Hi. I'm not a regular poster/lurker here or even an EQ player. Hearing about ShowEQ from some EQ players I know inspired me to do something similar for a networked program I use. After some initial work I came to these forums as research on how to begin a project such as this. I've read much and found it quite useful, but what I think I really need is some benevolent, knowledgeable person who would be willing to exchange a little email with me on the subject and help me understand a few things.

I am not a novice programmer nor someone who needs everything handed to them on a silver platter. I am good at figuring things out, but I am new to disassembly/reverse engineering.

Feel free to flame me as I deserve, I'm not sure how this post will be received, though I tried to compose it as respectfully as I could. I'm sure the answers to some of my questions are posted here somewhere and though I did do a fair bit of searching, it is quite a body of information to dig through.

If any especially helpful person wants my eternal gratitude then please send me email. Here are some of the types of questions I am thinking about:

If the network packets are encrypted, how do you find out what type of encryption was used?
How do you find out how to get a key to decrypt it?
With unencrypted or decrypted data, how do you make sense of the data initially and figure out what different parts of different messages correspond to in the game?

Thanks