Having a "TCOS Memories" Day :(

It doesn't happen as often anymore... but sometimes I still miss roaming the lost shards in the Deadspell Storm.

Yeah me too, it still is the best mmorpg ever made. I miss chilling in the forest as a plant and listening to the forset sounds ( especially sniffing of the boars was priceless ^^ )

Same here, but off course I have been digging deeper into the files and this gave me a better view of how things are made,

but even with all this info it's far away from having the Original feeling during the online gameplay of Spellborn.

 

In my opinion, and seeing the fact that there is hardly any response from others, except for the "hardcore" members it seems there is almost no interest anymore for our beloved game.

 

Off course I can spread some more info about the way the Spellborn packages are built up, but it seems like it's not worth spending the time to write it, compared to the amount of people responding

or should I say be able to get digging as well.

 

I've seen other projects for example Mass Effect 3 where a lot of things are done with a group of people, it seems we need to get more members interested in how it's made.

Off course this will take time to study and having some basic knowledge how 3D works on computer systems will help a lot.

Furthermore I can recommend 3Dbuzz and their UT2004 training video's for the basic Unreal knowledge, the engine which forms the base of Spellborn.

 

Greetings Jan-Willem.

Those projects always start with a couple of people that put the bulk of the ground work in then start gathering support when people can actually see something.

 

On that front, rebuilding the client seems like a huge undertaking, would it not make more sense to recreate the server first? If there is something to play with people will be more inclined to help out. I had a little play a while back but got stuck on how to work around their encryption, might take another look if I get some spare time.

Yep, and that is a problem for me.

I do own several versions of Unreal, but never actualy did any modding etc.

 

For Spellborn I can say I was a enthousiastic player who just missed out on the european servers and even though my wife and I did buy some time cards for SB we were not able to use them. The game went to the free to play mode via the US servers and Acclaim.

 

The only things we have today is the serveral versions / installers of Spellborn and the patchfiles to do the upgrades in between versions.

From someone on the Original team we know the server could be used on a laptop system, but the system running the database with all the client transactions would be a more complicated system. (Not knowing which type of database was used. )

 

I've seen SQL and several other types of data access in the code, but since those kind of things are a bit more complex for me I really didn't spend much time on it.

 

I've put my time more into the way the data storage in the Spellborn packages and allready got a lot of things out of it, but you might understand it's far from complete.

The way the SB team has changed things in the core, engine and other system files means the way the data is stored in the packages might be different from other Unreal games.

 

With a network sniffer program I did see some communications from the client to the previous server, and changing some ini file I was able to let it try to connect to a different computer of my own, but this "server" or database gave off course the wrong response and the SB client gives a no server found message.

 

For the encryption of the client connection and gameguard software you should know that the gameguard is introduced after the beta versions, so for testing things out I used the client version 0.8.  This one has an installer and debug window in the background, don't know if you have it, otherwise try to find it online.

 

I'm interested in how you got along so far.

 

PS, some of my earlier post contain pictures as example of things done earlier.

 

Greetings Jan-Willem

We played in beta and got hooked, but the release was harsh, took us ages to get copies of the game in the uk and then we could only play on us servers, eventually gave up. Went to give it another go a while later, think we got onto the free to play server about month before it closed down

 

On the database issue, it kind of depends on how many players your aiming to support, if you want 1000's of concurrent users then that would be a big problem, if you want a small server to support at most 100 players that's a lot easier. Either way you can always optimize later, getting a server running to support a handful of players would be a start that could be built from (the original WoW private servers could only handle a few players, now you have servers with 2k+ players on ).

 

I was using the 0.8 client as well, partly as I had the installer lying around still but also I don't think working around GameGuard would be a trivial problem I  made a really basic server in nodejs just to see the packets coming from the client and then have a go at guessing what the client wants in return. I got as far as getting the username/password and sending back a response that could trigger a particular error message (account locked, incorrect password, etc.) but the success response starts what I assume is encrypted mode or some sort of login puzzle as it sends a packet that's different each time and I can't figure out what it wants in return

Sounds interesting.

 

Looking back in the old logfiles of the game I notice there is a kind of key written each session, prob it's some kind of exchange between client and server to secure/ encrypt  the rest of the data transfer between both.

 

For me the packet sniffing is quite a while ago and since I don't have experience with this kind of programming it was more a way to see what was going on.

On this point it's nice to see that you at least got some progress.

 

Oh, and for fun, my fellow guildmember has posted a few things which we got together on youtube, based on the models and textures of the 0.8 version with my small Delphi program to extract the needed data.

 

Here's a link to one of his video's : http://www.youtube.com/user/AcidBurnElite

 

I would say take a look and let us know if you like it.

 

Greetings Jan-Willem.

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Same here, but off course I have been digging deeper into the files and this gave me a better view of how things are made,

but even with all this info it's far away from having the Original feeling during the online gameplay of Spellborn.

 

In my opinion, and seeing the fact that there is hardly any response from others, except for the "hardcore" members it seems there is almost no interest anymore for our beloved game.

 

Off course I can spread some more info about the way the Spellborn packages are built up, but it seems like it's not worth spending the time to write it, compared to the amount of people responding

or should I say be able to get digging as well.

 

I've seen other projects for example Mass Effect 3 where a lot of things are done with a group of people, it seems we need to get more members interested in how it's made.

Off course this will take time to study and having some basic knowledge how 3D works on computer systems will help a lot.

Furthermore I can recommend 3Dbuzz and their UT2004 training video's for the basic Unreal knowledge, the engine which forms the base of Spellborn.

 

Greetings Jan-Willem.


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I'd love to play this game once more ... or just enter the world roam for a bit, doesn't matter if there are no monsters or quests if all the ambiences are in place I'm happy. I'm just not skilled enough to help out;... nor do I have the time to dedicate to such a huge project. :/ And yes I lurk these forums often, I just don't usually post as I don't have much to contribute anymore ;(.

It's good to see some activity here.

Gives a little bit hope.

 

Too bad i can't really help out.

If someone manages to get some sort of server going I'd be happy to pitch in some money for server upkeep. We were a ninche MMO community before but there's still plenty of people that want this to happen. And if word gets out that a part of the game is working again big sites will pick it up with a whoop. And so players and help will flow in automatically.