Rebuilding Spellborn

Are there already any news about your trip into the spellborn files?

Hi everyone,


To keep you to date, I have been concentrating on two fronts:


1. Rebuilding the different zones from Quarterstone (Palace, Oracle, Green, Fountain, Statue, Arena). It's quite a task to get thing look right. Also placing all the lamp posts in their place, benches, crates, ... Therefore I started by placing the general shapes (roads, walls..) so that they connect properly. Also in the positioning of some static meshes I have to make sure that the collisions shapes are also properly placed (I have added and repared a few collisons like by the stairs in Oracle. Some people used to have to do a little jump to go up or down the stairs.)

Working with the files has been quite a learning curve for me and still is. Up till now I had never used the unreal editor.

Some great mysteries still occupy my mind. If any of you have any experiance with UnrealEd, I sure would love to hear your views on how to solve quite a few problems.


2. I have set up for testing purposes two virtual servers. One to run a database and the other to run the Unreal server.

On the unreal server I have been able to test my maps. I know there should be a way to connect my maps to unreal but don't know yet how. Using UT2004 I have been able to roam arround my maps and admire the great vortex that was the green district storm.


There are still lots of thing to do but 24h in a day and having to work during 8 of them, sleep, eat, have fun, ... , are not ennougth.

Things still to be done:

- Rebuild Parliament, Ringfell...

- Rebuild the lighting, athmosphere, ...

- For the sounds, some sounds can be imediately reattached upon adding elements to the map as they are coded with the links to the sound files.

- For the music, all the music files are there but the guys at spellborn had created their own audio player within the game so that has to be recreated using the dll's supplied within the spellborn client.

- Try to recreate characters (npc's, players...). The way to go would be to first create a character creation screen so that it can be used to create the npc's too. In principle it should be the same as any character with it's own data in the database. So the work for that should start by creating a character creation system with a connection to the database server.

- And more, and more, and more....


Unfortunatly my internet connection is not suitable to upload to internet clients map updates, therfore in a later stage I'll have to create a separte client distribution so that others can enjoy it. (date not yet to be determined).


In a few weeks I will be releasing another video of the progress so don't forget to check my video channel on youtube.

New video of the rebuilding process. Enjoy


<iframe width="459" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WqGoskuK_mg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0"></iframe>

That looks really awsome!

Gives me good hopes..


Too bad i dont have the knowledge with unreal engine and the dev tools,so i could help you.


keep it up

I haven't been on here much due to having started school in Amsterdam (Game Development) and not having much time for myself left.


I don't have a lot of knowledge to help out with, but if there's anything I might be able to do, let me know.

Absolutely amazing. While rebuilding the entire game is a monumental task, simply being able to walk around the maps is extremely good news for me. People around this forum remember how even some developers told us this couldn't be done. You have achieved something great.


Let me know if I can help. I have no background in programming or level design, but I do video game QA for a living, maybe there's something I can do. Heck, for Spellborn I can even learn UnrealEd.

so maybe we will get some news about the reborn project soon


would be cool

i saw comment on youtube where some guy says that he might make private server just 2 days ago.thats the link soo u may ask him to help u if u still planing to start work on this. This what he wrote





<span>what a good time i had with that game, think i will make a private server some time for that game</span>

<span>

</span>

<span>MrDecoppes

</span>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdClGvPJ2...aGu47DTl1w

Hello to everyone,


It seems to me that we're all pretty annoyed by the fact that we have no longer access to the game of Spellborn.

Seeing the recent comments here and on Czelsior's youtube video's it seems a good moment to be working a bit more on the Spellborn tool that I started a few months ago.

It started with the fact that I found some simularites between the original UT2004 files and the Spellborn files.

I made a program in Delphi pascal to be able to read in the files and show it's labels and size's of the items in the files.

The name of this program I made is the Spellborn file utility, Only Acid and I have this program and I have the source code.


Using my Spellborn file utility and a hex file editor Acid and I were able to open up most of the game files of the client program.

So far we only used this on the older files which had no link to the gameguard program.

There are still files that we're not able to open because of the fact that there are links inside the files to the DLL files of spellborn which are missing in the "normal" UT2004 environment.


