How about a jailbreak?
 

Hi all

I've been wondering, why not break out of the cage that is the SOE provided client side content? The Emu itself is such an awesome system. It is mature and stable yet, limited to what is included with the supported original clients.

Does it sound feasible to make the EQ specific (game systems) parts of the server plugable in some way so that they could easily be replaced with entirely new stuff? Free of the limits (and legal issues!). How about "OpenEmu" :) Of course that means a new, open, client too. I've seen some of the efforts that have been made here (including my own Zonewalk experiment which is here on the boards too http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=36087 )

Just seeing the incredible effort that some of the people here make in order to develop the server software systems and create various flavours of "The EverQuest Experience" makes me wonder if some that creativity and energy could not be channeled into a direction that would allow to create truely original, new worlds? Curious ....

Aengor

It's been tossed around as an idea and none of the developers would have an issue with it.

The only concern of course they've had is using free software to build it. I doubt we'd want a DirectX version of it.

I think breaking away from the SOE client is a great idea. As far as I'm concerned EQEmu is the most successful open source MMO project in existence and it's really only half of it.

I've done some very early work on just authenticating to the eqemulogin server provided with the source. So far it's just an environment and some packet captures. I have to get more familiar with the packet stream and existing packet type identifiers before I can do much more, but I really think that the network side is the better starting point.

The visual portion is probably the easiest part. Content creation is tougher, but at that point I think there would be a tremendous amount of motivation just for being so close to an alternative client, we could even check places like opengameart.org for those interested in making open assets.

I think people see that someone has built a zone viewer and they get all excited without realizing that there's another 80% or more to go to have an actual usable client.

Absolutely. Probably more than 80% even ;) Zonewalk for example is not even able to render the old (pre pop) zones 100% yet. And it has significant performance issues currently. So far its largely only an experiment (built in under 10 days start to finish) to see how far I would get with the chosen tools and the info that could be dug out of this site.


Still, I think this community as a whole does have the required expertise. It would be possible. And to be clear, I am not saying "lets do this" or "I'll turn zonewalk into a full blown client and off we go". My post was out of genuine interest to learn how people feel about the general idea. Being able to leave the confines (and illegality) of using the SOE provided content behind seems such a tempting outlook.

Thanks for everybody's opinions.

Cheers

Not a bad idea, but I think it kinda defeats the point of this project lol. This project is for Everquest. If we made a completely new client and then make all new content for that new client, it is no longer Everquest. For something like that, we would be much better off using a whole new engine designed for making that sort of thing much easier like Unity or whatever.

There are definitely plenty of projects out there based around other engines. While it would be neat to have an open sourced client for EQEmu, it may not have the expected outcome and acceptance from the community as you would think.

In all fairness almost all those projects suck. I do agree that it would take a while for it to gain traction (if it ever did). Doesn't mean it isn't something worth doing. I'd love to see something like SimpleClient actually come to life and be written in a language people can easily use.


Edit: Cavedude pointed out what I said came off as a bit harsh. I don't mean to disparage the work of other people, just that the projects lack maturity or openness and aren't really great candidates for "hey go work on this instead". They so far have all been essentially pet projects and the minute one takes the jump from pet to community project I'll be sure to back it.