New FFXI private server being developed

[Kari]

Player written servers have been around as long as mmogs have. They don't need to steal the original source code to do it. I understand being too young to have heard of UO or EQ, but surely you must have heard of that "WoW" thing?

Yes, but, without having the source to directly reference the recoding, it takes much, much longer to perfectly emulate the real thing. Just as well, every update to the game brings more chaos upon the developers of the emulator.
FFXI as-is has a fairly small fanbase for an MMO. By the time this emulator is fully ready, FFXI will likely have even less of a fanbase. You'd also have to consider how many people in that fanbase that would even play a private server, especially considering you'd be starting fresh. Of course, special private server features could make recreating your character faster or completely different, but still.

[Mercilessturtle]

I tried to be nice the first time, but you are a moron. FFXI is not complicated, or special, or difficult to emulate. It is dikumud clone #47265. Like I said, there's tons of emulators for tons of games, it isn't nearly as hard as you want to pretend. A few people can easily write a server, especially since 95% of the formulas are already worked out for them, they can fudge the other 5% and nobody will care, and another group already did the reverse engineering work. All the time consuming stuff is done for them, this is not a big deal.

[Kari]

I tried to be nice the first time, but you are a moron. FFXI is not complicated, or special, or difficult to emulate. It is dikumud clone #47265. Like I said, there's tons of emulators for tons of games, it isn't nearly as hard as you want to pretend. A few people can easily write a server, especially since 95% of the formulas are already worked out for them, they can fudge the other 5% and nobody will care, and another group already did the reverse engineering work. All the time consuming stuff is done for them, this is not a big deal.

Well when you recode everything related to Crafting, please do let us know what parts of the communities theories were wrong. Oh and could you lay out a table for me on how much the Moon Phase will effect my Hakuryu fishing? That'd be swell.
I tried to be nice as well, but you clearly ignored all of my points and repeated yourself.
FFXI isn't hard to emulate if you don't care about making a working clone. But there -are- a lot of things that you won't be able to figure out without the source, or SE spilling the beans on things that we've been asking for for years. Well, maybe not impossible, but the amount of time and effort to figure out such things to be able to recreate them on the dot, would be unworthy of the effort.

[Mercilessturtle]

Could you lay out a table for me on who gives a fuck? Your "point" was responded to before you wrote it. People don't play the game because of how much the moon phase affects your fishing. FFXI isn't suddenly less fun if they guesstimate for the 5% we don't know. It has absolutely no impact on anything.

[Kari]

Could you lay out a table for me on who gives a fuck? Your "point" was responded to before you wrote it. People don't play the game because of how much the moon phase affects your fishing. FFXI isn't suddenly less fun if they guesstimate for the 5% we don't know. It has absolutely no impact on anything.

Again, you've ignored what I said. My entire point was that the emulator wouldn't be able to replicate FFXI, due to the missing information.
You don't care? That's lovely. It doesn't make my point invalid. Stop being so childish.

[Mercilessturtle]

I didn't ignore what you said, I told you that it was stupid, and was already addressed before your posted. Your point is invalid because it doesn't matter. 95% accurate and 5% guessed FFXI is no less enjoyable than 100% accurate FFXI. Since nobody cares about making it 100% accurate in all the ways people imagine stuff that isn't really there, "you don't have the source to copy it" is entirely irrelevant. If stray mary having 10 more HP than it is supposed to is a big deal for you, then you are welcome not to use the emulator.

[geno3302]

The nice (or not nice) thing about FFXI is things like moon phase don't matter. Yes there is an increase in bite rate, but it's not that huge of an impact (imo.) We understand moon phase impacts fishing. If you're bite rate goes up 10% and a private server puts it at 12% you wont notice. In areas like fishing you don't need to be perfect, you just need to be close to what is expected. Will people complain if moon phase does nothing (most likely) yes, but so long as it does something noticeable even if not exact it wont matter. Cause while you may have over 10k Hakus caught with parse reading all the data and marking moon phase, 99% of the community doesn't and will never know the difference.

