Part of the problem is that you're confusing basic terminology, which makes the rest of your claims seem doubtful. "Encryption" has a very specific meaning, and other than the network protocol in-flight and one very tiny section, there's nothing in the COH client that is encrypted.
"Encrypted text" is even more dubious, because the majority of what you're looking at isn't text at all; it's binary code that is either directly executed by the hardware, or is interpreted as data by a program. It may contain fragments of text that it uses, but without the context those fragments are marginally useful at best.
You probably mean "encoded", but even then, most of it is still not text, nor a "script" of any kind.
Would you mind posting one of them and your interpretation of it? I have a feeling I know what you're seeing, and that it's probably not what you think it is.
The client doesn't ask for that. The client sits and waits, the server sends messages like "Spawn this NPC at these coordinates doing this animation with these 50 different properties" and "You did 19.72 damage to this NPC".
Those do exist in the client map files (sort of, it doesn't contain ones you can choose like train destinations, but it does have the spawn points), but the client doesn't actually use them.
This is readily apparent with Icon -- walk into one of the tunnels that normally teleports you to another zone and see that there is no freeze in control like there is when clicking a door. The client has no idea that you're standing in a teleport volume -- normally the server would just send an unsolicited "You're now in Steel Canyon, here's the map file to load" message.
What method are you planning to use to deliver this file to the client and get it to read it?
By encrypted I mean, it's no longer 0's and 1's is it? therefore some form of encryption has been used to change the characters so a random person can't read it, also when it comes down to it, all the programming language we know is binary lol except for specific stuff like colors or sound coordinates. everything else is a bunch of 0's and 1's we just define certain sets of 01010 as = functionname.
I'll post something and my interpretation of it later today, right now I just want to reply to some of the things in your post so you don;t think I'm witless or overly hopeful.
did you ever wonder why everything including the scene change triggers are on the client side and yet they don't work? as a game developer it became obvious to me the moment I saw the .bound files listed. it would make bad sense to have the server constantly checking every character to see where they are (it would be like a worm), not to mention it would take a ton of bandwidth (I've played CoH on dial-up 4.4kb/s so that is obviously not the case.
the thing that actually takes up the time on your computer for loading a new map is clearing the memory of the old map and loading the new map plus server wait response time. infact you'll notice that the loading bar loads relatively quickly then hangs up near the end, this is: the quick part: is building blah present in memory? Check!, is NPC Blah loaded in memory? Check! ETC., the wait near the end: "hey server, All objects loaded in memory I'm ready. server; um can you wait a sec I'm serving other people atm, first loaded = first served"
the client side does all the collision calcs including the scene trigger collisions. By process of simplistic function and elimination of anything else; they are and must be set-up as follows to work:
On collision with object that contains property "player" send message to server; collision = true and Wait for response - this is the question the client asks or very close to it.
now then, the actual scene switch (have you ever monitored your connection?) it's merely a ping to see if you are still connected with a few odd KB in data to say a simple short message that the client uses to determine what to do next. what is too long? load map C:\blah\blah\ETC\blah\steelcanyon.map and spawn blahblahblah and blah
(plus it seems a bit redundant to have all the spawn info on the cleint side if the server is gonna tell it all of it all over again every time we interact with those locations).
ok so the actual scene switch will be using a keyword that is already predefined on the client side, this presents a realistic loading situation versus being stuck there for minutes (high speed connection) waiting for the server to be free to send you all that data (and burning itself out fast in the process, some viruses called worms will do similar operations like : load blah.txt 3 billion trillion times)
from what I have seen we already have a long list of predefined terms in the client, I'm willing to bet that the trigger is waiting for a response of one of those terms.
Connectivity, I have several hypotheses of how to do it. 1; tell the cleint where to connect by changing it's target to include the desired file (where you could normally put in an IP address) 2; have the file itself be set to contact the client with the information, 3; both 1 and 2.
from what I can see the server sends very small amounts of simple data. the server says things like; steelcanyon = true, NPCMSliberty = true, Adamstor = true and Adamastor = G2 (spawn point) or Loc00.00.00 and Rot90.00.00, HP =###### End=###### Despawn at Time().
Timing is determined by the server, Battle cals Could be done on either side though I'm sure they are done on the server for anti- hacking purposes. still that would mean there is a Defined term on the client side with Open/empty brackets. a simple statement by a wouldbe server file would just need to set for example @Joshex PlayerHP(1200) as an answer to a calc. I figure @name would work because the game is set-up to recognise any character we play as our @.
I do remember seeing such statements in the readable portion of the client that are regarding various stats.
pre defined terms are mandatory in most modern quality games, the games WIll understand them if they are sent such.
I will post more later.
Eeeeeeee!!! I love hearing(or seeing in this case) people take about the things they enjoy/love doing!
Joshex, any news on that sure proof way of getting CoH's IP back from NCSoft? NCSoft's gates could use a good stormin'.
I will put that in motion the moment we hear anything negative from google.
