Calamity said:
I mostly lurk, but clementine was a discussion on ephinea and this was posted about missing information and the problem with the bosses . It may not be helpful and may have already been thought of but I jus thought I'd leave it here
"You'd have to imagine the AI for a number of the bosses should already be located in the code, since boss AI works offline without a server.
Also, for missing packets and/or data, they probably could just sniff/log ADHOC packets from the portable versions of the game which can still be played online (even through the PPSSPP emulator). I'd imagine the portable versions of the game have similar packet structure compared to the console and PC ones. After all, the packet structure for PSO didn't change so much from Dreamcast to Blue Burst. Only the layout changed slightly and the encryption type. I'd imagine the same goes if they compared PSP2/i packets to PSU/AoTI.
A little more reverse engineering can probably get them the exact AI information for all the bosses without having to guess how the monsters work."
While in theory, that's all great, the reality is, none of it is helpful.
The AI would be far too difficult to study through assembly, and would be easier to simply reconstruct from what we know. Offline also doesn't contain all of the data online did, and the parts that both had often were different.
Each version of the PC PSU had different packet structures, never mind the psp version. While again, theoretically this may give us small bits of information, it wouldn't be worth the time. There are ways we could use the PC client to look for packet structure if we really needed to. That and, not many packets are a problem for us right now. PSO is a different story. The game's netcode was extremely small, and most work was done clientside. The PSP games not running on a pure server system is enough difference for me to make a safe assumption that the network communications would look nothing like PSU.
This stuff isn't really a matter of "We don't have any way of obtaining the information we need" but rather a case of "We can obtain the information,or reconstruct it, it will just take us some time". We're in no way stuck, or barred from making progress. It's a time consuming process to rebuild these systems properly.
We appreciate you bringing these ideas forward! Thanks for keeping us in mind. Don't worry, we're making progress on this stuff.