Nostalgic way to learn

[Hobbiest 0]

Hi, first of all great work on keeping this site up, amazing still up after all this years, as many people here i got a nostalgic feeling for pko or Tales of Pirates as i knew it, i love the stand mechanic, as a child it blew my mind, no i'm 32 years old, and i been learning programming in unity, pretty basic stuff in C# nothing too complex, yet. This got me thinking 4 things.

 

1- i think it would be fun to keep learning unity recreating systems/mechanics from pko, even use de OG models for it.

2.-¿How much Lua, SQL. or what i need to know to understand de og source files? this question is, even i wanna recreate it on unity to help me learn, i have always been curious of how @V3ct0r creats his mods,

3.- also only as curiosity, I always read about backdoors, and security, as a new programmer¿ How you guys solve all that? all that security it has always been really interesting to me, how to solve it.

4 this is more for ppl who has a server, it amaze me they still exist, don't get me wrong, i love this game, but¿Is it financially good or only for the nostalgia of having your own server?

 

 

I know this are a lot of questions, but i wanted to share with you my thoughts about it, cause this games has a special nostalgia feeling for me, hope everyone is fine. thanks for reading.

[AlGhoul 66]

Hello @Hobbiest and welcome!
 

3 hours ago, Hobbiest said:

OG models

I don't know what do u mean by "OG" but I'm assuming u are talking about PKO's models, u can convert them in 3ds max and use them anywhere.
 

 

3 hours ago, Hobbiest said:

what i need to know to understand de og source files?

For this you need C/C++, LUA/SQL aren't a big deal you can learn them along the way.
 

 

3 hours ago, Hobbiest said:

i have always been curious of how @V3ct0r creats his mods

C++/Detours, it's not that hard to grab a function pointer from any legacy EXE especially the ones with pdb.

 

3 hours ago, Hobbiest said:

I always read about backdoors, and security, as a new programmer¿

The more you learn, the more it'll become intuitive, most of these topics are mentioned almost everywhere especially in low-level stuff.
 

 

3 hours ago, Hobbiest said:

Is it financially good or only for the nostalgia of having your own server?

Both, some Spanish/Brazilian kids are showing off and some are creating them for money

 

3 hours ago, Hobbiest said:

i wanna recreate it on unity to help me learn

You can create it on unity and all good, you have to keep networking on mind from day one most of these aren't really MMO friendly networking architecture the only thing I'd say that was good regarding TOP/PKO is their networking architecture I'm not talking about the ServerSDK or how they implemented the networking but I'm talking about the separation of concerns;
1- GateServer is acting like a proxy
2- AccountServer is validation logins for less tension on the server they even separated the login database (AccountServerDB)
3- GroupServer is handling Chat/Guilds/Teams (Partying and whatnot)
4- GameServer is handling the gamestate, hence you can scale the server by spawning more GameServers the only issue I can tell so far about this is the Data Race when player moves between instances (hence the infamous items duplication bug)
You can learn alot reading from unreal's docs networking docs and not just networking by the way: https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/NetworkingOverview.html
Good luck.

[Hobbiest 0]

18 hours ago, AlGhoul said:

Hello @Hobbiest and welcome!
 

I don't know what do u mean by "OG" but I'm assuming u are talking about PKO's models, u can convert them in 3ds max and use them anywhere.
 

 

For this you need C/C++, LUA/SQL aren't a big deal you can learn them along the way.
 

 

C++/Detours, it's not that hard to grab a function pointer from any legacy EXE especially the ones with pdb.

 

The more you learn, the more it'll become intuitive, most of these topics are mentioned almost everywhere especially in low-level stuff.
 

 

Both, some Spanish/Brazilian kids are showing off and some are creating them for money

 

You can create it on unity and all good, you have to keep networking on mind from day one most of these aren't really MMO friendly networking architecture the only thing I'd say that was good regarding TOP/PKO is their networking architecture I'm not talking about the ServerSDK or how they implemented the networking but I'm talking about the separation of concerns;
1- GateServer is acting like a proxy
2- AccountServer is validation logins for less tension on the server they even separated the login database (AccountServerDB)
3- GroupServer is handling Chat/Guilds/Teams (Partying and whatnot)
4- GameServer is handling the gamestate, hence you can scale the server by spawning more GameServers the only issue I can tell so far about this is the Data Race when player moves between instances (hence the infamous items duplication bug)
You can learn alot reading from unreal's docs networking docs and not just networking by the way: https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/NetworkingOverview.html
Good luck.

Thanks for  your replay men, really helpfull, thankfully unity now has a pretty good networking,¿ how do you access all the 3d models, since im still wanna keep learning Unity i wanna use all the models for my test to make it more fun to learn.

[V3ct0r 2,117]

Hello @AlGhoul,

On 11/27/2022 at 11:06 PM, AlGhoul said:

C++/Detours, it's not that hard to grab a function pointer from any legacy EXE especially the ones with pdb.

I would object to that. Creating mods is not just "grab a function pointer from any legacy EXE".  This process requires many hours* of work:

1) Explore the structure of the executable file and/or source codes;

2) Think about the structure of the mod. What functions and data should be exported from the executable;

3) Find all required functions and data addresses. Multiply by the number of versions of the executable file;

4) Code writing;

5) Debugging and testing;

6) Creating and publishing the mod topic on the forum;

7) Getting feedback and fixing bugs.

 

I'm not talking about years of experience in reverse engineering and programming.

 

* Even with source files and .pdb files.

 

 

Hello @Hobbiest,

 

As for vulnerabilities, I think this topic will be of interest to you:

 

[AlGhoul 66]

9 hours ago, V3ct0r said:

Creating mods is not just "grab a function pointer from any legacy EXE"

I know the process, thanks for the info. I didn't really mention anything else other than a function pointer and that's a fact.
Anything else like accessing Vars and Functions, it's not that easy for beginners, but still it's not that hard when it comes to counting some bytes, is it?
The hard part is debugging for some people and the overall process is time consuming tbh.
I'm not underestimating your work though so it's nothing personal I'm just stating some facts, thanks for understanding.

[V3ct0r 2,117]

On 12/25/2022 at 8:39 AM, AlGhoul said:

I know the process, thanks for the info. I didn't really mention anything else other than a function pointer and that's a fact.
Anything else like accessing Vars and Functions, it's not that easy for beginners, but still it's not that hard when it comes to counting some bytes, is it?
The hard part is debugging for some people and the overall process is time consuming tbh.
I'm not underestimating your work though so it's nothing personal I'm just stating some facts, thanks for understanding.

No, no, my post is not about "underestimating my work by you". I wanted to show @Hobbiest and other people what the process of creating a mod might look like.