VoA Development Tracking

[trevius]

I am not really sure what the plan is for this client. I don't really think we have enough active devs interested in maintaining a client that keeps up with Live patching. Though, with some recent scripts I made, updating opcodes is a bit easier. That may make it possible to keep up with Live with minimal work as long as it is kept up with for each patch so we don't get too far behind. The further behind we get, the harder it is to catch up, as many packet structures have changed and it takes a while to account for them all and fix them.

One thing I want to mention is that I named the patch files "VoA", which is the same naming convention as our previous clients. The difference is that this client could change at any time due to its source. So, one issue that would need to be dealt with if we tried to keep up with Live is how to handle the patch files in our source. We could have the names change to reflect the date of the eqgame.exe build date, or we could just put that date in the patch file as a comment and name them something like "VoA1", "VoA2" and so on. It isn't the naming that concerns me too much though, it is the number of potential patch files we would eventually have. It is already enough of a pain to update 4 patch files for every new opcode that gets added. I don't even want to think about having to do 20 of them after just 1 year of "chasing Live"! Maybe some sort of sub-patch system could be created that would allow for minor changes within the same expansion of patches. I think we would need some kinda change like that or maybe only support new opcode additions for the current patch as well as the UF and older clients and skip any Live patches in between.

I am just hoping that Steam gets a new complete client for EQ again at some point. If they do, then the work on this VoA client might be able to get the Steam version running in minimal time. That is my main reason for working on this client right now.

[trevius]

There is a new patch from Live with a build date of April 10th. I checked and it looks like they didn't change very much. The current VoA build for the emu is still as functional with the new client as it was with the old one as far as I can tell. I will be working from the new April 11th client from this point on.

I did a bit more testing and it looks like normal melee combat works fine and even looting works fine as long as you right click to loot instead of left clicking to loot to the cursor.

I found another crash with this client. It will crash the client if the character you are logging in is in a guild. Otherwise, it should log in fine.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a screenshot showing off some of the functionality of the VoA client so far: