A bit quite at the moment..

Oh hello guys! I COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY FORGOT about this website for the past year and something. Thank god for the asuracake project mail from vampire... How are you all doing?! I still want to play TCoS so bad ( . I have not found one good single MMORPG since then... Well...for me I've been very busy with college. Im doing my final paper this fall so I can graduate and start my MBA. So if anyone is still here please put me up to speed to any relevant and important stuff happening

Welcome back


good to see you,we will keep you informed about anything interesting

Hello there Bufaritza!


Not much has happened the last few months, but a lot will happen in the next few weeks.


I'm planning to release a mobile-ready version of the fan hub in a few days (and to fix some errors and remove the never-used sidebar...


And ofc there is the Asuracake

Hey guys. Any news on the spellborn build? ^^

I've tried myself to edit its files and make them work but only a 80 kbs file worked xd

Since editing the utx/uax and models worked, why not editing the maps too instead of rebuilding them? Or that wasn't possible?

Hey Getty,


The last time Acid and I worked on the Spellborn client files we were able to open most texture and staticmesh and sound files after using the program I wrote in Delphi Pascal.

What my program does is read in the original Spellborn files and show it's details.

Via a button the same content can be rewritten into a new file that can be used to open up in the standard Unreal 2004 editor.

The program is not completly fail proof because some of the files have to corrected by hand, using a hex-editor and by using the trial and error method opening the rewritten file into Unreal 2004 editor and see if it opens with or without errors.


As you may have read in other posts we still have problems with other files like the character and the map files of the different area's.

This is caused by the fact that the core and engine files from Spellborn are different from the original Unreal files.

This causes the problems when trying to open a Spellborn file in the standard Unreal 2004 editor.

Simple fact for example is the different header of a Spellborn package file and a Unreal 2004 package.

My program takes care of this differences but after that there's still more things that create problems like the relations between the package files.

In other words, as long as the Spellborn package has no links to other files it "might" open in Unreal 2004 without problems,

But as you may have guessed almost all of the map files do have links between each other.


Seeing the problems of the rest of the files we were not able to open Acid and I are now trying a different approach.

From the Unreal 2004 developer kit we found trying to create a clean environment in which we can link in the Spellborn DLL and other files one by one and see if we are

able to open up more of the files this way.


Other things we did is read a lot of info in books and online and use tutorials for the complete package of 3D modeling like 3D studio, Maya 5 PLE, Unreal Editor 2004.

For me personaly this gives good insight in how things work and how the Spellborn devs made things during the game development.

Also nice to see is the fact that a lot of info is still available online and some of the Spellborn devs have their own pages / websites.


One problem we have to deal with is the amount of time we can spent on the Spellborn work since Acid and I both have a full job during the week, this means the we only do things on it during the weekend / evenings when we're not too tired or playing some DDO in the fun hours of the evening after eating the meal.


Hope this gives you a bit of info about how things are going at the moment, Greetings Jan-Willem JW-NL

So for example, if you take a small map that crashes the ued when opening, edit its header, it will still crash? Because if it doesnt, the log should tell you what packages are missing. (Assuming the only problem the map has is the linking between files)

So for example, if you take a small map that crashes the ued when opening, edit its header, it will still crash? Because if it doesnt, the log should tell you what packages are missing. (Assuming the only problem the map has is the linking between files)

It's actualy a bit more complex than that.


Part 1 of the problem:

If you check both the ut2004 and Spellborn installations, you'll notice that you have quite a few DLL files. Some of Spellborn DLLs don't exist in the UT system folder. Inside of all the DLL's are paths coded in that don't match the UT folder structure. Also for each or most DLLs there is a corresponding .U file. These files contain unreal script code that is compiled with a equivalent but modifyed version of the UCC.exe program. what this program does is compile .UC into .U files. To load such U files, you need to edit the UT2004.ini file to add the references to it's name. Once this is done and try to load up the Unreal Editor, you'll notice that it can't load the entry points of the modifyed DLL's of Spellborn. De reason is that the Spellborn DEVs had access to the source code of the DLLs of unreal as well as C++ code from the launcher. Having that means that the DEVs could establish direct links between the EXE file and the DLLs. The U files are also linked to the DLLs as they contain code needed for the core and engine to understand what customisations to bring into the game.


