Lucy

[quote name='StarbuckJD' timestamp='1327945143' post='52721'] Pretty much sums up what I've said in this thread Of course this is EA, not really a game engine company that gives quotes, and if they gave any quote, whoever was doing it must have been hitting the sauce which in that case is possible, for a laugh on someone elses expense (that sounds like EA at least) [/quote] Well, at the end of it all, 150k is the number we were given. We didn't have that much though. They may have just been taunting us with the figure knowing we wouldn't be able to bring it to the table. Thing is, I wasn't a part of the negotiations, so I just know what I was told by our COO who was doing the negotiations. I'm honestly surprised he got as far as he did.

[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1327691206' post='52522'] Every day of our lives. Also, Mouse: I'm not sure if you saw my previous comment, but I have a good working knowledge of the EnB packet structure, I can at least get from startup through login network-wise, and I would be willing to help out. I would like to go into video game programming in a year and a half when I'm done with college, so this would be good experience for me to have. [/quote] Yes, I did, and I told my roommate who's actually been looking at the so called "Tada-O" server source code on sourceforge to decipher the packets. She's not working too hard on it because she's got other things on her plate. She also turned down the help, so I didn't mention it. However, if you have a .net/mono library that I could hook into, I could get something going real quick. At any rate, if you're anxious to start, grab a copy of Unity and send me a PM and we can maybe bang around in it and see if we can't get it logging in. Unity comes with Mono Develop, and we can use nearly any mono library if you're uncomfortable with writing code with monodevelop.

I went looking for the news article where someone high up in the SWG dev team was saying "sorry, we lost the pre-nge source code" but I couldn't find it. I'll keep looking but I've already spent half an hour on it. It was kind of a passing comment I read on an article discussing NGE a number of years ago. The guy was saying something to the effect of (and this is not verbatim, just the gist of it as I remember) "We lost 95% of our player base over night, we wanted to put it back the way it was but we'd somehow lost the source code to how it used to be. Thankfully, our subscription numbers have started to recover." This was also way before TOR was ever announced. My memory may be shoddy on the subject, though.

[quote name='Zathman' timestamp='1327679480' post='52509'] How long ago was this? Maybe the price has gone down Also, it's a shame that the banks saw a startup out of college as a risky investment when they so often prove to be quality investments... Sometimes. ;-) [/quote] It was four or five years ago. Back when we asked, the emulator work was "oh look you can log in and not make a character" and everything was being done in Java which, well, the idea of a java server kinda irked me. Maybe that was a different project though, I don't know. It was so long ago. [quote name='Kyp' timestamp='1327713677' post='52548'] We approached them last only about 2 months ago, and they basically told us what amounted to "we can't find it." in reference to the source of the client. I'm sure that wasn't entirely true, but I don't think they care to sell it regardless. lol. [/quote] I'm inclined to believe them. Normally you'd have this stuff buried on SVN and whatnot. But EA has changed management a number of times since. What's more, they're the kind of company that once they kill something, they freaking bury it. They also would rather recycle old hardware than buy new hardware. So I wouldn't doubt if somebody went "hey, the version control server's running out of space" and in the middle of trying to request more space, somebody declared EnB to be dead weight and ordered it deleted. I wouldn't doubt, however, if some actual old Westwood dev still has the source on a harddrive at home. But he'd need to get permission to leak it, which isn't likely to happen. (edit) Heck, Star Wars Galaxies went NGE and they lost like 95% of their subscriber base overnight. SOE paniced, and well, internally anyway, somebody ordered the game to be put back the way it was. They couldn't find the source for the old game... at all... apparently they weren't even using proper version control... can you freaking believe that?

