EQOA rose colored glasses thread or "How I learned to MMO"

Yeah we're having a hell of a time with the world server part. We've been able to dink and dunk and redirect our way to this point but have kind of hit a snag that we don't really know how to get around now. It is to the point where we are reaching out and trying to find help but finding competent devs that

A) know about mmo emulation
B) have a ton of free time
C) willing to work for free
D) like EQOA

...are kind of difficult to find. Secrets is working on EQMac and John Adams at EQ2emu/VGemu has his hands full too. So it might be a while before we proceed here. If nothing else, there are a lot of people willing to donate for a server and likely for a dev to create the world and get it going.

The last screenshot I posted is what I've been thinking about. It says "connecting for server list", that is it's goal at that point in time obviously, so it connects to one of my ips that I put in the eqahost.txt on the memory card (192.168.0.100:10070). The client tries to connect to that IP and disconnects right away then purges all connections and tries to do it again. What is it looking for? What is the server list?

The team found a dev with 20+ years of coding experience and is rolling.

Revival Online - Craving the Nostalgia?

Well it just wouldn't be the Everquest name is there wasn't some neckbeard drama right?

The "developers" in the project had a freakout after one of them started collecting donations for a product that isn't even produced yet. We have literally nothing but a few smoke and mirror ways to get to a dead server select screen. This person was claiming to have the way to get the game up and running in 6 months to a year so everyone kind of just bought in. Without getting too much in to it, shit is pretty messed up and I don't think we are going to see a revival.

Our we can pray that Secrets can lead us to the promised land and figure out the networking (login server/world server/database). There are several programmers in the group that have done game coding before but no one who can do the networking part.

Everything can be seen here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/445149928880146/

We've been able to populate the server list and have the client choose our customer server. Need to work on a few more packets to get to character select stuff.

The issue was that the CRC on our packets from the client and server were wrong and thus the client wouldn't trust the server. Now that we know how the client and server communicate, we should be able to make faster progress.

Still could use some guidance from the pros here though!

Not much going on here though. There are only three people on the team who have been able to do anything and we're not really sure what to do now. Part of the problem is real life and not having the time to test things.

We have been able to get past the log in screen by sending a packet found in one of our packet captures. We can then select our own custom server (named Corsten) but haven't done anything from there. I'd like to figure out a way to not have to bypass the login using the packet sending method and actually create a way to register/login via the game client. Can this be done with some kind of http api or php? Clearly we are over our heads here.

Mesenkomaha_sl said:

Can this be done with some kind of http api or php? Clearly we are over our heads here.

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Let me start off by stating I know nothing whatsoever about EQOA, even as a game but I might be able to generically answer the question above.

For VGOEmu, we discovered early on that there was no "Login" box at all like there is with many other MMO clients I've worked with. What we did notice was the VGClient.exe launching with a parameter for a sessionId. I figured out the way to tie that sessionId to a player account was to create the sessionId in a custom Launcher app (because I couldn't get SOE's launcher to talk to anyone but SOE servers). Our launcher passes the users creds through web requests to services I built on the back-end and if valid, a sessionId is generated and passed back to the launcher. This Id is then used as the client parameter during launch and when the connection arrives at the LoginServer, Login looks up the sessionId in the database and if there's a match, it can trust that the account tied to it must be that player (for this Session), and the player may now enter the game world. This appears to emulate the VG:SOH authentication process.

None of this is possible though if you cannot tell your authentication page "where" to point to (ie., your login or web service). I do not know the EQOA authentication process, so this is as far as I can advise. I wish I could offer more, but I'm fully engaged in getting Vanguard back on it's feet.

I wish you guys luck. Stick with it, don't give up. There's nothing more rewarding than seeing people from all over the (real) world connecting to a (virtual) world you created from nothing

Hey John thanks for the response. We are big fans of your work and have actually used the EQ2 wiki and VG wiki to get ideas for what we are doing.

