Development Question

[Baaleos]

This question would probably be best answered by acaos, since he made a plugin that did what I am trying to do already, for linux. But if anyone else knows the answer, feel free to chip in.

Question: How did you go about finding the location of the Feats in active memory for players in the nwn server process.

I have just managed to bootcamp my macbook to a 32bit XP, so I have my development environment back again, so I would like to have a go at trying to get some sort of inMemory editting plugin working for Win32 servers.


I was just wondering what values you searched for, in order to find the location of the feats.

Eg - Were the feat values, following some sort of pattern, eg - Hex'd values of what was in the feat.2da file?


Any advice, or information about how you went about doing this, would be really appreciated.

[Fireboar]

I believe what he did was use a command like (gdb) info functions to list each method and their addresses, then find one that looks like it is triggered by the feat, hook it and see what happens.

[acaos]

Fireboar is correct.

Acaos

[Zebranky]

As far as win32, symbols (specifically .map files) have been known to float amongst the devs, so it works quite similarly. Before I had those, I generally found a function whose name looked relevant in Linux, then tried to find a similar-looking function in win32 (hardcoded string references are a big help there).
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Win32 SVN builds: http://www.mercuric.net/nwn/nwnx/

<Fluffy-Kooshy> NWNx plugin is to this as nuclear warheads are to getting rid of fire ants.

<ThriWork> whenever I hear nwn extender, I think what does NWN need a penis extender for?

[addicted2rpg]

gdb... I was wicked with that thing in my operating systems class back in the "glory days" of university. I honestly can't even remember a single command from it now; it has been *so* long I have done any debugging on a nix platform. 15 years maybe? edit: I think I remember "bp"


Hehehe, anyway this is a windows question right? Ummmmmmmm I dunno! But! I remember I looking for something else and saw them awhile back and thought "oh cool it looks like its loading the 2DAs....."...

As far as the heap is concerned, I found it some offset from pGameObject where SetLocalString is being called on a the module object via GetModule(). I dumped about 100,000 bytes to file from that location and start noticing 2da content popping up.... or was it 500,000 bytes?.... I forget...


Now if you want the instruction image, i.e., the asm command that passes the address to where the 2da files will be loading to (for finding it more easily in the heap), you're on your own buddy It can definitely can be done though. I see pointers to shit all the time it's just I am not very deft at isolating which one will be loading something like the 2das. I do think a text search in IDA though may be helpful though.

[Terra_777]

[Zebranky]

I'll email you.
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Win32 SVN builds: http://www.mercuric.net/nwn/nwnx/

<Fluffy-Kooshy> NWNx plugin is to this as nuclear warheads are to getting rid of fire ants.

<ThriWork> whenever I hear nwn extender, I think what does NWN need a penis extender for?

[Terra_777]

Thankyou!
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I dun have any signature, I'm happy anyway.

[ArielT]

<.< Can I join this special club too?