Hey guys some of you may ask yourself
"How am i going to force my players to download the patch?"
NOTE: I am not going to show you how you change the version on your server!(Its pretty easy though) Just how you change the version of your Wow.exeYou definitly can do this and i am going to show you how.
But! there is one side effect:
You will have to remember that if your player is playing on a diffrent language than thought , then you may have problems with the dbc files.
In most of the dbcs where the language takes effect for example AreaTable.dbc, there are unused language columns where one column represents one language. They don't share the same column but they have to be enabled by introducing the diffrent language in the for its desitnated cloumn.
This is what you will have to do on your own if you dont want to force for example a spanish player to have bugs with your patch. The wow.exe reads out the column according to its language , so just make sure that in every language cloum there is one String name!
You will have to search all the diffrent .dbc files in all the language and find out wich column is for what language, and then paste all the names into one dbc file.
Use dbcutil and a table program for that to fasten this process as you can copy one complete column and paste it into the other file.
So now we start with the real tutorial:
First we are going to make a backup copy of our wow.exe!
Now, load your wow.exe in your favourite hex editor.
Then press ctrl+f (that is the most used key combination for search)
And enter 3.3.5 and search it. You should now find something.
Change that to your destinated high version number.
Now search again for 3.3.5 but i doubt that you will find anything else.
Lets start with the build version.
The build version is the number shown in brackets after the wow high version number.
In my case it is (12340).
So then we now search for 12340 and again change all the found results.
Search again multiple times until you are sure that none of the old build version number is left.
I had to change the build version 4 to 5 times.
Now comes the tricky part. If you would now save and start you wow client you would see the changed number.
But that doesn't do the trick as you are still (un)able
[(if you already changed the server version you shouldn't be able to connect)] to connect to the server.
We now have to change the part where the server checks for the client version.
And this part differs from wow version to wow version.
Now jump to the adress 0x004C99E0.
In this adress is the high version number and right below it ,the build version.
Yeah i know the build version i marked istn 12340. The screen says it is 34 and 30.
That is because it is hex and not string.
"But if i got to
http://www.statman.info/conversions/hexadecimal.html and translate 12340 to hex is says 3034 "
This is because it is again hex. You have to change the position of the bytes!
(But not the bits inbetween the bytes!)
And then we get it as is it shown in the screen 3034.
Now to change the build version just translate your number on that website to hex,and watch the result.
I get for 56789 => dd d5.
Now switch again the place of the two bytes (one byte is two numbers/letters)
And then i see that i have to enter in the place where the 3430 was => D5 DD
If you made a typing mistake DON'T! press backspace! Do either undo or press the keycombination ctrl+z for that. Else you will get a messed up wow.exe
Now save that and check your wow.exe
You should now be able to connect to the server!
Send this modified wow.exe along with your patch to enable your players to play on the server.
If you have a highskilled coder in your team, you may be able to even send this modified wow.exe along with your updates. (It is possible to make a blizzlike patching system for your server but this requires some coding as this feature isn't normally in the server core)
I hope i helped some of you with this guide
greetings!
Eluo
