These packets show sending “A”, “AA”, “AAA”, “AAAA”, and “AAAAA” to the chat, which can be seen (0x41 characters). These can be analyzed for patterns and guesses at the different parts of it can be taken and later verified or discarded. Below is an example of some chat packets that were sent. To get started, I created a LAN game with myself and used WPE to log packets on one instance. It’s extremely easy to use and provides a simple interface that displays everything that is needed. One of the better tools for this job is WPE Pro. There are other factors like the game being dead (developing studio disbanded), and it being one of the few multiplayer games that I own. This was chosen because the chat packets of the protocol are unencrypted so there won’t be any large sidetrack about hunting down encryption keys or reversing algorithms. To start off, the target will be Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion.

Example programs that could be written to send your own packets or modify parts of incoming/outgoing packets.

Reverse engineering the target application to see where and how a specific packet is built.

A preliminary post (this one) discussing how to perform a high level inspection of a protocol.

This whole series will be broken down into three parts: The steps and methodologies discussed though can aid in beginning to fully reverse a protocol and begin a project in server emulation. It should be noted that this won’t be an article in server emulation as that is much too complex and time consuming to both perform and write about.

I will focus on explaining how a specific packet (a chat packet) is built in-game and how understanding the packet structure can let someone do some fun and unexpected things.

Specifically, the packet structure and some basic steps into the world of packet reversing. This next series of posts will focus on looking at a game’s protocol.

Wpe pro 2018