L2J Server

The troubles with gameguard comes from the updates. The most often choosen solution is to mirror the files from a more permissive Game Guard release...

From the wiki, we can see that there are a few files that have to be included. Most of these files are single-file ZIP archives.

the file "update.cfg" tells about the version and, maybe, what files to update.

then, there are npgg9x and npggNT, nppt9x and npptnt2 who are two platform-specific files (probably an update to the device driver)

Splash is only a JPG file with the gameguard/lineage banner

remains npgmup, npsc, lineage2us, gamemon and npscan.

Some research (clean-room reverse engineering ?) may tell what each file is about and if some files may be changed without updating the other.

The idea would be to create "null-scanners" (and/or compatible drivers if needed) and an update.cfg which gives a version number/update time far away so there won't be any other update that would happen.

It would be a rewrite of some GG files, no copyright infringement, our own code... I think that only gamemon, npgmup, npsc and npscan will have to be newly coded files, lineage2us and update.cfg are data files which may have to be recreated (but probably optionals)...

This is only a temporary workaround as it does the same thing than the hosts file but using another way to do it... What I was suggesting is to have "our own" game guard files...

The custom winsock DLL may be blacklisted by Game guard in the future (checking for the presence of the file for example... Or loading dynamically the winsock from windows system directory and making a comparison).

Here, I'm talking about taking the problem one step higher : removing the "host file" test and other checks... Bot are already bypassing the current gameguards so game guard is only hurting legitimate connexions (for example, G15 keyboard extra keys are inactive, Wifi-card monitor are crashed on L2 exit, ...) and preventing the use of private servers (L2J/L2Free/...)

I really like the idea for our own GG development. This way we can make L2J Game Guard server and we wont need to add in hosts file the GG emulator server.

The custom winsock DLL may be blacklisted by Game guard in the future (checking for the presence of the file for example... Or loading dynamically the winsock from windows system directory and making a comparison).

Seems to be the case right now

Regards
Skir.