As I posted before, if a private servers random number generator ends up making you hit for 101 damage instead of 102 0.1% more often then you would in FFXI but the min and max damage still line up you're not going to care or notice.

Also, you point about each update bringing more chaos is not really accurate. They'll most likely pick an update to target then build the game up to that point. Once you have a stable server with all the basics implemented adding new things is trivial in comparison. Most updates SE just adds some mobs/zones/items and more or less all of that translates to scripting.

If you want to keep arguing that it wont be FFXI because it's not line for line the exact same code, then yes you're right. However that view is quite narrow cause no one will care, no one will notice, and people will enjoy it just as much.


tl;dr: STFU

[Kari]

If you want to keep arguing that it wont be FFXI because it's not line for line the exact same code, then yes you're right. However that view is quite narrow cause no one will care, no one will notice, and people will enjoy it just as much.

I never said anyone would care, or notice.
I just pointed it out in my own words, and people are still continuing to argue about nothing.
From the very beginning I just said that it wouldn't be as easy to perfectly emulate like some of the popular private server'd games out there.

[Kohan]

I never said anyone would care, or notice.

If no one cares, why post about it?

Exactly.

[Kari]

If no one cares, why post about it?

Exactly.

I meant, I wasn't trying to make it out to be a big deal.
"Oh my god! It won't be a perfect FFXI server so why bother this is so stupid!"
I was pointing out minor flaws in the original goals -- which others also pointed out but were not met with arguments.

Either way, apologies for the disturbances.

[ringthree]

If it's so easy to do, then please create a working clone with all the necessary formulas (damage, etc.) and then get back to us.

Until then this is just more FFXI private server vaporware.

[Genosync]

Nocturne: there is a button next to "Reply with quote" that let's you quote multiple posts. Or you can edit your replies if someone posts right before you do. You do not need to make a new post to respond to every quote.

sorry for bringing this back up, but quite frankly, you don't need to even reply at all. (@Nocturne)

[Mojo]

I didn't ignore what you said, I told you that it was stupid, and was already addressed before your posted. Your point is invalid because it doesn't matter. 95% accurate and 5% guessed FFXI is no less enjoyable than 100% accurate FFXI. Since nobody cares about making it 100% accurate in all the ways people imagine stuff that isn't really there, "you don't have the source to copy it" is entirely irrelevant. If stray mary having 10 more HP than it is supposed to is a big deal for you, then you are welcome not to use the emulator.

I'm a bit hesitant to even post in this thread, and this isn't necessarily directed at this post in particular, just the message you're trying to convey. I actually worked in the industry making, among other things, video game ports. Having the source code is vital in making any kind of port (100% accurate or not) in a practical manner. If you disagree you really have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, period. I have literally spent months working with an entire development team porting a single puzzle game in which we did not have the original source code for. An entire team of professional software engineers took the better part of a year to finish it. It was a puzzle game vastly less complex than an MMORPG.

That said, the people making this port do have access to a large part of the source code, the client software. However, I do not know how much of the game is stored on the client in comparison to the server, and neither do you. Even if game mechanics are understood, implementing them in a way that even resembles the original game is no easy task. It's not a realistic goal for the size and capabilities of the FFXI community.

[Mercilessturtle]

Having the source code is vital in making any kind of port (100% accurate or not) in a practical manner. If you disagree you really have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, period.

This is easily the stupidest thing you have ever said. Having the source code is not vital at all. It isn't that I disagree, it is that you are factually incorrect, and all the MMOG server emulators that already exist and were created without any source code access prove that you are incorrect. Just because you suck, doesn't mean everyone does.

That said, the people making this port do have access to a large part of the source code, the client software. However, I do not know how much of the game is stored on the client in comparison to the server, and neither do you.

We don't have the client source code. And we do know how much of the game logic lives in the client. WTF kind of nonsense is that?

