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This is why development stopped.

Initiate Mage
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I played BDO when it first came out and was one of the first ones helping with the development but eventually left for lack of time and interest.

I helped in the coding of the very first version of the emulator and even implemented many fixes that never saw the light.

When BDO first came out, end of 2014, early 2015 it had so many vulnerabilities that were easy to exploit and not as many intricacies as it has now and the trend will continue making it even harder to reverse engineer in the future.

I still get many messages on my discord from people asking me where to start and point them in the right direction. This is the problem with this community; Lack of information!
without proper documentation, sharing a tutorial, and providing information, most developers are not crazy to take on such a big project from scratch without building upon prior knowledge and advancement made by other peers.

The idea here is to democratize information, so newcomers are not discouraged and have more resources at their disposal to start helping and being productive in the community as fast as possible.it's for the benefit of everyone, hobbyists, gammers, and private servers. especially private servers (no one want to play in a bugged half butt working server)

private servers would be able to focus on newer updates and optimization running the server and creating events for their base players instead of wasting their time reverse engineer everything from scratch.

Anyway, I don't wanna make this any longer than necessary, Here is my proposal:

let's build a foundation to make it easy for other people to join the project by creating documentation and tutorials.I cannot do that all by myself, and I ask everyone to participate.here is what to do,create a video, or write steps to flow to do X thingsprovide information about past fixes and new problemif everyone makes a small tutorial or document something and send it to me. I will create a nice library and keep updating it and make it available as a resource for new developers

Once we know exactly what we are doing and have every process documents, the project will be less intimidating to new developers and we can even show it our workflow to more seasoned developer and reverse engineer and get feed back and help from top tier programmers in the field.
 
Experienced Elementalist
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Hello,

There has been an attempt already, running from 2018 to early this year, of building a development project.
But lack of attention + dedication made it stop, despite a few dedicated people who worked on this.

I hope you'll have more success with this.
 
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Life is beautiful, after
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The problem is that you do have a good heart in wanting to help new developers. But honestly, this talk of helping new developers doesn't excite me anymore. Because we are still in a pandemic, there are people without jobs (like me) and who simply live on corrections and others (almost). Now take hours, days, weeks, months and even years and it is free for a person to come, get it, say that they fixed it, open their private server and simply profit while the developers who had all the hard work stay here without receiving anything , honestly it is a difficult thing.

It already existed once and it didn't work and if it is going to exist the same way, with the same concept and everything, it won't work either, because eventually the developers will get discouraged and will just stop correcting. You have to understand that nobody works for free on extremely difficult codes.


My opinion, but im here for help whos want make the game better, not whos want profit.
 
Initiate Mage
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@Ledie Via Nais I agree with both of you,

The idea is to share. tutorials... documentation.... past solution... etc. and not your work.
If anyone work hard to do something and decide to keep it for their own benefit or sell it at a cost. it's okay because that person spent time doing it and need to make profit off of it. logic.

The idea is to share tutorial and documentation (only) no work. If there is 3, 4 people who commit to help me build this library I will ensure you that we will see a full speed in developments in the next few months.

If anyone is interested send me a PM. you can either record a tutorial yourself or send me written step and I will make video tutorial out of it for everyone.
 
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I've been considering working on an open source emulator for BDO in C++ lately alongside my current project, but I've ran into the same problem you described. It's hard to know exactly what is the current most up to date stable version of the current emulator. I am going to end up using ODO v1.0.1 more than likely to base things off of, but is this the best version to use? So it would be nice to have some good documentation that I could base my work off of lol. Though, I'll make sure to write some documents as I work on the emulator.
 
Life is beautiful, after
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I honestly think there are a lot of people talking, but we are not putting anything into practice. The idea of ​​creating the server in C ++ is great because the server will be lighter in ram consumption. But it will change almost nothing, the difference is that it will withstand more players.

And honestly if you are really going to have a project, you should put trained people and honestly always help each other, not close the intimacy of one or two and leave the progress of the project closed. What happened to ODO. There were developers with version 519 (Guardian) while others didn't even know it.

The idea of ​​creating a project to correct it over time and share only tutorials on how to correct it is great. But I ask you; What will new developers learn from this? Nothing, they'll just copy what you do and it is.

