When a GameSpy was shut down in summer 2015, the GermanCrysis has published their "Crysis Multiplayer Patch", which was meant to replace GameSpy and allow players to continue playing multiplayer. However this patch is shrouded in mystery. There are no public source codes and authors will not say any word about how it works.
However we were curious and we decided to dig into it little bit and investigate to learn more.
Things, which i am going to show you now, you can easily examine at home, just with standard programs and little bit logical thinking.
1. When we downloaded the patch from http://germancrysis.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1591, there was an installer asking us for path to our Crysis directory. First we made a copy of the whole Crysis directory, so we could later use it for further comparison. Then we ran the installer and installed the patch into 1 of these 2 Crysis folders.
2. Popular and widely used program for browsing files Total Commander (http://www.ghisler.com/amazons3.php) has a feature allowing you to compare 2 directories and see the differences - which files are added, which are missing, which are modifies.
Running this utility on the Crysis/Bin32 folders showed us this:
Red lines indicate differences. You can see, that many .DLL files are modified.
3. Total Commander can also compare specific files, you can do that by right-clicking on one of the red lines from previous result and select "compare left and right file".
Strangely, most of the compared files from Bin32 appear to have only 1 same change:
http://www.imghosting.cz/images/29GercryPatchDiff3.png" target="_blank">http://www.imghosting.cz/images/29GercryPatchDiff3.png" style="max-width: 100% cursor: pointer;">
Now attention! Some more sophisticated change is there, instead of only letter, it changes whole word :D
from "gamespy.com" to "gamesspy.eu".
And this is the ONLY effective change in the whole client patch.
So the conclusion is: The only thing what the patch does is, it changes address of the master server (GameSpy replacement) so the game can connect somewhere else. This is yet OK, they just must have some own partial GameSpy implementation running on that address ... that's what we thought at least.
4. Few weeks later, we found out, that there is another community-made GameSpy implementation called OpenSpy. You can find it here http://openspy.org. Instructions were saying, that to start using this system you need to open your game binary files (in our case Crysis/Bin32/CryNetwork.dll) in a hex editor and change "gamespy.com" to "openspy.org", simmilarly what we saw in GermanCrysis patch. So we did it, we backed up our original CryNetwork.dll, applied the change, started game, open multiplayer lobby with server list aaand ............... GermanCrysis and Desislava servers were there :O
How come, it is another multiplayer system .. or is it really?
5. In fact, when we added this modified CryNetwork.dll with "openspy.org" to our Crysis dedicated servers and wanted to join to OpenSpy multiplayer system .... our servers suddenly appeared in GermanCrysis server list o_O
Weird, don't you think?
Most probable explanation: Their servers at gamesspy.eu are running an internet service, which redirects all communication to openspy.org. We just connected to openspy.org directly without redirection and got to the same Crysis multiplayer system.
Therefore "their" system is not developed by them as they claim, but it is only using already existing system, without mentioning or giving credit to the original author.
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