PSO2β: Technical Information

[Pyrii]

This thread is mostly for people who have gotten in and want more technical information about downloading/installing/configuring the client.

Downloading:
Once you've recieved your e-mail, SEGA ask you to go to http://pso2.jp/cbt/ and log in to download the installer, but if like me you got lost, you might want to look under "Manual"/"オンラインマニュアル".

Failing that you could just download the Downloader here: http://download.pso2.jp/downloader.exe

Again like PSUJP, set a folder to download to (Can't download to drive root eg "S:\", only subfolders) and click the big button and watch as you download at under 200kbps :P Sadly I dunno of anywhere to upload these files for faster downloading, so no mirrors.

Once it's finished you should have the files PSO2_SETUP.exe(973Kb), PSO2_SETUP-1.bin(2Gb) & PSO2_SETUP-2.bin(1.4Gb) in the folder you chose.

Once downloaded, the downloader should ask you if you want to run the installer. If you accidentally click yes, the installer should run, if not, just run the setup.


Configure:
There are two methods of configuring the client, the in-launcher configuration options (2nd button down) or editing the ini file.

The launcher configuration is alot more basic and hard to understand, there is a guide for the Character Creator version here which covers most of it, the beta version has an extra tab and enabled option.

Tab 2 covers game language (There is only one at the moment: Japanese) and whether to play videos or not. And the slider sets video volume.

Tab 3 now has an option on the right to select a codec to use when capturing video. I myself prefer to capture losslessly, so I use Utvideo.

If like me you find the options hard to read of missing vital stuff, you can open your settings file directly under:
My Documents\SEGA\PHANTASYSTARONLINE2\user-beta.pso2
in your favourite text editor. This is an Lua file so follow the appropriate formatting.

Most of this is self-explanatory. But this also allows you to use resolutions SEGA refuses to know about like 1768x992 for 1080 screen owners who play windowed:

    Windows = {
        FullScreen = false,
        Height = 992,
        Height3d = 480,
        VirtualFullScreen = false,
        Width3d = 640,
        Width = 1768,
    },

I assume Width3d/Height3d are for people who want to play with 3D Screens, I'll ignore them for now.

VirtualFullScreen will run in windowed mode, scaled to your primary monitor's desktop resolution, taking up the full screen. But rendering resolution will stay the same so the image may look distorted/aliased and this also messes up mouse offsets so clicking buttons will be hard. If you use this mode, set the resolution to your native desktop resolution.

Other fun parts include capture options:

    Capture = {
        FrameRate = 30,
        Codec = "ULRG",
        FixFrameRate = false,
        Quality = 40,
    },

FixFrameRate I assume changes the game's framerate to match capture framerate.


Technical:
The client uses the awful GameGuard as it's protection system, easily bypassed by hackers and mainly screws up the PCs of legitimate users, it's already frozen up my PC once from just trying to watch the credits.

As like other games, if you want to run the game directly you need command line arguments. for PSO2 this is

• PSO2.exe -pso2

but as I mentioned above, GameGuard will mean that steam will only recognise the game being open for a few moments. And won't use it's overlay. Plus this means you won't get updates, so this is here for technical reasons only.

PSO2.exe uses the same encryption method as PSU, there's minimal ASM to decrypt the rest of the program for execution. This is obviously to make reverse-engineering difficult. (Not impossible, difficult). So figuring out other command-line options will be.. difficult.