Server Custom Login Screen

Server Custom Login Screen This tutorial assumes you are running a server based on the Ouroboros build and can therefore use the same executables and data files but want to brand it with your own custom login screen.

Prequistes

• Have a private server
• Have somewhere to host files
• Have completed the Personal Custom Login Screen tutorial

Software Needed:

• Piglet - Got to Ourodev Archives and download Piglet.develop.7z

Summary

The City of Heroes game makes extensive use of files known as "Piggs" which are simple flat archives of game data. When you start the game client, it scans any Pigg files it finds and loads them into memory. It looks first to the core "/piggs/" folder, then any Patch Directory you may have specified and finally anything that may have been placed in the "/data/" directory. In the [Personal Custom Login Screen] tutorial we created a new login screen texture and placed in in the "/data"/ folder. In this tutorial we are going to archive that texture into a new pigg file and distribute that to our players using a manifest file.

Steps:

1. Completed the [Personal Custom Login Screen] tutorial
2. Create a new empty folder to use to create your pigg. For example "C:\cohpiggs"
3. In that new folder create the same directory structure we created in the Personal Custom Login Screen tutorial i.e.

   \texture_library\GUI\CREATION\HybridUI\LoginScreen

4. Copy the COH_LogInScreen_Background.texture you created in the Personal Custom Login Screen tutorial to the new "LoginScreen" folder.
5. Unzip the Piglet programme and test it runs.
6. From within the Piglet tool
   1. select "File", "New", "Archive from Existing Folder"
   2. select the "texture_library" folder
   3. save the new pigg file to the top folder. Give it a unique name i.e. "YourServer_login.pigg"
7. Check your new pigg file by opening it from Piglet. Do this by clicking the "Open Archive" icon.

   Make the top level folder is "texture_library" and that you haven't accidentally included any other files. It should look like this:

   caption

8. Place your new pigg file on a server where it can be downloaded from a url i.e. https://yourserver/coh/YourServer_login.pigg
9. Remove the COH_LogInScreen_Background.texture from your client's data directory. Otherwise you won't know if your pigg is working.
10. Since you have decided to distribute your own pigg files that replace Ouroboros files you will need to create your own "Patch Directory"
    1. Pick a unique name for directory, probably your server name
    2. Do not use the name of an known server or existing folder (like "bin").
    3. For this example we will use "yourserver"
11. Create a manifest file for your server. You can base it off the example in the Ourodev wiki
    1. Modify the first "launcher" in the profiles section to point to your auth server and your server's website andchange the patchDir from "ouro" to the name you have chosen i.e. "Yourserver"

       <launch exec="Ouroboros.exe" order="0" website="https://your.website.here" params="-patchDir yourserver -auth YourIpOrDomain">YourServerName</launch>

    2. In the "filelist" section copy the 4 file descriptions between the <!-- Ouroboros Patch Directory files --> comment

       and the <!-- Issue 24 --> comment and in the name attribute change "ouro" for "yourserver"

       for example <file name="yourserver/DBTextures.pigg" size="116021" md5="7a705aa0259b4ba07df49e427d006163">

    3. Lastly change the entry for "ouro/ouro_login_v2i1.pigg" to your pigg file i.e. "yourserver/YourServer_login.pigg"
       1. Remove the urls for ouro pigg file and replace them with the location where you are hosting the file i.e.

          https://yourserver/coh/YourServer_login.pigg

       2. Change the size reference to the size of your new pigg in bytes
       3. Change the md5 reference to one generated fo your new pigg. You can generate a md5 from this website
    4. Upload your new manifest to a server where it can be downloaded from a url i.e. https://yourserver/coh/manifest.xml
12. Add your manifest to your CreamSoda client
    1. From within CreamSoda, click the "Options" button
    2. Enter your manifest url https://yourserver/coh/manifest.xml into the manifest field and press "Add".
    3. You may need to press the "Re-Validate" button to make it start. It should download the 4 piggs to your patch directory. 3 will be standard Ouroboros piggs but one will be your login texture.

If all this worked, you can distribute your manifest url to your players or potential players. Alternatively you can bundle an install of CreamSoda with your manifest as described in the Ouroboros Client Setup guide.