Quick and dirty costume creator

[Mister Bison]

Hey guys.

I just remembered an old, kinda skippy software, I won't tell you the name for good reasons, just let me tell you what it did: it recorded every storage driver request of the game, and learned to replay them when the game requested them again afterward, even if the driver itself couldn't. For instance, it could be used to play without the disc in the drive.

Now, here is the idea... maybe we can just record the dialog between the City client and server, given a certain account name/password, what is sent/received when it created a character on a certain server, and presto, now you could normally create a character using the game client itself, just not go further. (it would also crash if you opened the store and so on).

You wouldn't get the in-game unlockable options, but that's still a way to keep that part of the game alive.

Who volunteers to put its account on the line for us all ? Because, obviously, you would need to enter the account name and password again for everything to work well.

Regarding this, you should do the recording and wait for the end to publish it. Also, change the password to something easy for the recording maybe.

[Codewalker]

Well, the bad news is that won't work without some really fancy routing tables and such that require messing with your network stack. When you authenticate, the auth server sends the IP addresses of the various game servers so when you pick one from a list, it connects to that. The traffic is encrypted, so if you're just doing a replay there's no way to override that and have it connect to something locally instead.

You could work around it with a transparent proxying firewall, but that's something that's non-trivial to set up.

The good news is I'm already planning to do something similar, but instead of a direct recording it's just a dummy server that lets you in with any username/pw.

[Mister Bison]

In fact you just need to prevent packets from going out to the real server (or don't care), and a sniffing mechanism that sends back the response packet on the local interface. You probably could do it with wireshark-like libraries.

I guess you know how to change the auth server getting polled, if you plan on making a dummy auth.

[Codewalker]

I actually already have a dummy auth. :) All that's needed at this point is a dummy dbserver.

[Mister Bison]

Ok let's cut it here, go on, I didn't say anything, I can't get me understood it seems.

If you need dumps, give a wink.

[Premmy]

Can't we get a hold of the "City of Hero" Stand-alone costume creator and do something with that?

[Mister Bison]

Can't we get a hold of the "City of Hero" Stand-alone costume creator and do something with that?

Knowledgeable people already sai the costume creator part of City was so much transmogrified it's no longer possible to just "mod" this ancient (issue 4?) standalone costume creator with the modern data.