Re: D2GS Open Source [VB6]

dizzy · October 11, 2006, 02:24 AM

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.

MyndFyre · October 11, 2006, 03:56 AM

Split source

Joe[x86] · October 11, 2006, 06:57 AM

1. Don't quote me on this but I think Ringo releases his code under BSD or modified BSD.

dizzy · October 11, 2006, 07:25 AM

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

MyndFyre · October 11, 2006, 12:35 PM

Quote from: dizzy on October 11, 2006, 07:25 AM
Hopefully the "modified BSD" license and not the original one as per http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

Saying that something is released under the BSD license is generally understood to mean that the author retains the copyright and that you can use it and choose to provide source code or not. Saying the BSD license or the modified BSD license does not typically indicate that the author is granting the copyright to Berkeley.

Ringo · October 12, 2006, 05:54 AM

Quote from: dizzy on October 11, 2006, 02:24 AM
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 didnt release it under any license, so feel free to use it in anyway you see fit.

Altho im not sure how this would be of any use to PvPGN, as its a bnet/realm/d2gs 1.10 client.
The BNCSutli.dll as you may already know, is a battle.net library and the D2GS.dll contains the decompression functions/tables provided by Brand.X back in 2003 (a search will bring up the thread) so the bot can decompress incoming data from the server.
afaik, this should beable to connect to a PvPGN server and enter a PvPGN d2gs game, but i have never used or logged on a PvPGN server before, so i cant say for sure

Is your aim, to enable 1.11 clients to login and play on PvPGN?
If so that would be very easy to do, but unless the server was wrote in visualbasic 6.0, i cant really help there, other than supplying infomation on protocol changes made in the 1.10 to 1.11 patch.
It would only start becoming a big task, if you wanted to add the urber boss's into it.

As to question 2:
I have not heard of d2cs/d2dbs before.

Do they stand for the chat and realm server?

As to question 3:
None at all, its was aimed at people willing to make packet observations so they could help document them.

dizzy · October 12, 2006, 09:22 AM

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

deso64 · October 12, 2006, 01:49 PM

Hello!

Hi Ringo, I'll try explain the situation that's going on at the moment.

What some people are trying to do in the PvPGN realms is making a working 1.11b Diablo II Game Server (D2GS, in PvPGN'ish slang - I think this might brought up some confusion with your proejct

), but, the server software (D2GS) is Closed Source, it was made by a couple of coders ( http://d2dev.dlg.cn ) for 1.10, and since then, people are looking forward to a solution, either by hacking into it, or making a project, which unfortunatelly, hasn't been successful at all, something like dizzy explained

UserLoser · October 12, 2006, 10:14 PM

These boards are kind of isolated from the whole PVPGN stuff, no offense to any of them, but our knowledge is well past them in most areas of Battle.net specific things (or atleast has been ahead of them for a while), however those are still welcome. His "D2GS source" is just a D2GS client, like we commonly and properly call a chat connection a BNCS (Battle.net Chat Server) client connection.

Why has nobody been able to make a working D2GS server for the current patch? And why would onlyer's D2GS server require all those MPQs and DLLs? Without doing any research, it appears to me that his D2GS.exe is just a replacement of Game.exe and utilizes all the functions for an "open game" on Battle.net where your Game.exe normally starts and controls the game through the use of those files. I don't think onlyer and others actually wrote the server and the network handling for it, if they did, I may be confused here and not understand what you are meaning exactly.

l)ragon · October 13, 2006, 08:15 PM

Quote from: UserLoser on October 12, 2006, 10:14 PM
These boards are kind of isolated from the whole PVPGN stuff, no offense to any of them, but our knowledge is well past them in most areas of Battle.net specific things (or atleast has been ahead of them for a while), however those are still welcome. His "D2GS source" is just a D2GS client, like we commonly and properly call a chat connection a BNCS (Battle.net Chat Server) client connection.

Why has nobody been able to make a working D2GS server for the current patch? And why would onlyer's D2GS server require all those MPQs and DLLs? Without doing any research, it appears to me that his D2GS.exe is just a replacement of Game.exe and utilizes all the functions for an "open game" on Battle.net where your Game.exe normally starts and controls the game through the use of those files. I don't think onlyer and others actually wrote the server and the network handling for it, if they did, I may be confused here and not understand what you are meaning exactly.

FSGS started the D2GS protocall useing the cell files from the mpqs but never finnished it and was the only part of FSGS that was open source, and at the time were the only ones working with the game realm system, I believe that "D2GS.exe" was derived of the left overs of that project.

If you search 'SF'.com hard enough you can find that project.

dizzy · October 15, 2006, 02:43 AM

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

NetNX · November 01, 2006, 10:53 AM

Quote from: UserLoser on October 12, 2006, 10:14 PM
These boards are kind of isolated from the whole PVPGN stuff, no offense to any of them, but our knowledge is well past them in most areas of Battle.net specific things (or atleast has been ahead of them for a while), however those are still welcome. His "D2GS source" is just a D2GS client, like we commonly and properly call a chat connection a BNCS (Battle.net Chat Server) client connection.

Why has nobody been able to make a working D2GS server for the current patch? And why would onlyer's D2GS server require all those MPQs and DLLs? Without doing any research, it appears to me that his D2GS.exe is just a replacement of Game.exe and utilizes all the functions for an "open game" on Battle.net where your Game.exe normally starts and controls the game through the use of those files. I don't think onlyer and others actually wrote the server and the network handling for it, if they did, I may be confused here and not understand what you are meaning exactly.

Onlyer dropped off the face of the earth so even if you used his software you would never see another update. Following the similar concept would not be as efficent as actually trying to design your own server.