ShowEQ Open Source Project Message Forums FAQ

Group member hit points are always updated, no matter where in the zone they are. Player hit points are actual values, so if they have 1700hp it will show them having 1700hp. Mobs on the other hand were changed to ONLY reflect a percentage, and ONLY if you are within a certain range will you get an update. Until you have come close enough to a mob, its HP will show as "65535" or "-1" or perhaps some other value.

Once again, this is a change Sony made. If you think about it, it really was silly of them to send a number between -32768 and +32768 when they only really had about 10-15 different things that it could be. Well, they realized this and changed it. Hurray for them, bad for us.

Once again, Sony is responsible not ShowEQ. There have been significant changes to the way experience is calculated that make it very dynamic. When an accurate formula is derived, it will be included in ShowEQ again.

Because these are the most recent versions of the Gcc compiler and the Qt libraries. The new versions include performance enhancements and support features that have been recently added to ShowEQ. This shouldn't be a problem, as most any modern Linux distribution will come with these versions already installed.

Make sure you are logged in as the user 'root'. From a terminal window type the following, pressing the return key when prompted for a password (it is blank):
# cd /
# cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/seq login
Logging in to :pserver:[email protected]:2401/cvsroot/seq
CVS password:
# cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/seq co showeq
This will download the source and maps for ShowEQ into the directory "showeq" where ever you ran the command from (usually ~/).

From a terminal window type the following:
# cd showeq
# make -f Makefile.dist
# ./configure
# make && make install
If you have multiple versions of Qt and the GCC compiler on your system, you may need to export some variables before the configure script will run properly:
# CC=gcc3 CXX=g++3 QTDIR=/path/to/qt
You might need to replace the "gcc3" with the proper gcc-3.x compiler for your distro. Please check the ShowEQ forums for help if the above commands do not work for you. Remeber to use the SEARCH button before posting for help.

From a terminal window type the following:
# cd showeq
# cvs -z3 update
You will see several files download. Now you have the latest source files for ShowEQ, and can use the above commands to compile. If the ShowEQ Announcements forum mentioned a new libEQ.a file, make sure you update that as well before compiling using the instructions in Question 2.9.

Once you have ShowEQ downloaded, compiled, and running, it should load up a map of your current zone and show mob locations. As of the current version of ShowEQ, decode should be automatic and you should see mobs correctly. If you do not, check to be sure your copy of libEQ.a is the most recent and your code is up to date.

Note that as of the latest version of ShowEQ, a libEQ.a file is no longer needed. Its functionality is now built into the program.

The following are some opinions of some popular Linux distributions:
For moderate/advanced users:

• Gentoo - This distro is fast becoming the most popular distro among power users. It is source based, which means EVERYTHING is compiled on your system. This has the effect of being generally faster because it is tailored to your system. You get everything you want, nothing you don't. Some of the developers use and enjoy this distro, as do many users (myself included).
• Debian - This is a VERY stable distro with one of the best package systems ever (apt-get). It can be daunting to install and configure. Some of the developers use and enjoy this distro.
• Slackware - The people that DO use it swear by it, but there is not too much support for it in the ShowEQ community. Try at your own risk ;)

For beginners:

• RedHat 8 - If you are installing Linux for the very first time, and want to get ShowEQ working with the least amount of work, choose this distro and use RedHat 8. RedHat 8 includes the proper QT and GCC versions to let ShowEQ work almost directly out of the box, providing you have all the required packages installed. ShowEQ will work happily on RedHat 7.2 or later as well, but you will need to manually update GCC and QT. If you know what you're doing, this is not too difficult, but if you are new to Linux, we highly recommend version 8.
• Mandrake 9 - If you have installed RedHat and want to try a prettier distro which is optimized for the i586+, try this one. It is a little harder (not much) to get ShowEQ working but it has a much prettier install and to me it just felt faster.
• Suse - This distribution is popular in Europe (being made in Germany I think?). Again, there is not much support on the boards, but people have had ShowEQ running under Suse.

You should make your choice based on how skilled you are, how much time you have and what you want to get out of it. RedHat would be the easiest choice, my recommendation if you think you can hack it is Gentoo. Gentoo will teach you more than you thought possible about Linux and give you a fast system designed around YOUR needs. Linuxiso.org has a HUGE list of distributions and their ISOs.

Hardware wise, go with the best you can afford. While ShowEQ will run on something as slow as a Pentium 133, performance will be abysmal (not to mention it will take nearly a week to compile, depending on memory). The general minimum recommended specs would be a PII 400 with 128 MB RAM and a 4 GB hard drive, a hardware accelerated video card is a plus. Typically Nvidia has much better driver support in linux than ATi, Matrox or 3dfx. A TNT2 card should be just fine.