Right now we're skipping login by sending a packet to the client that passes us along. The idea is to get into the game world first and see what we have on our hands there then work on getting it all correct. We figured out the CRC32 protection and the client connects with our server at the server select screen. We can send the client a server list when it requests one. But this is about the extent of it so far. We need to figure out a heartbeat system to keep us alive (times out) and then write the process of loading the game. We only have two packet captures from when the servers were live. We are sorting out the OP codes and figuring out how to formulate responses to get us into the game world. That's the biggest goal right now but our team is small and we all have jobs and families and school so little progress is being made.

Thank you again John! We really appreciate the feedback!

Ah, EQ:OA. Now here's an MMO. It's a shame so many people missed this great gem of a game because of bad marketing and it being on a console. Did you like Everquest? Did you like World of Warcraft? Than you would have liked EQOA. It was a hybrid of the best traits of the two. Fantastic world building.

Let me give you an example of something that happened. You head off in a random direction from an outpost town, wandering through a giant forest and swamp for the better part of an hour completely lost, when you come across a cave leading into the ground. You go in with a few of your friends and fight your way down through rooms and tunnels full of Frogloks, and you realize, holy shit, this is Guk. You make your way down down into the depths and kill the Froglok King if you're hard enough, who dropped some sort of ring I think. All of this is done without any loading screens, not even the dungeons. It was one giant contiguous world.

Reputation was important. I can say with no conceit that I was one of the most well-regarded clerics on the Castle Lightwolf server. I remember waking up early in the morning, gathering whoever was online, and hitting up all the named giants in Permafrost that had spawned during the night. I recall the first Isle of Dread raids, and getting our asses handed to us by some life-draining jester thing that never seemed to die. I remember leveling in groups in Blackburrow, Crushbone, Cazic Thule, and all the other famous old world EQ hot spots, although the best xp in EQ:OA was probably those skeletons near the igloos. I remember 2 characters, Drizzt and Belial, who were good guys, but became famous on the server for their legendary acts of stupidity. It was always an adventure and laughs grouping with those 2.

If I were Daybreak Studios, I would cancel their Minecraft MMO crap and set to work on EQ:OA2 for the Xbox One. I mean, my god, even a mediocre MMO like Neverwinter Online seems to be doing well on consoles. And it would be so much easierto develop than all these "next-gen" MMOs, with a tangible path to completion.

Explaining EQ:OA is like explaining EQ to people. You kind of had to be there.

Awanka_sl said:

Ah, EQ:OA. Now here's an MMO. It's a shame so many people missed this great gem of a game because of bad marketing and it being on a console. Did you like Everquest? Did you like World of Warcraft? Than you would have liked EQOA. It was a hybrid of the best traits of the two. Fantastic world building.

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Great post. I've explained EQOA to my friends in this very way: a hybrid of EQ and WoW. I know I'm in the slim minority, but I actually enjoyed EQOA more than EQ even though EQ had greater depth by far (I started with EQ in 2001). EQOA really was unique at the time with its seamless world, and I loved the idea of playing an MMO on a console. Also, I had an absolute blast exploring, maybe more so than in any other MMO to date.

I'd rank EQOA as my third favorite MMO experience behind WoW and FFXI.

I loved Necromancer up to lvl51
I was often the main healer and/or crowd control and/or puller and it was a blast. I loved draining and transfering life.
The pet was icing. The class was great and then it became a kind of stale dps. The big numbers were fun as was kiting, but lvls 8-48 played so vastly different from the higher game it was disappointing.
Lich upgrades were always awesome because when you first get them, you have to race to keep hp up and then as you get used to it, boom! Upgrade time. But then upgrades flattened out and weren't as drastic.

When I think of Necromancers, I think of ruling armies of undead and that certainly wasn't the case here. EQ Necromancers felt like something different altogether, like a Blood Mage (never played one if a game has one, just making up names). I rank it in contention as the most fun class out of all games I've played.

I'm in the minority here, but I loved LDoN, it was my favorite expansion after Kunark.