Fun times with ResHacker
 

I got bored today and decided to play with ResHacker on the EQ2.exe file. For giggles I made a new bitmap for the LaunchPAD program. Unfortunately it reverts back to the old one about half-way through so it's not as fun. Below is an actual screenshot of the LaunchPAD with the modified background:



PS. I know my wallpaper is pink, but it's from an anime I like so :p


Edit:
I found out why it changes back to the default SOE image. EQ2.exe just patchs the launchpad and then executes it. Any changes I make to the LaunchPAD.exe cause it to be redownloaded. I was hoping to make it a bit prettier but SOE has other plans.

Edit Number 2:
I tried changing the LaunchPAD skin for EQ2 but alas it does a checksum on each file so we can't change the LaunchPAD, Login, or License screens. :mad: Not sure if anyone tried to do that before but I was bored so I tried it again.

Looks funny... but well its revers engeneering wich is a clear violation of the EULA.
Well they need to do it this way, to formaly protect the relevance the EULA has. And well they protect you from scammers that make a Log in tool mod that captures your password or changes the EULA.

But non the less... for the fun it looks good.

Glad to see SoE got somthing right in detecting that the .EXE had been changed / modded :p

SS looks good btw its a shame your work was all in vein :(

For one I am glad to see the back of that damn Dell ad :mad: and see a nice frame of the guys here and there avatars insted :p

You're correct Vendolis, although it's not reverse engineering. I was just swapping out bitmaps within in the exe file. It does protect people against malicious modifications to the LaunchPAD though. I did find it interesting that the LaunchPAD is also used for StarWars Galaxies and the two bitmaps stored in the file for those are much prettier then the generic SOE logo EQ2 gets!

Laffs, it wasn't all in vien. My change to the EQ2.exe file remains in place! I'll have a nice brief shot of my time before the LaunchPAD opens up. I find it pretty funny that they use a generic LaunchPAD for all of their games and just have it load up the skin for each game.

Why is that funny? They have 5 or so games that use the same patching process, so why not save some development time and make updates easier by having them use the same patcher program?

They tryed to introduce it to EQ1 too.. but they failed on that task ... i have no idea why, because it has all the functionality that EQ1 needs...

While digging in the logs of the launchpad, I noticed that you can use many parameters in order to run game associated to him.
My main custom shortcut to avoid patching the launchpad and run direcly the eq2 patcher in a custom language (because I play on us server with french install game) :

"C:\Program Files\Everquest II\LaunchPad.exe" /nopatch /multiple "/gamepatchpath:C:\Program Files\Everquest II\LP_REGION_EN_US" /env:main /lang:en_US /game:eq2 /restarted

Maybe it can worth it to use the /nopatch parameter, because when I tried to use the launchpad alone after 3 month of using this shortcut, I had to download a lot of launchpad stuff :)

can you explain how this works with the client ?
i want to play with the english client on the german server