[Windcatcher]

I think the concept of an emu of an existing MMORPG (any of them, for that matter), is fundamentally flawed and ultimately doomed to failure. When it comes to attempting to recreate the experience of a commercial server, no group of enthusiasts can hope to compete. There is simply too great a disparity in terms of available effort. From the start I've thought that the only viable way for an emu to really flourish (read: provide an enjoyable experience for its playerbase) is to quickly and irreversibly migrate from an emu to a non-emu: that is, to become a unique game in its own right, from rules all the way to content. Otherwise players will always be subconsciously comparing it to the real McCoy, and that's always a losing proposition.

Is it possible to create a hybrid, where there is some emulation and some uniqueness? Sure, and there are emerging examples of that trend. However, it still only scratches the surface of what's possible, and still leaves such servers under the commercial game's shadow in more ways than one.

This next part might sound like a dig at the devs; it isn't, and I'm really trying to provide food for thought here. Case in point:when you dig through the server code, just about everything is hardcoded for the EQ client, but it doesn't have to be. For example, instead of having netcode in source files, they could reside in a loadable DLL instead. There would be zero loss of speed, but it would allow servers to branch out toward different client types, like (gasp) a client that we could create with our own protocol. It can happen.

With respect to client-server communication, a client depends on many things, but certainly these: a method of packaging data (i.e. a network transport layer), a packet protocol (structs, opcodes, and sequence of usage), and game rules (formulae, for instance). It might be possible for the server to use DLL modules or something similar, so as to decouple it from the live client. How about a server that used AD&D rules instead? (either 1E, 2E, or 3E). Or maybe DragonQuest? (once again, pick your revision, there are several) Or a skills-based ruleset of our own creation? Using DLLs can allow these things. I think that for an emu to wish to be perceived as more than just a pale impersonator demands taking a serious look at this sort of thing. What's more, it makes it hard to legally justify going after such an emu: if an emu has several server modules, only one of which was an EQ module, then that's a whole other ball of wax (though the "eqemu" name would *have* to go at that point, and I'd urge the devs to do that anyway, based on the FreeCraft lesson). I don't know about anyone here, but I *detest* the EQ ruleset