[realityincarnate]

I finally got another chance to look at forcing another string into the link, and it's a lot more messed up than I thought.

For some reason, the client likes to receive a text representation of the hex values for augments, etc. I probably should have realized it from looking at how the item id is handled in the original sprintf statement used to generate the links, but it just didn't sink in. So just trying to put a string in there directly causes crashes because it doesn't know what to do with, for example, a hex number represented by "ST".

I was able to trick it into holding some information, but it's much less efficient than I had hoped. I used the string "test", which has a hex representation of 74 65 73 74. The link string allocates five characters for each augment, so we can put two letters in each.

sprintf(out_text, "%c%06X""%4X%1X%4X%1X""%s%s%c",0x12,999999,'te',0,'st',0,"00000000000000000000000000000","test link",0x12);

will produce an item link that will have "te" in aug0 and "st" in aug1.

Putting them back together is more fun. Each aug slot has two letters, now represented by hex bytes, and in the wrong order. I got them back out using a struct.

struct AugIn {
	char let2;
	char let1;
};

and running this to build the string.

AugIn* test;
	char response2[250];
	sprintf(response,"%c",0x00);
	for (int i = 0 ; i < 5; i++) {
		test = (AugIn*) &augments[i];
		sprintf(response,"%s%c%c", response, test->let1, test->let2);
	}

A similar struct method could be used to make it easier to get the string into the augments in the first place. It works, but leaves us with a limit of 10 characters for the response string. This could be increased by using the other variables (evolving item info, etc), but those variables aren't even being decoded by the emulator at the moment.

In other words, I'm beginning to doubt how much advantage this has over your the original suggestion of just using the database. I'll probably continue playing with it, out of stubbornness more than anything else, but I don't think the results will be anything spectacular.