If we really want to help new developers, we have to make them learn to fix, make them understand how the game files work; As far as server-side, client-side and source-side.
 
Initiate Mage
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I've been considering working on an open source emulator for BDO in C++ lately alongside my current project, but I've ran into the same problem you described. It's hard to know exactly what is the current most up to date stable version of the current emulator. I am going to end up using ODO v1.0.1 more than likely to base things off of, but is this the best version to use? So it would be nice to have some good documentation that I could base my work off of lol. Though, I'll make sure to write some documents as I work on the emulator.

I'd honestly probably recommend starting from 491 since that is pretty much complete, odo and others are pretty much just copy pastes of each other and some really bad practices.

491 is just as bad tho



Only thing the project really needs is reverse engineer's for binary action chart and dbss. Almost all systems since 491 are untouched and still function with up2date info. rest of the issues seems to lie in unfinished database.
 
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I honestly think there are a lot of people talking, but we are not putting anything into practice. The idea of ​​creating the server in C ++ is great because the server will be lighter in ram consumption. But it will change almost nothing, the difference is that it will withstand more players.

And honestly if you are really going to have a project, you should put trained people and honestly always help each other, not close the intimacy of one or two and leave the progress of the project closed. What happened to ODO. There were developers with version 519 (Guardian) while others didn't even know it.

The idea of ​​creating a project to correct it over time and share only tutorials on how to correct it is great. But I ask you; What will new developers learn from this? Nothing, they'll just copy what you do and it is.

If we really want to help new developers, we have to make them learn to fix, make them understand how the game files work; As far as server-side, client-side and source-side.

Well the project would be completely open source, however, I can't just make people join, they must do so on their own volition. All I can do is provide a space for people who want to contribute. Creating a new project when you know very little about the surrounding subject matter is probably the greatest way to learn new things, and with learning new things you can then dispense the knowledge to other people. The goal in the end of any sort of emulation project is to understand the game's internals like the back of your hand. It's what I've been doing with ArchLord, and what I will do with BDO once I get things going. I honestly think you are being too pessimistic, and aren't seeing the forest for the trees. I do understand how much work is involved, especially since BDO is a pretty complex game, and has lots of moving parts. I hope to document as much as I can, but I am only one person, and I can not guarantee others will assist me.

I'd honestly probably recommend starting from 491 since that is pretty much complete, odo and others are pretty much just copy pastes of each other and some really bad practices.

491 is just as bad tho



Only thing the project really needs is reverse engineer's for binary action chart and dbss. Almost all systems since 491 are untouched and still function with up2date info. rest of the issues seems to lie in unfinished database.

Hmm, 491 seems like a possible candidate. I was just looking for something that was more up to date content wise, that had most of the packets figured out, and was "stable". I have a friend I will ask for his opinion on where I should start, but thank you for your ideas.
 
Life is beautiful, after
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Anyway. I'm not being pessimistic. If they are really going to create this project with all these guys. Call me, I'm here. cmb
 
Initiate Mage
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The lack of clear Instructions! thats the Ducking problem here!
When i found this project i was excited to play on my own Server with my own rules.
But there are so many Bugs its not enjoyable nor playable. When i was looking for solutions i, of course was trying to learn how to do it by myself, i asked people "can you explain me "how to this, how to that, why is this and that" just TO understand where the Ducking problems are but noone gave a duck, most of them didnt even respond to my messages.
There are some good tut but most of them arent that great, like "You have to go to bexcel extract table put in XXX" or "you have missing opcodes you have to find them and then place them" like what the duck. I mean yeah great i have at least some direction but how to solve it is still a mystery.

DONT Ducking POST CORRECTIONS!!!!
POST CLEAR TUTORIALS WITH EXPLENATION BEHIND THAT.

If the people go with clear instructions and manages to fix that error by themself they learn the best and can solve this or similar error in upcoming bugs.

I mean sure a fully working Client + Server would be great and ofc there are people who will try to monetize someone else work but let them do it.
They are going to fail pretty hard when the first big bug arises.
Other people going to take this client and work on it even more, adding new features, quest whatever but thats how a PServer game evolves, you just need to check other game with a pserver scene. So many different Servers.
But people here are scared, greedy and thinking in a closed mindset.

