Clarification on the projects status

First of all thanks for the comments that show your interest! Unlike you might have thought I did not stop working on analyzing the packets sent between the client and the server. It's just that "real live" sometimes gets in the way ;-)

So I recently started capturing packets again to see how they are assembled. This is a time consuming process but I'll explain the very easy steps.

1.) Clone the repository from http://gitorious.org/lotro/lotro-server
2.) Import the project into your Visual Studio (Monodevelop is not supported right now)
3.) Run the Project LOTROPacketCaptureAndAutoDecryption
4.) Launch the game and "do something"
5.) Take a look at the packages generated by LOTROPacketCaptureAndAutoDecryption (you can also upload them to http://bwgypyth.appspot.com/ but be aware that they might contain sensitive data)
6.) Repeat steps 3.) to 5.) over and over again

We already know some of the details on the decrypted packets, like to be seen in http://bwgypyth.appspot.com/packet.jsp?packet=35004. All of the analyzed packets so far contain a header and data block. The header always is 20 bytes long (the initial packets sent have a header of 22 bytes, but more on that in a later post) and describes the data.

The data packets themselves can be distinguished by the "root command" (as we call it). This defines the type of data that is sent. So far we know the most about 0x00000006 packets, which are used when doing a character creation request.

The server and client also exchange "ping pong" packets to verify they can talk to each other and didn't loose the connection. I case someone is interested in understanding the process you can try to identify these packets (simply do nothing in the game and these will be the most frequent packages) and analyze how they are built up. Feel free to ask questions regarding this process in the comments and I'll try to answer them as quickly as possible.

And a quick sidenote: Everything we did so far is open source and can be found at http://gitorious.org/lotro. Feel free to play with the code and add things. The web application for visualizing packets is written in Java while the dumping of packets is written in C#. Both of these languages are pretty easy to learn (you don't have to deal with memory allocation), but feel free to contribute in whichever language you prefer.