Silkroad development tools in demand?

I've been away from Silkroad about 6 months now (and for those that don't know this alias might know my two others, stimmedcow or Drew_Benton). I can see not too much has changed with the game besides the image captcha being removed. I've also seen the rise in popularity of SBot, SROKing, and Torque, clientless bots that seem to be the most popular programs around. I still get messages from time to time telling me how edx33 is being used to help crack programs and I can't help but smile at the creativity.

I was never too interested in "bots" per se. The idea is nice, but it's a bit of an over-saturated area now in Silkroad. I've always been more into tool development and giving people the ability to do whatever they wanted to, granted they had the skills. My previous releases of sr33 and edx33 (not to confuse with my really old school clientless powerleveling tool) seemed to be somewhat useful, but I noticed in general people want end user programs and not pure development tools.

So now after being away a while, I've decided to have another run with Silkroad for fun. I just couldn't get into other games and my other game programming endevours lead nowhere. I know what most people want nowadays is something I'm not interested in doing, so my question in this thread is this:

Are there any Silkroad development tools in high demand but not avaliable?

Has there been an increase in the number of people that want to make their own packet based programs for Silkroad but don't have the tools to do so? What about the number of programmers, are there more people willing to put in the work to make tools or does everyone still just want programs to use to play the game with?

I still have all my older programs for Silkroad, but I think I'll be rewriting most of them to be more efficient and easier to use as well as adding more flexibility to them than I had before (namely scripting). I wanted to spend this weekend looking into possible projects to work on again so I come here for some ideas.

So, I'm open to any suggestions except for "bot" and "emulator" ideas since those are a bit too big right now for me to do alone. I hope to get there eventually, but I want to start slow. My programs are packet driven and utilize C/C++/ASM and work fine on Windows (been running my last project on Win7 x64 with no problems aside from running as Admin). I'm not looking to make any AutoIt or VB/C# GUI driven programs that do memory reading either.

In addition, I'm not interested in writing cracks for other programs. I like doing things myself and being able to make improvements as needed to programs I write. I'm not too keen on making programs that are going to be compatible with other programs as well, so that might hurt some intended audience who want to use tools to add more features on existing tools. It might be doable though, but no guarantees.

Alternatively, would more people be interested in just Silkroad development knowledge? For example, resources on how to find things in the client, opcode functions and parsings, and other things of that nature? I know that stuff is more limited in terms of who can make use of it, but if anyone wanted to get started with it, it might help some.

I'm just looking forward to being able to contribute back to the Silkroad community again. :) Thanks for any feedback!

i never thought that the known "Drew Benton" would be arround here.
First of all, hats off for your work!

I think the most interesting thing would be the "silkroad development knowledge" since there certainly are some people on these forum who just need some right hints to learn the basics of packet analyzing / ASM code analyzing and editing.

I myself don't have big interests in getting something cracked or something programmed (besides the server files). Editing client stuff in silkroad is a pretty interesting issue. Even if I'm a total noob in ASM, i'm already able to build a multiclient and a no-launcher sro_client.exe (if it's not packed). I never had any real confrontations with packet analyzing,decoding or editing, but as I've seen, it's pretty interesting as well.

It's pretty nice seeing someone like you around, trying to help the community and its members to comprehend and understand the background of computer's gui's and program simplicities.

You could make love to me.

ZZZZZ is there anyway to make me log on with sbot crack? I only can try once every client restart and it's like impossible to log on... for me that is. I need a tool for unlucky people who can't log on like me thx!

Thanks for the reply silkbotter :)

The development knowledge is easy for me to write about, but it's still a bit tricky to make use of for a lot of people because of the gap in being able to understand what is being said and being able to utilize it yourself.

However, I do love writing and will try to start putting some resources together on some of that stuff. I can't and don't have the time to teach people the basics of reverse engineering or understanding assembly language, but I think I can write it in such a way that if someone is willing to take the time to learn about it, they should be able to follow along.

My main conundrum right now is finding the most effective way to share knowledge. If I just post everything I know, a few people might make use of it but overall it's just information that won't do many people any good. If I write more development tools like edx33 and sr33, then only a few people can actually make use of those tools. I want to find a common ground where I can make tools that more people can use (which I think I can use Lua scripting to accomplish this) as well as give people the knowledge to be able to do things themselves. It's no easy task though.

Client based development is a lot easier to work with because all of the data is in a ready to utilize format if you know the right places to hook, but the downside is that you then have to do more work on client updates and keeping the client stable. You can implement a lot of additional functionality this way if you have a packet based framework injected into the client.