You basically have two options. I will make some stupid looking ASCII art to describe them to you.

• (Internet) <--> (Linux NAT/SEQ Box) <--> (HUB/SWITCH) <--> (EQ/Other computers) - With this layout, you use your Linux box as your internet "gateway". It gets two network cards (or one NIC and one modem), one of which hooks to your internet and the other goes to your hub/switch. Since you can use a switch, your network will be more efficient and possibly faster. There are two main advantages to this layout: your network device does NOT matter, you can use a hub or a switch and you save money by only needing one computer for both your gateway and ShowEQ (which is also a downfall).
• (Internet) <--> (Gateway NAT Device) <--> (HUB) <--> (SEQ/EQ/Other computers) - This is the layout I recommend and use myself. The gateway device can be a small dedicated device like a LinkSys, DLink or 3com residential router which you might be able to find for $50-100 and it might even include such features as HomePNA, Ethernet and WiFi all in one package. It could also be a spare low end computer running a firewall/router os like IPCop (which I highly recommend) or FREESCO which I also recommend to anyone with really low end hardware and only a floppy drive. Freesco will run on a 386+ w/ 8mb ram (I have run it on this!). Ipcop should probably have a pentium+ with 32+mb ram and a 500mb+ hard drive. Using this setup, if your ShowEQ computer has some problem, you don't lose internet access.

In these bad diagrams, the (Internet) represents your connection. It can be dial-up, cable, dsl, T1, satalite or ham radio. (HUB) means it can ONLY be a hub, (HUB/SWITCH) means it can be a hub or a switch.

Since libEQ.a is no longer needed with new versions of ShowEQ, this point is moot. Porting may be possible to SPARC and/or PPC platforms. If you have the ambition, give it a shot and let us know how it goes for you.

While nothing is impossible, the goal is to keep ShowEQ away from Windows (the masses). If you can get it working on VMware, more power to you. Please don't expect much help though, as we tend to frown on anything with "ShowEQ" and "Windows" in the same post/sentence.

Make sure you are the "root" user (if not, use the "su" command to become the root user).
From a terminal window type:
showeq
alternately
#/usr/local/bin/showeq
Using the network menu, set the IP address of the EQ client to monitor. ALternately, ShowEQ will auto detect the first EQ client for which it sees network traffic. If you have multiple network cards on your ShowEQ computer, set the physical device for capturing packets (default is eth0). If you are running multiple EQ clients on one computer (EQW), enable Session Tracking. If using a key sniffer that sends the decryption key over your network, set the port that ShowEQ should listen on (a number greater than 10000 is recommended). Finally, use File->Save Preferences to store the settings.

In a terminal window, type the following and press the TAB key twice:
# gcc
The result should look something like the following:
  gcc gcc-3.1 gccbug-3.1 gccmakedep
From this example, we see that my gcc3 is called "gcc-3.1". Some common ones are "gcc3" / "g++3" in RedHat and "gcc-3.0.1" / "g++-3.0.1" in Mandrake 8.1 and "gcc-3.0.4" / "g++-3.0.4" in Mandrake 8.2 and finally "gcc-3.1" / "g++-3.1" OR "gcc-3.0" / "g++-3.0" in Gentoo (depending on which version of gcc3 you are using).

This is actually not very hard and merely involves editing a file (a different one for each of the two main version). You will need to change all references to "gcc" and "g++" to your version of gcc3. For QT-3.0.x it is "mkspecs/linux-g++/qmake.conf". Then just run the ./configure -thread found above and finish up with a make. Note that if your system comes natively with Gcc3 or later, you will not need to do this, since Gcc3 will be your default compiler already.

"The ARQ is a sequencing number in the EQ protocol. The "give up" value limits how many consecutive arqs you are willing to cache while waiting for the expected packet. The result is a limit to the size of your packet cache can grow.
It was decided that this value should be reconfigurable on the fly for various reasons. Limited memory. A host not able to capture packets reliably.
So to answer your question, if you have a quality link with low latency and congestion between the EQ client and server, its not going to matter. Even the best connections will likley experience a level of packet loss requiring 96+ cached packets now and then. If you do not have issues, set the value to 256 and ignore it.
It has come to my attention this value is maxed at 256. I will be adjusting to code to allow up to 1024 and setting the application default to 256. Of course, any value the user sets will be saved in the preferences if the user chooses to do so." -fee