[Game Server Reversing] - Reversing to allow emulation.

[TehAvatar]

Hi folks!

A few months ago I came to you with an intriguing problem and you helped me out quite considerably. I am again faced with a problem that only reverse engineering can solve, so what better place to seek advice than the reteam forum.

Ill give you a synopses of my situation.

Im trying to write a "game server emulator" for a certain RTS game that is unavailable in my country. The reason behind this is to provide people from South Africa with a low-latency connection in order to experience the game as it was intended.

Heroes of Newerth (http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/) is an awesome game, but it lags like your playing from a satellite connection if you try to play it from SA.

The thing is, ive already written a working server for the beta client of the game. This server allows for almost the exact same functionality as the official servers except that it has one major flaw. ITS FOR THE BETA CLIENT!... which means that there is a ton of crashing going on clientside.

I didnt actually need to write the physical "game server", only the accounts server and the chat server. The game server is embedded into each and every client, so I could just use the game client with some command line switches and bam... it turns into a fully fledged game server.

Now this is where my problem comes in... The latest version of the game has the same functionality, except that it has some protection of some kind for the client-side game server.

There could be a couple of reasons why I cant connect to the latest version of this game server but the most logical reason is that it requires authentication with a main server before allowing direct connections to it.

Ive discovered a command line switch that starts up a "practice mode" server which has all of the functionality that the normal server has, except that it only allows localhost connections and it only allows a single connection.

How would I go about solving this? How would I allow more than just one single connection?

Already patched the strcmp check it does to see if the connection is local, but still cant connect more than one person.

If you are interested in helping out with this endeavour, or your interested in server emulation for Heroes of Newerth (HoN) then please pop me a message.

Kind regards,
TA