[Churchill]

this is getting tiring

[urat]

This is easily the stupidest thing you have ever said. Having the source code is not vital at all. It isn't that I disagree, it is that you are factually incorrect, and all the MMOG server emulators that already exist and were created without any source code access prove that you are incorrect. Just because you suck, doesn't mean everyone does.

He didn't say it's impossible for you to build an emulator of an MMO without the source code, he said it's an unrealistic task for our community. Go take a look at how many people built WoW and etc emulators, how big their teams were, and more importantly, how long it took

No I personally don't think it's an unrealistic task, since we do indeed have access to a large portion of the work for ffxi. The ffxi client already does most of the work for the game, all we actually need to code is AI of NPCs (monsters, fellows, escorts, shit like that), the quests (which is surprisingly easy with good implementation), and the game's under the hood engine for calculations.

For example, critical hit rate, damage, fStr, all of those things have to be manually sorted out and converted to an algorithm.

The best part is, if we had been doing this from scratch no I don't think we could do it. But thanks to several teams of individuals, we've spent the last several years already figuring out how shit works in ffxi. So in essence we have been working on figuring out the "source code" of ffxi. Everytime we try to calculate how something works int he game, that's a step closer to the source code of the server side game.

We don't have the client source code. And we do know how much of the game logic lives in the client. WTF kind of nonsense is that?

A large portion of ffxi's code is stored in the .dats to handle shit like events and stats. Yes, actually, we do. More particularly we have an already built client so we don't need to build one ourselves. That's a large chunk of the work there done already.

And no we don't know how much of the logic is client driven. Until just recently we thought you're fish's ID when fishing was set to a specific fish when you catch it, when we now think that is actually server side and the data of the fish simply tells the game how it acts.

[Mercilessturtle]

Other emulators we developed by small teams of a handful of people. And again, the time consuming part is already done. Remember projectxi? They already did the reversing work, they already figured out the protocol. The client does not do most of the work, you are living up to your reputation. Dat files are not source code, and they contain simple data, like spell costs, cast time, recast, etc. And who is "we"? You may have thought that about "fish IDs", but anyone with half a clue can figure out "durr, these are obviously not IDs since they change based on your rod".

[Indalecia]

Then by all means, go make your utopian perfect FFXI copy and leave us the fuck alone. You're annoying the fuck out of everyone and acting like the supreme pen-ultimate programmer. No one cares, GO AWAY.

[Mojo]

Dats do contain code (even though it's compiled), although you are right in that labeling it simply as source code is a misnomer. Maybe source is a better word. You can instruct it to do something and it does it in the same way regardless if it's SE's server or some other server. Regardless, what it's called is the least important point to be made and they do contain a lot more than art assets and other such things.

Again, it's not nearly as easy as you think, it's not a realistic goal given the state of the community. If you're so intent on being so enthusiastic on something that you have seemingly no experience in, well then by all means go try making one yourself and see how far you get. You'll flounder out from disinterest long before you finish, just as this project will.

[Mercilessturtle]

Again, it's not nearly as easy as you think, it's not a realistic goal given the state of the community. If you're so intent on being so enthusiastic on something that you have seemingly no experience in, well then by all means go try making one yourself and see how far you get. You'll flounder out from disinterest long before you finish, just as this project will.

It is exactly as difficult as I think. There's a reason I know that, because I do in fact have experience in it. "The community" has nothing to do with it. Succeeding is entirely up to the handful of people working on it, not "the community". You are correct that I don't have enough interest, I barely have enough interest in FFXI to play it much less write a server for it. I am working on a server for a game I am interested in though. Would you like me to keep you updated on my progress in this impossible task for a game with an even smaller community than ffxi, that has been "dead" for years? Sure, the guys working on this may not finish, I don't know them. Do you? Do you really need to keep screaming about how impossible it is? We get it, you don't think it can be done. Feel free not to work on it then. Feel free not to post in threads about it even.

No one cares, GO AWAY.

Oh sorry, I forgot bitching and moaning about how impossible it is to make a server emulator in a thread called "we're making a server emulator" was the universal sign of disinterest.