[quote name='Kyp' timestamp='1327253623' post='51966'] Mouse, We can provide you some understanding of the existing client, and we can teach you what is needed to communicate with the proxy but do you grasp the scope of that project entirely? A client like that usually takes a fully trained programmers several months, that being said if you're into it let me know and I will arrange a conversation for you with the folks who know the most, like I said, bear in mind we don't know anywhere near close to everything about the existing client, just what we've needed to get by. [/quote] Well, since I'm going to be diving into the server code soon, I'll be able to learn about the protocol. But I'd like to familiarize myself with the server code, and my roommate's going to work on trying to figure out the protocol to make a C# networking library that can be used. Still, like I said, I'd rather have a firm grasp on the server code so I can get a general idea of the scope that's required for making a client. Yes, I do know the scope required for a client. It's a lot of really really hard work, especially to do it properly. I've done a client for Second Life in Unity using the LibOMV library. I got it mostly functional for representing the world and navigating through it, as well as chatting. The only real issue I had was in converting from right hand to left hand coordinates and rotation. So the best I could do and still maintain proper orientation of world objects was that everything you saw in my client was actually a mirror image of what SL was really supposed to look like. I scrapped it after that because I couldn't figure out the math for converting between the two hands. I can work in left handed or right handed math, and I can convert positions and whatnot, but converting local quaternions between the two... that's over my head... I've also one a few clients for other avatar chat systems based entirely on a white paper of the protocols. None of them had encrypted handshakes like EnB probably has (I don't know if it does or not right now at this moment). Mind you, for all but one of the things I've done, my roommate did the networking code on them. My own networking code is... well, I just haven't done it in a while, my roommate's much better at it and it's saved us a lot of time just to let eachother handle the stuff we're each better at. Doing a client is not quite as much work as doing a server. The server is authoritative so it has a more of a job to do. The client doesn't have to think about very much, it just does what the server tells it to do. I'm not meaning to say that clients are trivial. Far from it. If it was just my roommate and I working on it, I honestly wouldn't expect to have anything to show for at least a year. Even then, we're frequently having to scramble on paying projects so we can get the rent paid. I suppose after getting basic login and explore stuff in, I could put up a donation thingie so we could possibly be able to afford to spend more time working on it. I don't know, just me thinking outloud here, nothing definite. [quote name='C Del' timestamp='1327633738' post='52444'] Nice, didn't know they have mono specifically for android. I'm going to have to look into that. [/quote] I don't know if there is Mono for Android. What I do know is that Unity has a special license for Mono which allows them to port it to any platform they want without having to open source their changes. So there is Unity for Android. I don't know about Mono proper for Android. [quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1327645329' post='52466'] running through a web client is kinda cheating, although I have to confess I have seen some good stuff running through Unity. I just don't think it's quite got the same energy as a well written native C++ engine. But, like Cdel was saying - I guess if you just want something working quickly, C# is pretty hard to beat. [/quote] Yeah. A C++ client would definitely be better. But like you and CDel have said, it would take longer. The cool thing about Unity, though, is that it actually very highly optimized. The rendering engine doesn't have to call out from managed code to draw the 3D graphics, so you don't have the whole managed/unmanaged overhead. There are a few cases where you can hit that overhead, but there are ways to code around it if you know where they are. Namely it has to do with accessing any data that would be in the unmanaged part of the engine. For instance, accessing certain members of classes in the UnityEngine name space, it's better to copy the value, work with that value, and then feed that value back in than it is to constantly reference it due to the managed/unmanaged overhead involved. Of course doing it in Unity has a few more things going for it that doing it from scratch in C++ doesn't. With Unity, we'd already have a fully optimized 3d engine complete with a ton of high profile middleware backing it up. It'd be a lot easier to maintain and thus create totally new content where needed. Done right, Unity games are almost as fast as native at most things. And any way it goes, we can certainly blow away the regular client using Unity. ALL of that said... I'd like to say that this is all just speculation on my part. I'm far more intent on helping out with the server right now. There's no sense in me diving into making a new client until I know more about how the game works.

You know, at one point, a startup company I was part of contacted EA to buy the rights to EnB. They only wanted like 150k for it, but they'd only sell to a company with either 3 AAA titles under their belt, 1 successful MMO, or a million dollars in profit in the previous fiscal period. We didn't meet any of those criteria. The company's since been dissolved. We never made any profit because we got too caught up trying to make ends meet that we couldn't actually get around to doing the games we formed to do in the first place. Banks wouldn't give us any venture capital because they viewed indies fresh out of college as too risky a venture.

[quote name='StarbuckJD' timestamp='1327641039' post='52459'] We did get a side by side example in a previous post, where showing the overall degradation with the xp bar, though I can see it w/o seeing the xp bar, even in your pics. If my card would do it, I think I'd pass on it, it's a bit sloppy. It's not a weird card, it's an X series, I switched from ATI to this because it works better (with shaders) with the game engine I work with. In most cases where a game or render app has AA, even 2x does a good job with it while retaining crisp graphics. If it doesn't bother you, then your set, but I'm cursed with noticing stuff like that hehe bothers the hell out of me. It's like, you program, what if your app kept spewing out "Hello wUrld!" every ten minutes, you would want to snip the noob code out of it, right? Well for someone that lives in graphic apps, noob graphics suck too Ah well, no AA isn't so bad, would just be nice if this supported it natively, or did well externally. But thanks for showing examples. [/quote] Well, there's people posting saying they got Radeon to do AA. So I'm guessing it's Case A: an odd gpu/driver setup... Perhaps you could try different drivers, or talk to people who have Radeons to see which drivers and cards they're using.

