NosTale-Gfless

A library that allows you to launch NosTale client without GF launcher, or create your own private server launcher that starts the game client in the server selection screen (you skip the login & pass window)

Emulating GF launcher

The launcher communicates with the game using named pipe and JSON-RPC protocol.

Preparation

Before the game is started GF launcher creates two environment variables:

• _TNT_CLIENT_APPLICATION_ID - This is the UUID that is stored in windows registry, it is probably const for the GF launcher itself.
• _TNT_SESSION_ID - This var contains random UUID to identify game client in the launcher (in case you run multiple game clients)

What is the purpose of those vars?

• _TNT_CLIENT_APPLICATION_ID helps to locate the GF client installation folder, the game reads it from registry key Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall{THE_UUID_FROM_VAR}_is1 in order to locate the gameforge_client_api.dll. If the var doesn't exist the game tries to grab the dll from the game folder itself. So if you don't set the var you need to copy the dll manually from GF launcher to game folder.
• _TNT_SESSION_ID the var also isn't mandatory, you don't have to set it if you want to make things simpler.

Please note, as long as you don't set those vars you are fine, however if you for some reasons want to do that do NOT set those variables as global windows environments, instead set it as local vars for your process

The pipe

The next step before launching the game is to create MS Windows pipe named \\.\pipe\GameforgeClientJSONRPC using CreateNamedPipe winapi func with duplex and byte modes. Then you need to launch the game client with gf parameter, and wait for the informations sent over pipe using ConnectNamedPipe

If you see error messagebox like gf init failed at this points, it means that the game client couldn't locate gameforge_client_api.dll either in the location pointed via registry key, or inside the game folder itself.

The protocol

You can read/write to the pipe using winapi calls like ReadFile or WriteFile. After the game client initialize, it will send...

First message (isClientRunning):

Message from client:

{{\"id\":1,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"method\":\"ClientLibrary.isClientRunning\",\"params\":{{\"sessionId\":\"SESSION_FROM_TNT_SESSION_ID\"}}}}

You need to answer:

{{\"id\":1,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"result\":true}}

Second message (initSession):

Message from client:

{{\"id\":2,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"method\":\"ClientLibrary.initSession\",\"params\":{{\"sessionId\":\"SESSION_FROM_TNT_SESSION_ID\"}}}}

You need to answer:

{{\"id\":2,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"result\":\"SESSION_FROM_TNT_SESSION_ID\"}}

Third message (isClientRunning):

It looks the same as first message, except the id: 1 now becomes id: 3

Fourth message (queryAuthorizationCode):

Message from client:

{{\"id\":4,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"method\":\"ClientLibrary.queryAuthorizationCode\",\"params\":{{\"sessionId\":\"SESSION_FROM_TNT_SESSION_ID\"}}}}

You need to answer with the token obtained from GF API, you may use this library to obtain the token: Nostale-Auth. Remember, you need the raw token (the UUID), not the hexlified one. If you create private server launcher you need to suply your own auth token, that you can later validate inside your login/game server:

{{\"id\":4,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"result\":\"AUTH_TOKEN_IN_UUID_FORM\"}}

Fifth and the last message (queryGameAccountName):

Message from client:

{{\"id\":5,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"method\":\"ClientLibrary.queryGameAccountName\",\"params\":{{\"sessionId\":\"SESSION_FROM_TNT_SESSION_ID\"}}}}

It looks like it really doesn't matter what display name you will send, you will login anyway, however if you want to stick what the GF launcher does, you can obtain the proper display name using library linked above.

{"id":5,"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":"DISPLAY_NAME"}

What to note

• All the communication is done in JSON format, it looks really strange here because it is in escaped format, however any proper json should be accepted.
• If you dont set the _TNT_SESSION_ID then SESSION_FROM_TNT_SESSION_ID will be empty in all the messages exchanged between launcher and game, however this doesn't really matter
• After each packet send you may have to create the pipe again using CreateNamedPipe

Running example server

In order to run the example server you need to:

• Install python3 (remember, set the checkbox with "Add to PATH")
• Modify the very first line of server.py to set the correct game path
• Modify the second line of the server.py to set the correct code country
• Install the requests and pywin32 libraries, you can do it easily using pip
• Run the shell with admin permissions and execute the python server.py <email> <password>

NOTE: If you don't have the GF launcher installed you firstly need to put the gameforge_client_api.dll into the game folder, and comment out the line with os.environ["_TNT_CLIENT_APPLICATION_ID"] = ....