[Proof of Concept] Custom login/player creation screens (No flash)

[Santa]

With the upcoming removal of flash by Microsoft, existing conquer clients will most likely stop working all together. @Relic and I have spun up a proof of concept showcasing a custom login and player creation screen. The flash dependency has been completely removed.

Here's a demo:

[Envy\Craft]

[bashondegek]

Originally Posted by StarBucks

With the upcoming removal of flash by Microsoft, existing conquer clients will most likely stop working all together. @Relic and I have spun up a proof of concept showcasing a custom login and player creation screen. The flash dependency has been completely removed.

Here's a demo:

thats some really awesome stuff :-)!
Interested in seeing the end result!

[cois]

Good **** from the last real coders left around co world!

[darkhc]

Originally Posted by StarBucks

With the upcoming removal of flash by Microsoft, existing conquer clients will most likely stop working all together. @Relic and I have spun up a proof of concept showcasing a custom login and player creation screen. The flash dependency has been completely removed.

Here's a demo:

Wow, I would love to know how you did it!

[turk55]

Originally Posted by StarBucks

With the upcoming removal of flash by Microsoft, existing conquer clients will most likely stop working all together. @Relic and I have spun up a proof of concept showcasing a custom login and player creation screen. The flash dependency has been completely removed.

Here's a demo:

Small (simple) feedback: You have to re-pick the class when the name is taken, you might want to remember the picked choice.

[57bob57]

Originally Posted by StarBucks

With the upcoming removal of flash by Microsoft, existing conquer clients will most likely stop working all together. @Relic and I have spun up a proof of concept showcasing a custom login and player creation screen. The flash dependency has been completely removed.

Here's a demo:

Could you talk more about how it was done?

[Santa]

We used ghidra to perform static analysis of the target patch. Dug around until we found where the existing login screen and character creation screens are initialized and patched over those calls. After that it was basically finding all the places visibility of those two windows was needed and patching those as well. A lot of the functionality was tracked through the functions that send messages to and from the flash dialog, that is the key to most of it.

We took the opportunity to completely cut out to existing login sequence so that simplified things quite a bit. But with that you had to perform a couple of calls that are buried in the existing sequence to reset game state if you wanted to be able to log out of one character and into another.

[teroareboss1]

what is your version?

i think this version is more than 5900, so this Client don't use flash...

[Relic]

Originally Posted by teroareboss1

what is your version?

i think this version is more than 5900, so this Client don't use flash...

It's version 55xx which uses flash. Version 6187+ removed the flash dependency.

[denominator]

So this would work for 5065 client as well I assume.

[hyperco]

Originally Posted by StarBucks

We used ghidra to perform static analysis of the target patch. Dug around until we found where the existing login screen and character creation screens are initialized and patched over those calls. After that it was basically finding all the places visibility of those two windows was needed and patching those as well. A lot of the functionality was tracked through the functions that send messages to and from the flash dialog, that is the key to most of it.

We took the opportunity to completely cut out to existing login sequence so that simplified things quite a bit. But with that you had to perform a couple of calls that are buried in the existing sequence to reset game state if you wanted to be able to log out of one character and into another.

good to know. thanks for sharing this.

[Relic]

Originally Posted by denominator

So this would work for 5065 client as well I assume.

The same concept can be applied to any patch.

You could probably use existing hooking code when moving from patch 5517 to 5579 for example, by using byte pattern matching instead of static addresses.

5065 however, would require a complete new analysis of the client .exe since the structure changes significantly between 5065 and 55xx.

[denominator]

byte patterns screams csv3 which I know will work, however what happens after flash has no further use later this year?

[Santa]

Originally Posted by denominator

byte patterns screams csv3 which I know will work, however what happens after flash has no further use later this year?

What? I don't understand the question