What ever i wish you guys all the best and good luck with your project.
 
Initiate Mage
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Almost everyone trying to update this emulator is starting from the wrong place. Yes you might be very proficient at C#, C++, Java, etc., but that means practically nothing for this game. 90% of the work is analyzing the client and packet analysis, and with each new update proficiency in reversing becomes more crucial. You can only get so far by looking at packets alone and serious time needs to be spent looking at the games main executable and various other files & formats used like .dbss, the actioncharts, and more. The emulator itself can be written in anything.
 
Initiate Mage
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c++ is hard for me,I have already moved about half of the code to c#, just for the sake of interest, binaryaction is not a problem, the problem is in the shuffle of packages on a new client.
 
Initiate Mage
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As a new comer, I was very happy to come across this post.

People here tend to use the word "community" to refer to the collective that happens to be roaming the BDO section of the forums. From my observations, it seems pretty evident that we're FAR off from being able to call ourselves a community, and that's to me the root cause of why there has been so little progress in the BDO private servers space and why there is little to no information out there as you point out.

Coming in, I was expecting to see a pinned thread that includes:
- Summary about the current state of development of each build.
- Links to all builds and documentation for each one (installation & setup, how to contribute, etc..)
- Links to social platform where we can have a more instantaneous way of communication (like Discord)
- A "bounty" point pointing out important engineering tasks that the community needs help in

This is just from the top of my head... Organization is key if we want to make the entry accessible.

Of course, I saw nothing of this.. Instead I saw a lot of what appears to be a combination of confusion, anger, misunderstanding and frustration.

I don't know what the motives behind all of the people are but I would argue that a major part of it is your desire to bring this game to its full and well deserved potential and to have the ability to enjoy it as we're supposed to.
If we want to see that day become a reality we gotta work together..

Sorry if this comes off as a speech. I guess this is me also getting out some frustration..


I'll be more than happy to help you create and maintain such a library and to help foster a true community here.
Please share with me relevant links (discord, existing library, etc..)

Thank you
 
Initiate Mage
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Ofc no one wants to manage a community that consists of frustrated angry people because it's hard and non-rewarding work. Even in real life software development, with discipline, grownups and payrolls, human management is hard. Now imagine herding a bunch of non-motivated 20-year-olds.

If you think you can handle it, god bless you. But instead of asking for a discord link you'll have to make one yourself, advertise it everywhere etc. Eventually people will come. In a couple of months you'll end up with 4 developers that are too busy with life and 240 impatient gamers that flood the discussion with nonrelevant stuff in 5 different languages. The library will probably also land on your hands because the developers hate writing documentation and the gamers are, well, gamers. New member onboarding, granting and revoking access, all kinds of infrastructure management - everything takes time. And also someone will have to pay for the source code repo and the servers (if I'm not mistaken, that was the main reason why ODO died). If you ever achieve something of value, deal with PA lawyers hunting you down. If you have the answers ready, by all means go ahead.

Oh and by the way this forum has some weird policy that prohibits discord links. In terms of a knowledgebase I personally like emudevs, somewhat questionable with their karma system which is both a blessing and a curse, and also very russian. But still, lots of content.
 
Life is beautiful, after
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Ofc no one wants to manage a community that consists of frustrated angry people because it's hard and non-rewarding work. Even in real life software development, with discipline, grownups and payrolls, human management is hard. Now imagine herding a bunch of non-motivated 20-year-olds.

If you think you can handle it, god bless you. But instead of asking for a discord link you'll have to make one yourself, advertise it everywhere etc. Eventually people will come. In a couple of months you'll end up with 4 developers that are too busy with life and 240 impatient gamers that flood the discussion with nonrelevant stuff in 5 different languages. The library will probably also land on your hands because the developers hate writing documentation and the gamers are, well, gamers. New member onboarding, granting and revoking access, all kinds of infrastructure management - everything takes time. And also someone will have to pay for the source code repo and the servers (if I'm not mistaken, that was the main reason why ODO died). If you ever achieve something of value, deal with PA lawyers hunting you down. If you have the answers ready, by all means go ahead.

