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+--- Forum: Introductions (https://sinister.li/Forum-Introductions)
+--- Thread: Hello (/Thread-Hello--57519)
Hello - Sythe Decryption - 07-18-2014
Hello,
I'm interested in everything to do with technology. I've learned a lot about the internet by using the internet. I've been a gamer since I was seven years old and it's grown into a passion of mine. I'm a Computer Science student, planning on getting my bachelors and then my masters.
Hopefully there is a lot that I can learn from on this website.
Thanks,
Sythe
EDIT:
I was going to post a separate thread asking a question, but apparently I won't be able to do that unless I spam the forums for 20 post count. I'm not going to spam, so I'll just add my question to my introduction thread.
Years ago there was a game called Impossible Creatures. It was released in 2002 and I played it for five or more years. In around 2008 they shut the online server offline. There is a long back story to the situation, but it's been shut off since 2008. I've always had a goal to run my own server for the game and try to make the game active again. There are still a lot of people who would like to play the game, around 20-30 people. I'm not that experienced with hacking and I only know HTML, C, and some self taught C++. I've had experience working with the client-side files of private servers before as well. Overall, I'm young and still in the learning process for most of this type of stuff. I'm wondering if there is anyone on this website that could explain to me what and possibly how a person got the online servers of Impossible Creatures running again. A person had them running again for around a month and then disppeared and has not came back for years. This is his explanation on how he got the game server back up and running:
"I initially wanted to implement the protocol IC used to talk to the Microsoft MSN Gaming Zone servers, but that turned out to be too much hassle, so I just hacked the (COM) interface IC uses to talk to those servers instead.
This means you must start Impossible Creatures with my launcher in order to play on my server. The launcher is quite simple, when it first starts, it tries to locate Impossible Creatures, and if it can't it presents an open dialog box where you must locate IC.exe for it. It then copies itself into the IC directory and places a shortcut to it at the location you started it. Using the shortcut will not present you with a dialog box again.
The launcher doesn't have any graphical interface, except when it has to download files. It will download a couple of files (mainly a dll with the replacement interface for ICO) the first time it starts. It also has the ability to auto-update itself, so if I change or fix something, you won't need to download it again. All files downloaded are saved under a directory called icolauncher under the Impossible Creatures installation directory.
The launcher never makes any modifications to existing files, all modifications are done in-memory after IC has started. That's why IC always has to be started with the launcher in order to play online."
If anyone has more information for me, I'd really appreciate the time taken.