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.

[Goaldan]

On a side note, I sadly don't think this is something you can easily do with notepad, since the data's not in plain text format. I used a hex editor tool from here: http://www.mh-nexus.de/hxd/

[Talyns]

I don't see how that could be against the TOS.
You aren't hacking the memory or data stream.

You are just changing your custom chat channels which is something that can be done with the client.

Many of us here wish and have requested that file was a plain text ini so that a hex editor would be unnecessary to correct those type of issues.

Great info thanks for sharing it

[Landiin]

I've tried poking around in that ui settings .ini file a couple of times, but I'm not very good a trying to decode things like that. No it's not going to go against the TOS so please continue to decrypt it

If you could figure out window placment I would gladly build an app where authors could make ui settings files out of game.

[Othesus]

Of course it would be best if SOE could fix this. Until then, the easiest way to get rid of the channels is to leave them from the original character, then /load_uisettings on the second character.

[kenaian]

A tool that does this has already been written.

http://eq2interface.com/downloads/in...atControl.html

It's only in French, but I was able to use it pretty easily. You can also use it to re-order the channels, which is convenient if you're trying to get them set up uniformly across multiple characters.