Oh and by the way this forum has some weird policy that prohibits discord links. In terms of a knowledgebase I personally like emudevs, somewhat questionable with their karma system which is both a blessing and a curse, and also very russian. But still, lots of content.


To be honest sometimes i think in create a devlopment group, but im out of time, because i'm studying medicine rn so...
 
Junior Spellweaver
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Ofc no one wants to manage a community that consists of frustrated angry people because it's hard and non-rewarding work. Even in real life software development, with discipline, grownups and payrolls, human management is hard. Now imagine herding a bunch of non-motivated 20-year-olds.

If you think you can handle it, god bless you. But instead of asking for a discord link you'll have to make one yourself, advertise it everywhere etc. Eventually people will come. In a couple of months you'll end up with 4 developers that are too busy with life and 240 impatient gamers that flood the discussion with nonrelevant stuff in 5 different languages. The library will probably also land on your hands because the developers hate writing documentation and the gamers are, well, gamers. New member onboarding, granting and revoking access, all kinds of infrastructure management - everything takes time. And also someone will have to pay for the source code repo and the servers (if I'm not mistaken, that was the main reason why ODO died). If you ever achieve something of value, deal with PA lawyers hunting you down. If you have the answers ready, by all means go ahead.

Oh and by the way this forum has some weird policy that prohibits discord links. In terms of a knowledgebase I personally like emudevs, somewhat questionable with their karma system which is both a blessing and a curse, and also very russian. But still, lots of content.


The truth hurts but I've seen this way too many times in different MMO communities, even ones that I start up.
It sucks.
 
Experienced Elementalist
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The following is my opinion/personal experience and makes no references/attacks on anyone else on this thread.

Most "community" projects fail for a very simple reason: what's required is complex. Less than 1% of the people on this forum (or any other forum) have the required skills to make meaningful contributions. the other 99% are leeches, armchair practitioners, or people who expect(require is a better word) leaked VM with and YouTube video and their hand held.

Really, let's remove the emotions from the picture. It's a simple math.

To run a real BDO server, or write an emulation that is worth its salt.. you need to be or have a team with:

1). reverse code engineer

2). one or more people who can hack if real are used.

3). someone who can program in a language like C++, and has some basic reverse code engineer skill set.

4). experienced players to give feedback, or persons 1 or 2 (the coder/rce) be end game retail BDO players (never happens).

5). not have a team of people looking to ego++/chest puff, or take the files and run (even if they run, they can't fix the problems, having leaked files and no skill set).

6). be able to trust the people you are working with.

Not many people do pserver development. Not many people do reverse code engineering or code.

Add these together, you are left with a very very small group of individuals qualitied. Now when you factor in all of these rare birds truly being able to trust the other and act in the collective best interest? you end up with an impossible situation that melts into petty interpersonal drama... every time, always, no matter the game.

The truth is never pretty.
 
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The following is my opinion/personal experience and makes no references/attacks on anyone else on this thread.

Most "community" projects fail for a very simple reason: what's required is complex. Less than 1% of the people on this forum (or any other forum) have the required skills to make meaningful contributions. the other 99% are leeches, armchair practitioners, or people who expect(require is a better word) leaked VM with and YouTube video and their hand held.

Really, let's remove the emotions from the picture. It's a simple math.

To run a real BDO server, or write an emulation that is worth its salt.. you need to be or have a team with:

1). reverse code engineer

2). one or more people who can hack if real are used.

3). someone who can program in a language like C++, and has some basic reverse code engineer skill set.

4). experienced players to give feedback, or persons 1 or 2 (the coder/rce) be end game retail BDO players (never happens).

5). not have a team of people looking to ego++/chest puff, or take the files and run (even if they run, they can't fix the problems, having leaked files and no skill set).

6). be able to trust the people you are working with.

Not many people do pserver development. Not many people do reverse code engineering or code.

Add these together, you are left with a very very small group of individuals qualitied. Now when you factor in all of these rare birds truly being able to trust the other and act in the collective best interest? you end up with an impossible situation that melts into petty interpersonal drama... every time, always, no matter the game.

The truth is never pretty.

You are absolutely right
 
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