I can spent more time on converting the newer client files and convert them, but the same problem will still be present with these files.

For example the map and character/ animation files still give problems.


since my last posting I did spent more time on the Dungeons and Dragons Online game and no time on Spellborn program because I'm still not sure if we'll ever be able to recreate the game the way it was just by the two of us and even if it's something we can bring it out to the open community. Maybe it's just a better idea to make a visit to the Khaeon office in Den Haag and talk to some of the people there about the rights of Spellborn....


Let's say, hope we can buy the rights for a low value amount just to give players the original game back...


Greetings JW-NL

Hi everyone.


Glad that we are not alone who wanted to redevelope this awesome game!


We are a team of fans just like u guys who played tcos a lot in past and we started the reverse engineering the game data.

We have recreated a game design document`s parts, list of assets and some rest stuff.


But there is some troubles in our way to reach the goal:

1. Im sure that those who bought Tcos bought it not to amplify and evolve, they did it to have all the law rights (correct me if im wrong) and simply kill the game with such great potential. So they will fight for their law rights.


2. The server side is one of the main game parts. And looks like its fully hidden from us. Even if i have all of the games packages and fully installed game - there is no chance to get the server but to contact to developers and hope the CAN help us by giving us code parts (is it legal for tha situation?)


3. Anyone have Registry files alive?


4. As it sayd before - the question of level design, FX and the rest is a question of time but all the game resources are incapsulated .spb format. Dlls are locked and the connections with gameguard ruins hopes.

We guess that developers had Spellborn editor becuse UDK doesnt have methods and classes

Yes, we managed to open files partly but we can`t connect them to each other - in a short speech - main code was executed at the server side.


So, the problems with law (who can say whats going on between Disney, Playdom and Frogster? afaik Spellborn NV`s guys are working some where else, Frogster have nothing, and Disney`s game company Playdom killed the game, right?) serverside and the computing part


So what do you think about it?

Hey there Sirokko,


I'm just wondering how far you ever got into the SB files, as you might have seen from my other post Acid and I did get the texture and static mesh files converted so that we can open them in the UT2004 editor.

Doing it this way gave us an idea of what kind of information is placed where, but this is only a part of it.

The map and character mesh and animation files are still a bit troublesome because the format of the animation data in the packages is unknown in most tools and also to us.


As far as I know the company of Khaeon was the one that started the development and after that transfered the work and rights to the newly created company in two parts Spellborn, one part was rightsholder and the other part the workcompany.

When the game was launched there were several publishers, of which Acclaim was the last one to have the servers up.

I'm not sure how or even if the publishers had rights / access to the sourcecode of the game, but seeing the fact that Frogster had their own version running for a while I have the idea that they had access to the code / development tools.

Acid and I are using a version of the client which had no connections with gameguard yet, so we can start it up without it. Even editing a ini file can make the client try to connect to a different IP adress to try out some things.


About the rights / ownership of the game and it's code:

Acid found some documents about the final verdict / handling of the costs / closedown of the workcompany Spellborn and this means that the belongings / workers are no longer legally responsible. This is something different from the other part of Spellborn which is the rightsholder part. This part of the company was not involved in the bankruptcy, in other words there is still someone who has the official rights of the game. This might be a larger group of people (maybe some of the original investors) but this is not clear. It can also be that khaeon still has some rights, but it's not clear. On their website of khaeon.com Spellborn is still listed under the button our games.


about your question if someone still has a registry file with things related to Spellborn, I might have it since I moved to a new computer while playing SB and the client is still on that machine. But copying the files to the new PC without reinstalling the game gave me a direct playable client, so not realy sure if there is something important in the registry for SB.


Indeed much of the information of the game was server side, meaning the game had a game server and a database server. The game server was the central point for interaction between players and the database server more the point where quest and player related information was stored.


As far as I got information from Selachii the game server was able to run on a simple laptop, the database involves more computing power.


From the part of Acclaim / Playdom / Disney I don't think there will be much involvement anymore since for them the game game is closed down and servers reinstalled as I guess.


One other thing I would like to know is where you're located, maybe try to team up a bit, that way it's not all on the shoulders of just a few, it's simply too much information/ things to do next to a daytime job.


Greetings Jan-Willem JW-NL