[quote name='C Del' timestamp='1327633566' post='52443'] Ooooo. Me likey. It would be nicer if it were a bit higher-res though, and if it didn't cost $6500. o.O [/quote] How about the keyboard I mentioned? http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/maximus/ The keys are full color light up displays that can be reconfigured on the fly. So one could, in theory, set up one's number keys to show the icons of the game's power/equipment tray. How cool is that? And the keyboard only costs $2100!

[quote name='Tienbau' timestamp='1327297777' post='52032'] yeah C# you are locked into one platform. Also it just feels ... icky ... coding in it, like Java. C# on linux? I can just see the linux gurus pulling their beards in consternation in the uni refectory over that one. [/quote] One platform... I suppose Windows 32&64bit, Mac PPC&Intel, Android, Wii, PS3, XBox360, iOS, and web player, (Linux coming soonish) are all one platform. Cuz... you know... that's the list of platforms the engine I use supports. They must all be one platform though. As for C# on Linux. [url="http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page"]Yeaaaaaah.[/url] [quote name='C Del' timestamp='1327336165' post='52052'] Oddly enough, I love C# and hate Java. Something about C# just feels better. Anywho, C# will produce more 'robust' code per man-hour than C/C++ will because of it's inherent exception-handling devices. I would love C# on linux, but because .NET support only comes from a third-party project instead of directly from M$, I wouldn't bet on it becoming a stable and usable platform any time soon. Don't get me wrong, if I need hands-on control of memory and efficiency is a huge concern, I like me some C, but for putting a project together quickly, C# takes the cake and honestly, you don't have to sacrifice a whole lot for that expedience. [/quote] Ok, well, the thing is that Mono is actually very stable. It's the engine used by the Unity game engine (which is the engine I use), and it works on all the above mentioned platforms. On consoles and iOS devices where JIT is typically disallowed, it does full AOT compilation. I wish it'd let me do full AOT compilation for the platforms that allow JIT, but meh...

[quote name='Zathman' timestamp='1327629307' post='52421'] @Tienbau, et al.: If you buy online, 16:10 monitors can still be found pretty easily.[list] [*]NewEgg: [url="http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000020&Description=1920%20x%201200&name=LCD%20Monitors"]http://awm.so/AzhT6S[/url] (Search for "1920 x 1200" :: 10 results) [*]Amazon: [url="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_scat_1292115011_ln?rh=n%3A1292115011%2Ck%3A1920x1200&keywords=1920x1200&ie=UTF8&qid=1327628927&scn=1292115011&h=fcfabefe414ea447aa053e06187d7c07f002e421#/ref=sr_hi_4?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A%21493964%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1292115011%2Cp_n_feature_keywords_browse-bin%3A2882904011&bbn=1292115011&ie=UTF8&qid=1327628944"]http://awm.so/xtaMNI[/url] (Electronics › Computers & Accessories › Monitors › 1920 x 1200 :: 97 results) [/list] For me personally though I'm not inclined to jump on the 16:10 bandwagon just yet (if at all), so any sort of FOV changes that can be made to E&B would be preferable, especially as EyeFinity and other technologies start getting cheaper to buy into. [/quote] This is what I want, a triple ostendo setup. http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ostendo_curved_display_eyefinity.jpg An ostendo is basically a curved monitor equivilent to setting 3 4:3 monitors side by side. And this one's 3 of them. *drool* I also want an Optimus Maximus keyboard to go along with it. *double drool*

[quote name='StarbuckJD' timestamp='1327298033' post='52033'] I don't see that, I see jagged edges. Like such as in EVE, I can use either my Nvidia CP or game settings and get 16x with nice clean lines. [/quote] I took another couple of screenshots. Here's a side by side comparison. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17771862/enbaa2.png On the left is without AA, on the right is with. The AA on the right is 32x. Sure, you can see a bit of jaggies, but it's greatly improved. No matter what, the pixels stay the same size, so AA is not going to be perfect, no matter how high you drive it. My suspicion is that people who think AA doesn't work on EnB at all either have some weird gpu/driver setup, they expect AA to result in perfect elimination of jaggies in all cases, expect the monitor to magically increase its DPI, or most likely simply haven't done a side by side comparison and are freaking out over edge cases, no pun intended.

