Against TOS or no: manually removing chat channels from uisettings file?

[Goaldan]

Hi folks,

I've seen this mentioned off and on from various forums, and guildmates, about a problem that comes up copying UI settings. When you copy the UI from a good character to a 'bad' character, you end up with tons of Good_<name> channels stuck in your custom channel list.

Well, I got pretty fed up with it and decided to poke around with my character's UI files. Since it's not in plain text, I used a hex editor to see how info's laid out in the file. This part would be why I'm not sure if it's against the TOS or not =/

Anyways, after numerous attempts, I finally figured out how to remove the custom channels and not break the UI in the process. For the more nerdy among the posters here, this is what I found:

Offsets 0000-0005: Unknown. In my UI files from test and antonia bayle, it always seems to be in the format 06 XX XX XX 46 02. I'm not sure what those 3 bytes are for. I had two files that were identical, except for these 3 bytes, when I added then removed a chat channel.

Offsets 0006-0009: Total number of custom channels. Bytes must be read in reverse order to get the decimal value. I thought this seemed high, until I got to the information for the custom channels themselves, which also use 4 bytes for the channel number. That's a hell of a lot of channel support sony built into the client, apparently.


At offset 000A, the custom channel information starts. Because of the variable name length, these don't correspond to a specific offset. The format is this:

Bytes 0-3: Channel Number. Bytes must be read in reverse order to get the correct decimal value.
Bytes 4-5: Length of the channel name. As before, bytes must be read in reverse order to get the correct decimal value.
Bytes 6+: Name of the channel.


So, with this information, I removed several entries for 'Good_<Title>' channels from my UI. I then updated the total number of channels with the new total, and loaded up EQ2. So far, everything looks to be working correctly. All my window positions, settings, and other channel information appears to be good.

Beyond this, I don't know what the rest of the UI settings do in the file. This would probably take a lot more experimenting to figure out. But, I got rid of my 'Good_<title>' spam, so I'm happy =P

Now if they'd just let you remove channels you're not joined to, we could avoid all this, hehe.