Clientless based development is more efficient in terms of what you end up with, but it's hard to do since you have to parse everything yourself. The biggest packets that matter (player info, group spawn, storage) are the real problems here due to their size. However, with enough client knowledge, you can pretty much replicate the parsing logic, but that takes quite a bit of time due to the length of the packet and having to figure out the utility functions SRO uses to calculate certain flags for the parsing process.

I'll do some more thinking this weekend and start writing down the ideas of things I think might be useful and browse around the forums more to get a better feel of what's missing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by backo You could make love to me.

I love you too Nick ;)

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Originally Posted by xXkinachiXx ZZZZZ is there anyway to make me log on with sbot crack? I only can try once every client restart and it's like impossible to log on... for me that is. I need a tool for unlucky people who can't log on like me thx!

Sorry, but things like that lie outside my domain right now. Since SBot is also packed with Themida/WinLicense now, it's a bit of work to get it unpacked and working in that form, to which you then have to learn how it was made and try to come up with a solution. I prefer dealing with Silkroad only.

Im more interested in Silkroad Dev knowledge
But we all really need someone To edit the Sbot Crack to fix the login shit

He already said he won`t do cracks.
Btw,welcome back to silkroad and e*pvp.
I would say,create a silkroad tool,make it open source,and hand out some tutorials,so people can add their own code to the program.In my opinion,this would be great because alot of guys here wanna learn coding.

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Originally Posted by InDaClub He already said he won`t do cracks. Btw,welcome back to silkroad and e*pvp. I would say,create a silkroad tool,make it open source,and hand out some tutorials,so people can add their own code to the program.In my opinion,this would be great because alot of guys here wanna learn coding.

oO i was sleepy xD
Edited the other post

Pushedx very nice guides ant tools ty. I want to ask you if you can post more about the packets or SRO and their structure if possible ty :)

hey drew, have you considered finishing edxEmu ?

Since the topic is already bumped...

Drew, I'm so glad you're again with us. I don't have much ideas for something that could be done, but I'll probably show-off my current project soon, so you'll see that there's still something unique :p

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Originally Posted by Kazuya¹ hey drew, have you considered finishing edxEmu ?

I have an article I'm planning on writing about that actually. I'm going to explain why all of the previous emulator projects have failed and why everyone is going about them the wrong way. I don't have plans on revisiting that specific project until after I get some more articles done and rewrote some necessary developer tools.

I think I have an idea of how to make a successful emulator, but the bulk of the work is on the design side and not the code side. I'm not in any hurry to work with this stuff anytime soon though, but I am excited about the idea still, even if it is a lot of work.

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Originally Posted by maxbot Since the topic is already bumped... Drew, I'm so glad you're again with us. I don't have much ideas for something that could be done, but I'll probably show-off my current project soon, so you'll see that there's still something unique :p

Sounds good! :)

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Originally Posted by pushedx I have an article I'm planning on writing about that actually. I'm going to explain why all of the previous emulator projects have failed and why everyone is going about them the wrong way. I don't have plans on revisiting that specific project until after I get some more articles done and rewrote some necessary developer tools. I think I have an idea of how to make a successful emulator, but the bulk of the work is on the design side and not the code side. I'm not in any hurry to work with this stuff anytime soon though, but I am excited about the idea still, even if it is a lot of work. Sounds good! :)

I have seen a lot of your work and I believe it has really helped a lot of people,the thing you could really help us with is the sbot crack.Here is the problem: as you know(or don't) sbot has released the 1.22 version and it was unprotected so as you might guess it got cracked,then they continued updating 1.22 because the later versions of sbot couldn't be cracked,now the problem is we have a functional 1.22 but since it was released before the captcha system was removed it still searches for captcha confirmation and it causes dc on login,if this were to be fixed it would be great.If you can't do that no prob,cuz a new bot is coming.I am for sro clientless dev knowledge

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Originally Posted by fiki196 I have seen a lot of your work and I believe it has really helped a lot of people,the thing you could really help us with is the sbot crack.Here is the problem: as you know(or don't) sbot has released the 1.22 version and it was unprotected so as you might guess it got cracked,then they continued updating 1.22 because the later versions of sbot couldn't be cracked,now the problem is we have a functional 1.22 but since it was released before the captcha system was removed it still searches for captcha confirmation and it causes dc on login,if this were to be fixed it would be great.If you can't do that no prob,cuz a new bot is coming.I am for sro clientless dev knowledge

you obviously cannot read.

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Originally Posted by pushedx In addition, I'm not interested in writing cracks for other programs

dev knowledge and hacking/cracking knowledge = 2 different things.

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Originally Posted by Kazuya¹ you obviously cannot read. dev knowledge and hacking/cracking knowledge = 2 different things.

Ups,sry :P,guess I'm a bit blind,make edx33 more compatible with vista that's all I am asking,I changed my mind.