[quote name='ryprx' timestamp='1327360469' post='52070'] Damn you Mongorians!!! [/quote] Hey, my ancestors were Mongorions. They crossed the Bering Strait some 14,500 years ago, but they were from Mongoria! Don't make fun of Mongorians, we're all very good at knocking down walls, and that's a useful life skill, you know!

[quote name='Kyp' timestamp='1327253800' post='51967'] Byakhee refers to all of us as colonists, from time to time. [/quote] He better not call me a colonist. I'm indigenous injun... injunenous? indijunous? yeah, i'm indijunous!

[quote name='StarbuckJD' timestamp='1327298033' post='52033'] I don't see that, I see jagged edges. Like such as in EVE, I can use either my Nvidia CP or game settings and get 16x with nice clean lines. [/quote] The jaggies aren't as bad as if I run it without the AA. I'm heading to bed so I'll post screenshots of the game without AA. But if you look at the zoom in, you'll see that the jaggies are actually being softened. It could be better, yes, but AA is working. The problem is that nVidia cards do multisampling. Supersampling accomplishes the goal of antialiasing better, but it's a lot slower. Multisampling can achive visually simila results under most circumstances. However, there are instances where it fails. EnB seems to have a lot of instances that fails to achieve the aesthetic benefit. I have a domain name from my old MUD server I mentioned, it's directed at my IP. crushedmew.game-server.cc the mysql server is on port 3307 like you said. The password for the root on mysql is slapperfish

[url="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17771862/aaenb.png"]http://dl.dropbox.co...71862/aaenb.png[/url] (edit, blow up of my JE's fins) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17771862/aaenb2.png Here we have a screenshot of my JE and the nose of my JS. You can see that I do have antialiasing going on here. So it CAN work forcing it through the driver settings. So the question isn't so much "does it work?" as much as it is "what are your relevant system specs?" Me, I'm running Windows7 Enterprise GeForce GTX 465 nVidia driver version 285.62 WHQL and my Anti Alias Settings are Anisotropic Filtering: 16x Antialiasing - Gamma Correction: On Antialiasing - Mode: Override any application setting Antialiasing - Setting: 32x CSAA Antialiasing - Transparency: 8x (supersample) Perhaps someone who can't get AA working through driver settings could post similar data for comparison so we can maybe dissect the problem?

I'm going to look up the DirectX 8 specification and see if I can't find how the call to set aspect ratio is made. It's actually not the FOV that needs changing, it's the aspect ratio. If it's a simple enough call, I might be able to create a new client patch to change it. Don't get your hopes up though. The only times I've worked with DirectX has been through middleware, and my skills with ASM aren't the best.

[quote name='Mimir' timestamp='1327204314' post='51955'] Well just because I prefer to buy my groceries on the day that I cook them does not make me European, but hey your friends may think whatever they want... unless they still think they own the USA. [/quote] No, they don't think they still own the USA. Although one of them pretends like he does.

[quote name='Mimir' timestamp='1327165823' post='51927'] I'm a bit confused with Mouse's request for a C# programmer to get the new game client rolling. LOL as far as I know this is still an all volunteer effort so "assigning" you a body just won't fly here IMHO. I think if one or more of the devs want to give it a go with you it would be up to them. Personally I would prefer to see the server code up and running before any resources were spent on the client, but again that could be just me. [/quote] I wasn't requesting that anybody be assigned. I was musing that I could do it, but I'd need help with the networking side of things. I agree that focusing on the server is more important. Though there will always be people who want to improve the graphics. As has been said, the engine is outdated and improving the graphics with the current engine will just further tax it. I was at no time asking for resources, personnel or otherwise, to be allocated to me.

[quote name='Mimir' timestamp='1327146949' post='51906'] Well welcome to the Emulator Mouse... I thought it was the "old" (I'm gonna die for that crack) Mouze changing her name. And like it or not the UK/Britain is considered in the EU, Europe, European Nations. Pretty sure it is not just us "Ugly Americans" that think this way. [/quote] Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Also, that doesn't stop the British people I know from yelling at people when they're referred to as Europeans.

