Novadrop Progress Report - January 2024

[alexrp]

This is part of a series of progress reports that are posted with a monthly-ish cadence when there's notable progress made on the project.

v2.0.280 Release

Per #78, it was originally our intention to release v2.0 with support for older data center format versions. However, work on the TERA Arise project, as well as the release of .NET 8, led to us shuffling some priorities around.

v2.0.280 ended up being primarily a housekeeping release:

• We now require .NET 8 (net8.0) in libraries and tools.
  • We will support .NET LTS releases going forward. This, for example, means that .NET 8 will be supported until November 10, 2026.
• We cleaned up and refactored APIs in Vezel.Novadrop.Formats and Vezel.Novadrop.Client.
• We fixed some memory safety issues in the innards of the data center APIs.
• We removed memory patching APIs in favor of unpacked game executables.
• We removed the novadrop-run and novadrop-scan tools as they have effectively become obsolete.

The feature highlight of this release is the experimental Vezel.Novadrop.Interop library. This library contains a set of API bindings that let you interact with the game client in memory (e.g. after injecting an assembly with Ruptura). The library targets the unpacked r387486 client by default, but address resolution can be overridden if necessary.

The set of bindings in Vezel.Novadrop.Interop is very much expected to grow over time. Addition of new bindings will mostly be based on practical need. Feel free to let us know if there are types and/or functions in the game client you would like to see made available!

Finally, we added a rich set of navigation extension methods for DataCenterNode, making it much easier to perform complex queries. For example, the new DescendantsAt() method:

// Before:
var coords = from areaList in root.Children
             where areaList.Name == "AreaList"
             from continent in areaList.Children
             where continent.Name == "Continent"
             from area in continent.Children
             where area.Name == "Area"
             from zones in area.Children
             where zones.Name == "Zones"
             from zone in zones.Children
             where zone.Name == "Zone"
             select ((int)zone["x"], (int)zone["y"]);
// After:
var coords = from zone in root.DescendantsAt("AreaList", "Continent", "Area", "Zones", "Zone")
             select ((int)zone["x"], (int)zone["y"]);

Future Plans

The major planned features for v2.1 are:

• Support older data center format versions #19
• Expose key flags on DataCenterNode #33

The major planned features for v3.0 are:

• Expand network protocol documentation #1
• Implement the Vezel.Novadrop.Net library #15

All other features are attached to the Future milestone, which basically just means they haven't been included in the working set for a particular version yet.