant really help them) and maintain it and support future d2 versions if will show up.

When you say that enabling d2 1.11 clients to play on pvpgn should be easy, what do you mean exactly ?

PS: d2cs/d2dbs are 2 other programs used in the messy chain to emulate a d2 closed realm server, d2cs basically manages the characters, d2dbs manages the ladders (AFAIK only d2gs server connects to d2dbs); because I thought your project is some kind of d2gs server drop-in replacement I asked if it still worked with d2cs/d2dbs as the chinese d2gs server does

Thanks for your reply, sorry for the confusion

Hopefully the "modified BSD" license and not the original one as per http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

Wow, that's cool ringo some questions tho:

1. under which license do you release your code ? sure you provide the source but I need specific license terms in order to see if we can use your project for our needs too (pvpgn, would be great if you can also license your stuff under GPL for us) if thats ok with you too of course (proper credits will exist of course and also you are more than welcome to do this yourself if you want to join our team)

2. does this d2gs talk compatible protocol with the d2cs/d2dbs programs that were used on bnetd-thread/pvpgn ?

3. does it (re)implement game logic completely or does it rely on executing various functions from d2 original DLL for that ? (as original d2gs does, from the archive it seems you distribute some dlls which Im not sure what is with them,)

Since d2 1.11 has been released people are bugging us about it although we dont actually make d2gs.

I wanted both things, one to have an alternative implementation of CheckRevision of IX86ver1.mpq which as you said its already available in many places and to use this to make my own DLL, my own IX86ver1.mpq to be recognized by clients but as people said (and as I feared) the mpq is digitally signed that no mpq made by me will be recognized by clients. Thus here a solution is to use a loader for the clients to disable the signature check (or replace the public key with my own).

Another question I have, does anyone knows the legal status of these files downloaded from battle.net (IX86ver1.mpq, icons.bni, etc) ? I mean one can get them (with a bnftp client) without having to agree to any EULA or TOS so under which license to they belong to ?

Oh... so any other IRC location to get in touch with vL people ?

Hi

Can someone point me to some docs covering these mpqs ? (IX86verX.mpq, etc) I whould like to know details about that MPQ if its special than others, I understant it stores a single dll, what functions should that DLL provide ? (seems kinda hard working with MPQs and checking DLL symbol table under linix ).

My end purpose is basically trying to completly recode and replace such a MPQ with a custom made one that should work on Blizzard clients so that redistributing such a file does not fall in any of Blizzard's copyrights but under the creator's (which will use a GPL license).

Thanks!

Uhmm...  this IRC server doesnt seem to be reachable from me

$ telnet irc.tehnetwork.org 6667
Trying 69.25.27.172...


Tried several ISPs, whats the problem ?

LoRd[nK] thats what I think too. Do you know any other information ? Like if it sends user/pass, how they are encoded, etc...

where ? I have searched "file transfer" on the bnetdocs search function and didnt got any match. also in the left frame I dont see anything about that.

hehe, is that a joke ?
here is what pvpgn sends:
1. the 4 bytes:
                  packet_set_size(rpacket,sizeof(t_server_file_unknown1));
                   bn_int_set( &rpacket->u.server_file_unknown1.unknown, 0xdeadbeef);

2. when it receives the next packet with all that unknown stuff it just ignores them all and reads the filename and sends the file

so this means there is no check client side, only serverside as it seems.

Hi

I have some questions about the new file protocol (which came with W3/W3XP). I have modified bnftp from a recent PvPGN release to use the new protocol for W3/W3XP cases and it "works" to download from PvPGN servers. However, Battle.net doesnt allow to download icons-WAR3.bni file for example. The file cant be downloaded using the old protocol so I have assumed it has something to do with the new packet fields in the new file protocol. Some protocol description:
- client connects
- client sends the first byte initconn of 0x2 (as the old file protocol)
- client sends a packet containing a standard file protocol header, arch and clienttag and 8 zeros
- here starts the fun part
- server answers with a "random" 4 bytes
- then client sends a "packet" of 36 bytes which starts with 5 zero bytes, then some random shit, then some fixed bytes then again random shit then the zero ended filename

Battle.net disconnects my bnftp after this last packet sent by client. My guess is that some data in the last packet depend on those random 4 bytes (I have tried hardcoded values from dumps and doesnt work). Anyone here has more informations about this subject ?

then probably we need to ask a lawyer about this. blizzard also claims all those files they send you when connecting to battle.net are copyrighted by them.

we are all programmers here, and what I hate mostly is arguing with programmers about legal issues when what we should do is programming. I am sorry for flooding this thread with this messages. Damn the world we live it and the fscking lawyers!

OK, what I mean to say is that doing a sed 's@CLIENT_AUTHREQ1@SID_something@' in pvpgn sources is very easy but I need to know what are the legal implications of using some code constants as from Blizzard's sources ? In their suit against bnetd they claim the modified SHA-1 hash was "stolen" from their codes, not reversed. Considering this how do you feel about using something you are almost sure its like in their codes ?

ouch!

I have never imagined you people are using information from Blizzard. I wouldnt say more because I hope you realise the legal implications. I thought you reversed it as everybody else. Funny who is on suit now for "using copyrighted code" if you think of it...