A thought brought on by insomnia :P

[Swampdog]

Ok.. While tossing and turning last night trying to get to sleep I came up with an idea. Not sure if this has been hashed out before or not, but it seemed to be a good idea in my sleepless state. :P

From what I have seen lurking in the eqemu boards for the past month, it seems that the biggest problem people have is with the patches of the client which ends up causing the devs to hussle to get support for the new client. With the new client, Sony in their infinite "wisdom", changes the op codes and hoses up functionality of the servers.

My thought last night was it would be nice to have a client proxy, similar to ZoneProxy, which sits on the client machine. For the sake of this post I'll call it ClientProxy. With this "proxy" the eqclient would no longer talk directly to the world/zone servers, but would talk to the proxy. The proxy would determine the patch level of the client and perform any required op code conversions/encryption as required by the zone/world server.

Plugins could be developed as new servers are developed which would plug-in to the network side of the proxy enabling players to connect to a server which is locked into a certain version level such as Winter's Roar or some of the servers locked into 5.7-DR3. The player would simply download the WR network plug-in or 57DR3 plug-in and then would be able to connect and play.

Plugins could also be developed to add additional commands/functionallity into the client similar to how MQ2 adds things.

ZoneProxy could also be integrated into this as a plugin allowing the development of new zones.

The plugins would also allow the devs to create serverside communication with the client and semi-lock it, not having to change it with every version. This would allow setup of setting up encryption for account security and leaving it alone since the server now communicates with the eqemu clientproxy and not the eqclient.

This wouldn't really solve a lot of the coding requirements since the devs would still have to code changes as Sony made changes to new clients. But it would provide a solution in which folks could play on a variety of servers regardless of what version of the server source they were running by downloading plugins.

I'm not a programmer and not really 100pct sure how the client and servers communicate other than what I have read here in the forums. I'm not even really sure if something like this would work. Just wanted to share the idea and see if it was something that was feasible/possible.

Any thoughts?