How do I display timestamps in my chat windows?

You have no clue what ISB does... NO clue at all.

Those all work by injection.

This is wrong. EQAddons does not change anything to deal with the communication between the client and server, it's much more like EQPlayNice than you seem to think.

I'm sorry, but you seem to not understand what ISB does. (or more correctly, how it does it)

I DONT? LOL LOL ROFL*1000000

I could create IS Boxer as well, this is getting so incredibly stupid now, I KNOW EXACTLY how it works and EXACTLY how it does it. And IT DOES inject its dll's straight into eqgame process to do it.



Please go away , ashamed of yourself.

I'm gonna go do the errolsi love letters quest now, I don't have any more time to waste on trying to convince a bunch of idiots one way or another. Whatever, use it or don't use, I don't care anymore. EQAddons is and will continue to be great software.

Best Regards
ProgRambo Creator of EQAddons

Your level of cluelessness is awesome. ISB works with about 80 different games! Just shut up. Your cute little tool isn't telling you anything, and you obviously don't know how to use it.

You've grabbed open source software and renamed files and called it your own (HI GNU license, you've violated it...). Where the hell is RadarX to lock this down and ban your sorry .

Hate to break it to you, but they're not clueless.

The way you're presenting yourself and your software here isn't exactly stellar.

This probably wasn't the best thread to present your software in to begin with, but you already did, so ok.

Misleading people as to where your code came from (ie, a stripped down version of emcuetoo) makes people suspicious.

And firing shots at everyone isn't winning the hearts and minds of your potential user-base.

All that being said, thread likely has a lock incoming anyway, but imo release your source. Many won't use it either way (including myself), but at least you can be transparent about what it does. The "I don't want anyone using it for malicious activities!" defense sorta doesn't work because there's already an easily available open-source software that can be used for that - unless yours is doing something spectacularly evil, it shouldn't be an issue.

Just my 2cp.

inb4thelock

The thing is here, people are quick to judge without having any facts to back up what they say. This is the problem with the internet, people think they are an expert on a particular subject because they dabbled in the subject. If you accuse a programmer of doing something, you need to be a programmer yourself, have facts to back up what you say and present evidence. If your not a programmer and don't have any facts or evidence, you are ill informed and embarrassing yourself. I can understand making a case against a program that is helping players cheat in game but this program just adds a timestamp to the chat window. Even if it's derived from the same code and same developers who work on the cheat program, this particular program doesn't help you cheat.

I wouldn't get defensive and lash out at people for accusing me about a product I made however I would point out the error in people's thinking and provide information that supports my case as he has done. Even if ProgRambo extracted code from the other program, he obviously didn't want to start coding from scratch, he just extracted the code from what they needed and built from there.

You guys don't realize that without these programmers finding ways of reverse engineering games, we wouldn't have Everquest information sites on items. You know those item collectors that give the big Everquest sites item information? Certain programs that read your character so you can see all your gear on a particular site? Everquest doesn't provide information via a API like Everquest 2 does. Be happy we have programmers that still take an interest in Everquest or else these sites and people's interest in the game will wither away.

Except the Zam Item collector and Magelo clients only read the datastream, they don't interfere and tell the client to do different things.

Adding timestamps to a chat window isn't something I would lose sleep over. I'm pointing out we need these developers to develop programs such as this until we can get Daybreak to give us these particular features.

You're pretty clueless, actually.

Oh so injection is ok as long as it's working with 80 other games as well?
So sorry, I had no idea.

Well, it took years for ISB to grow from v1.0 and today it supports many games (not 80 though) but initially it only had support for everquest and wow, but I don't expect you to know or care about a minor detail like that.

By your "logic" we would see timestamp added around 2020 then or something, I would prefer if we could just have it now, and you give me some time to add it in other games as well..

Pretty sure that's as equally against the EULA as injecting, so I'm not sure that point holds

First of all, DayBreak WILL get all the source when I am ready to leave beta. No one else should need it and why should I have to provide source when no one else is? I don't see anyone crying about ISB or any of the other programs that add features to EQ releasing their sourcecode.

But to show you just how open I am here you go:

Code:

if (gbTimeStampChat) {
        int len = pText->Length;
        if (char *szMsg = (char *)LocalAlloc(LPTR, len)) {
            if (char *szMsg2 = (char *)LocalAlloc(LPTR, len + 64)) {
                GetCXStr(pText, szMsg, len);
                CHAR tmpbuf[32] = { 0 };
                _strtime_s(tmpbuf, 32);
                sprintf_s(szMsg2, len + 63, "[%s] %s", tmpbuf, szMsg);
                if (PCXSTR str = CXStr(szMsg2).Ptr) {
                    AddOutputText_Tramp(str, iColor);
                }
                LocalFree(szMsg2);
            }
            LocalFree(szMsg);
        }
    }
    else {
        AddOutputText_Tramp(pText,iColor);
    }

Now go create your own injector and u have your very own timechat addon. As you pointed out it's readily available for anyone else who wants to take on this kind of a project.

Interesting how coders can argue really vigorously about stuff that 99.999 don't understand. I was a neophyte coder 15 years ago (power point guy aka corporate sellout now), and I can barely grasp the essentials of this thread .

I think it is fair to assume that Daybreak don't care about the tech essentials, but whether it impacts their business. They have drawn a line in the sand about unattended gameplay, and while not openly accepting third party software (which would open liability risks), they only crack down on unattended gameplay.

It it really hard to see how timestamps will promote unattended gameplay, and therefore nobody will care at Daybreak. People getting wound up on the formalities, eula, injection, can benefit from the thought that no one in Daybreak is hired to manage that kind of stuff. There are no processes setnup for it, because it does not drive the business model, and is therefore shaven down to the uttermost essentials.

Daybreak cannot make money right now from mods, so they will not lift a finger neither for nor against mods.

If the community can spawn new modders that make new mods, that only support and promote attended gameplay, then there really is no issue.

Personally I guess that I will be fine for the next 18 years without timestamps.

But if someone could make a mod that always place the buff icons in the same place, then I would be interested (set up order, greyed out if not active, 20 first slots or so). This would definitely require some heavy modding, but would be completely useless for unattended gameplay, and therefore fine, maybe it could be a nice overlay?

;-)

I have to comment on this because I used to be so about the order of the first 7 or 8 buffs that I would click them off if someone had the nerve to cast on me at the wrong time. Reason being it was very nice to know just from peripheral vision which buffs I had lost since their designated space in my interface had gone bald. So +1 to this. Now go make a new thread about it so we can finally kill this one.

Where is _strtime_s documented (among other things)?

That snippit of code could be doing anything.

It's a string safe Microsoft function ... just google it.

Actually that is not correct. The Zam itemcollector does not access EQ directly at all. It sites on the network layer and looks at the information passing through it, decoding as is necessary to grab the data.

The magelo client does directly access the eq client and its data. It does not do any "packet" processing as you describe.

I did. Notice the underscore before the function name.

ie: it's doing something different than the regular function without an underscore.