SB AdRemover

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Warning: This application is prohibited by the Shadowbane Terms of Service . The use of this program may result in the suspension or closure of your account.

SB AdRemover

Ubisoft has recently introduced commercial advertisements into the Shadowbane client. While the game is free, and I have no problem with them making money off this great game, I and many others don't feel we should be forced to watch the same 1-2 ads over and over again. These ads are poor at best, and quickly become irritating.

SB AdRemover is a simple, easy to use program which periodically scans the directory these advertisements are stored in, and deletes them. It does not access any other information on your computer, and can be started or stopped at any time. The reason it must be left running while you play is because everytime you start the game, die, or exit the game the Shadowbane client downloads fresh copies of the advertisements. SB Adremover will see they have been recreated and delete them immediately so that by the time they would have been played again they are gone.

Where to Download

AdRemover can be downloaded from the The Official Site. If the site is down it can also be found in the Mordkessel Archives.

How to Use

  • Start SB AdRemover. If this is the first time you have run the program it will inform you it is creating a small .ini file to save your preferences in.
  • Select the directory your Shadowbane client is installed in by clicking the button to the right of the directory label.
  • Modify the frequency SB Adremover checks for ads to whatever you prefer. By default it is set to 10 seconds which seems to work fairly well.
  • Click the "Start" button to begin removing advertisements.
  • Run Shadowbane by clicking "sb.exe" in the main Program Directory. Do not run Shadowbane by clicking the Patcher!

That's all there is to it, you should be running in a advertisement free mode. You will see 1-2 seconds of dead space where the ads used to be, this is normal and unfortunately unavoidable at this time.

Developed by: Kevin Clark ([email protected])
Tigg@Mourning

Manual Ad Disabling

If you'd rather disable the ads manually yourself, you can do that as well. This is also prohibited by the game's Terms of Service.

Instructions

  1. Under Shadowbane\DoubleFusion\cache\data there are directories for each ad, these directories each contain the ad video file (.bik)
  2. Copy one of the blank .bik videos (for example from the Video_Blank_intro directory) into each of the other directories replacing the one already there
  3. You now have blank videos which are only a second or so long instead of the ad videos
  4. Now mark the new .bik files as read-only so the patcher can't replace them
  5. This is probably more work than using the app referred to above, but it does work and I figured some may prefer this approach