You're quite welcome

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/19/tech/sopa-blackouts/index.html Thankfully, Washington is getting cold feet about both of the bills after Wednesday's protests. Secretly, I half hope they do pass so that I can sit back and laugh as every politician involved in passing them gets nailed to the wall for the stupidity; and history learns a very important lesson about allowing corporations to bypass such tenants of basic human rights and civil liberties as due process and [i]ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat[/i] (innocent until proven guilty). Mind you, I really don't want the things to pass, but I fear that "Big Media" will continue and continue and continue until a media holocaust breaks out and independent, uncontracted creative minds are rounded up and prosecuted for such crimes as creativity without a license. Yeah, yeah, I know, that's slippery slope fallacy. Still, knowing that it's fallacious thinking doesn't help me not worry that something insidiously more stupid is just over the horizon. Of course, [url="http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html"]a recent TED Talk[/url] about SOPA and PIPA didn't help me relax much. As the TED talk says, it's most likely that it's not piracy that they're trying to stop. It's people being creators, not consumers. They're well aware that creators are also consumers, but consumers who create instead of just consuming are also competitors.

[quote name='Mimir' timestamp='1327140076' post='51903']Glad to see you back Mouse..... Remember I used to travel back and forth to the "EU" sometimes twice a month? European Union (EU) not Eu as I was apologetic for the typo. [/quote] Different Mouse. Hi, I'm Mouse, I'm new here, and check the Net7 patcher, I've set all the mice free from their cages!

As funny and cool as that is, Britain isn't EU, it's UK. British people get quite irate when you call them "European". Kind of like how Canadians do when you call them "American" even though it is technically the same continent. But then again, the very northern tip of Japan is technically on the American tectonic plate.

[quote name='StarbuckJD' timestamp='1327100092' post='51866'] You might need a lot more things actually. If it’s a licensed engine, it’s quite probable there are license restrictions which for the most part wont let you mod an existing game and linking them together. Game engine developers are pretty strict in most cases, not willing to have their wares being linked with anything that even hints on infringements to intellectual property rights even if the final product is given away for free. It’s a reputation thing. So you will usually find heavy modders turning to open source with more laxed licensing. Additionally, to such a degree of work involved in this type of modification, you will probably need more than one to help. You will probably need a carpenter too …one that is good at carving square blocks into round blocks so they will fit into the round holes lol such as modding. Actually, it is probably more expedient to replace all the content assets, basically building a whole new client side system though with the EnB theme in this case, and open source would probably be the most appealing approach for any involved. My 2¢ anyway. [/quote] Nope, no such license restrictions. I have the engine fully licensed. The only restriction on what I can do with it is that I cannot use it to make a game development kit. Like basically I can't go and make a scripting engine with it and then release it as the engine with this scripting engine for the purpose of allowing other people to make their own games with it. That's it. The engine I'm talking about is closed sourced, and interestingly enough, Electronic Arts has used it for a few games, but they didn't make the engine. Then there's the fact that I'm not talking about a mod for an existing game, but a reimplementation with all new code and all new assets. It would be like saying "oh, no, sorry, space mmos have already been done, you can't do that. No sorry, Doom did zombies and demons first. Hey what're you doing there? Ultima did the medieval fantasy game back in the 80s, you can't do that." Or in fewer words, nihil novi sub sole. I honestly wouldn't need more than one person to get the project started and get some momentum behind it, which is what I'm talking about doing. As for open source, I was intending on it. Even though the engine I have is close sourced, it has an absolutely beautiful IDE that lets you do just about anything you want, entirely through Mono. It's the assets and Mono based code that would be open sourced. What's more, the engine itself is actually free in a basic form. Like I said, I have a fully licensed version, so I get access to extra features like calling out to unmanaged code, render to texture, screen space effects, low level graphics access, etc. Though a replacement client for EnB is totally possible in the free license for the engine. The engine is called Unity. You need the pro version to use its built in access to SVN, but there's nothing stopping you from slapping the code and assets on an SVN externally. {edit} To follow this disccussion go to the topic "New Models2". It has been split into two topics due to strange behavior with posts following this one.

I've actually been tempted to start making a whole new client. I have a fully licensed engine which is highly optimized for doing so. Thing is, I need two things. 1: A white paper on the protocol 2: At least one other person with experience in C# and networking to assist me. I'm a pretty decent programmer, and fluent in C#, but networking is not my forte. When I have done networking, it's always been in straight C, and for operating systems other than Windows. (edit) A third thing I thought of 3: Permission to run an untested, pre-alpha client on one of the test servers. (edit again) If I do this, once the client can communicate with the servers just fine and it's playable, a new client would need all new artwork for everything. In theory we could keep the same visual styles and themes, but the art itself would have to be new. Otherwise we'd be distributing a client with assets we don't own the IP for.