World Chat

[Yueh]

I couldn't find much chatter about the world chat. Is anyone working of figuring out the new chat system? I saw Zaphod was looking into it but nothing beyond that. Anyone have a progress report? If not, I may start trying to see if I can figure some of it out.

[fryfrog]

it reminds me SOOO much of irc, that i wouldn't be surprized if it was very simliar to irc server/client setup. would be kinda neat to connect using an irc client and chat with people on irc when you couldn't actually play :)

[Dedpoet]

Omg, I'd get fired if I could do that. I already read boards too much ;)

[Azerael]

Originally posted by fryfrog
would be kinda neat to connect using an irc client and chat with people on irc when you couldn't actually play :)

That was one of the main features I loved about AO when I used to play it heavily last summer. They had a web front end and I could chat with all my friends on Rubi-Ka while I was at work. :) It will be interesting if Sony VI ends up with something similar available...

[Yueh]

If it doesn't come from Verant it probably won't happen though. Who has kahuna's large enough to try and develop a client that talks to the VI chat servers using their own account login to connect :)

[fryfrog]

if they would release the specs to just the chat, i'd be willing to bet the open source community would do the hard work for them and make a client. there doesn't really even seem to be any need for it to be based on your VI user account, as you are actually chatting as your charname, not your login name. just my 2 cents :)

i don't have the skills to sniff and figure this stuff out, i'm just guessing. seems like it would be easier for them to just use off the shell irc server backend and adapt it slightly to their own uses for the front end.

[Yueh]

It would definitely add value to their service. I'd put money on the fact that you have to authenticate with your station credentials though. If not, anyone could spoof a character name and talk as if it were someone else. That would be very very bad to put it mildly :)

[Cryonic]

I would guess that they took an IRC server and modified it to match their needs. Put one on each worldserver and only allow authenticated users to attach (e.g. those who have logged in to EQ), then set the nick to the current char name (guaranteed unique on each world server). The connection might not even come from the client.

Guess it wouldn't be too hard to check out, just log a char into a quiet zone (e.g. arena) to minimize noise traffic from EQ, then login to a world chat channel (like a guild Raid channel) and watch what the client does in response.

[three-p-o]

A couple of times I have gotten disconnected since the world chat was implemented I have recieved an additional hit to my firewall after the disconnect in addition to the one from the zoneserver I was connected to at the time.
this server was DNS name searched back to eqchannel1.station.sony.com
Source port was always 9876 destination port changes
Seems the destination port could be related to the zone you are currently in 'cause I have been in 1 zone xping for a while, on rarely raiding as of late, and there are numerous attempts to access 1 specific port as compaired to the limited # of attempts to access other ports.

not sure if this will help.