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Old 02-21-2005, 11:47 AM
RangerDown
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 1,066
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I'm sure there's been that kind of documentation in the past, and that it was closed for reasons you and I may or may not agree with. I hope it's some consolation to you though, that even if tomorrow they decided to stick it on the home page, I probably wouldn't bother reading much of it... why? because I can tell you it's already out of date.

Mid December, SOE switched over to a brand spanking new network engine (actually EQ2's network engine, so now they probably only have one set of network code to deal with for both games). So all the 20-page writeups that have been done on the net protocol in the past have been made moot with one single patch.

I can tell you with 99% certainty that noone here at eqemu has made it a point to go spend 12 hours on another 20-page write up of the new code... because we only have 2 really active devs atm, and they may be focused on other things besides Live netcode, especially while the live client is riding out the aftershocks from a new expansion. When there's 2 active devs, then the source code and casual conversation thru PM's will pretty much comprise the documentation for this new net code -- at least for the forseeable future.

I've seen various writeups on old net protocol that I was able to get to with simple Google searches. Once again, they're all outdated now, but I did come across a thread in HQ forums just the other day that I believe talks a little about how the new net protocol works.

And no, it's not against the rules to talk about various inner workings of the server as it would be hypocritical to have an opensource server and then forbid discussion about it. It's also (mostly) not against the forum rules to talk about the client's behavior as you observe it. There are certain things which we don't talk about mainly out of legal concerns -- such as the no warez rule. If you somehow managed to get the EQ client sourcecode and posted it here, it'd prolly be gone in a flash as that's copyrighted stuff too.

If you've observed ex-devs going on a rampage and posting confidential material, he's usually posting the source to one of those closed source projects. Whether you or I agree with an author's decision to make a subproject closed source, the fact of the matter is if it isn't GPL'd or licensed by some similar terms, then the author retains all copyright and can choose how (s)he wants it distributed. If the author doesn't want it distributed, then posting it here is just as much warez as posting eq client files.

While I, like you, disagree with some of the community's past decisions to keep something private, the only people the devs are hurting by unnecessarily doing so are themselves. If any dev has forgotten that, perhaps this message can serve as a reminder that clamming up and becoming unreachable will be a turn-off to potential help. As long as they are aware of that, I don't think they'll bother keeping more info private than they have to.
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