New login interface on Test
 

Yesterday evening I patched to Test to see whether the upcoming patch might break the current Emu servers... and... yipes!

All I can say is FOR THE LOVE OF TUNARE DON'T PATCH!!!

I got as far as the login screen. The totally revamped login screen. If the eqhost.txt file is changed to point to the Emu servers, the login client simply crashes to desktop when submitting a logon. Interestingly enough, after finding yourself at the desktop, you see the contents of the eqhost.txt file were modified to this:
I can only assume they're making a substantial change to the login part of the game... to the point where a dev named S. Mitchell is spending his 8 hours a day hosting an internal login service on his XP machine and playing around with the login.

I should also bring to your attention that the [Account] button has changed to. Evidently they're doing away with in-the-client support for account management options (registration, billing, cancels, etc.), and instead when you press [Account] it simply launches the station.sony.com website. If this goes live, the mechanism you put in place for registering new accounts via a "CD key" won't work anymore.

(PS: Packet collector didn't pick up anything while I was submitting my logon. Wasn't sure if packet collector just doesn't work when you're using testeqgame, or if that means something serious)

Well, the login would definitely crash if you change to our eqhost.txt because the formatting has been changed it looks like. Perhaps if you put our info in in that format it would still work. Try changing it to Host=eqlogin1.eqemulator.net:5997, then at least it will succesfuly parse the file and try to connect. As it is it would get to a brace and not know what to do and crash. I guess for the registration change we should try to make a seperate web application that uses a different DB than the forum login and lets you activate a new account like the client does. It also should not have web based passsword retrieval or anything so that people can't use it to steal peoples passwords. Perhaps the table could be set up so that the web application can only insert new rows into, and not let it even read from it at all so that even if someone hacks the web application they still can't read anything from the DB.

This was verified by an EQEmu dev, it does not crash the client when it is in the correct format, but it also cannot connect to the EQEmu login servers.

Not sure at this point how deep the change will be.. So, follow the normal advice and do not patch if you wanna play EQEmu.

I would like to point a few things out.

1. he patched to teh test server, and then when running the eqemu (im assuming he replaced the eqhost.txt file) EQ rewrote the eqhost file.

Thsi means a potential change where the eqhost.txt file will be hardcoded in eqgame.exe to be rewritten upon running the program

Actually sounds like a good way for sony to put a kill on emulators like eqemulator.net.. if the eqhost.txt is automatically rewritten upon each execution of eqgame.exe ...

Can you reverify exactly what you did?

Would making the eqhost reonly, fix that? Also you Could minimize eqgame then recopy the eqhost in.

Sounds like a good time to look into an alternate patcher for those of us connecting to EQEmu. :/

Not again, lol

I'd bet that it rewriting the eqhost.txt file is just so that internal sony people wanting to test the new login can get to that S. Mitchell guy's login server without somebody stopping by his office every 5 minutes going "now WHAT do I make the eqhost.txt file say to try your new login out?" It'll probly be changed to not overwrite the file after it goes live.

I edited the eqhost.txt file and followed the format it looks like they want, and no crash and no rewritten file, but yeah the connection to the Emu login server just sat there and eventually timed out. Looks like the login handshaking process is gonna be totally restructured. This might not be pretty :(