Part 2 of the problem:

While we can reuse the texture, mesh and sound files, as they do not realy link to the DLL's, as JW explained JW made a delphi program with witch we can change the header of the files so that we can use them together with the Unreal Editor.

But when it comes to maps, character data and animations, those files require data that is stored in a database, therefore they crash as they lack information. Analysing the contents of the spellborn DLLs, some hints point to a Postgre SQL ODBC driver and queries passed via wwwquery. Also some DLLs seem to hint that a proxy was used on the server side. How the all the pieces fit together is our current aproach. For that we need to be able to understand the C++ code available from the public source code available from older Unreal versions, and the code we found from a guy that reversed some of spellborn's data. That person will not do any more work for spellborn as he considers it to have a too low player base. So we are left with only one solution: learn to program (in general), brush up on maths, learn C++, learn physx, learn Directx, learn networking programing, create a network with database, web server, unreal server with modifyed code. And if we want to use the Spellborn clients (post beta) disassemble to bypass gameguard.


I hope hope this gives an insight in the tasks at hand.


As JW previously mentioned, we only have so little time that we can spend on Spellborn, so things take longuer than you would hope. Of course with more people with knowledge on any of the previously mentioned task, and willing to take on a huge chalenge with no financial reward at any time, things could go a bit faster.


The Dream:

If only the owners saw the potential of spellborn and still not wish to lose such a gem, i dream of them making the source available to us (the community) so that it may not go down into oblivium...

I had a little talk with selachii in the past,when the servers were still online and he said,that even he's not able to create an own server.

So these files own someone else like frogster or spellborn NV?

Hey CZ, Kaiyn,


My wife Ciara has Selachii on facebook and via her account I did ask him something similar earlier.

As far as I understood the server software for Spellborn was not that difficult / high load for a computer, "even a laptop can run it" according to Selachii.

Much more demanding on hardware/software is the database. This database was running on a different server and the load on this machine was much higher.

Think of the fact that a lot of data has to be received from the players clients, querys performed to gather data, and this data to be send back to the client computers of all the players. This whole thing is time critical, even a little delay causes the famous LAG.....


Acid and I are not sure which type of software was running the database, but it seems that at least during development, a postgreSQL database was used.

From Selachii I never got more info about the used database or even if he still had a "copy" of the Spellborn server due to the fact that he can't be involved in the Spellborn revival for us Spellborn addicted players.... .


Since the game of Spellborn was created in the Unreal environment a lot of things can be found on the internet and in books, Acid and I still learn a lot when working on these kind of things, it makes us understand the problems the devs faced at that time and how they got around some things.


But yeah, as you might have guessed the files from the servers can be considerd lost since the last servers running Spellborn at Acclaim seem to have gone and Acclaim no longer available. The earlier servers running here in Europa were hosted at a hosting company in the east of the Netherlands according the IP adress.

The fact that It is a hosting company makes me guess that once they don't receive any payments for the services,

the server gets closed down and used for other things / fresh software installed.

In other words if the database was not saved / backup'd the data is lost.


Think we have to face they fact that we have to rebuild the database and find out via the client program which kind of info the client is looking for.

At the moment we're trying to get at least the screen which shows the available server(s) active and see what we can get beyond that point.

Maybe even the character creation screen ?


For those of us who still have the Spellborn client files on their computer I would say don't delete them just yet, you might need them if we can get further in the rebuilding process.


Greetings Jan-Willem

Interesting news


It seems,that the whole thing is not that easy as i expected in the past.

It would be a good thing to get all these files which existed on the acclaim servers.But i dont have much hopes that they are still somewhere.


I still have the game on my computer,i would never delete it