[Discussion] about ROM

everyone knows this game is dying because of basic lag issues and no upgrades to the graphics the game is having a hard time competing with newer games so I'm looking for a team that would like to remaster this game but before I do that I would like to start a discussion do you think that remastering this game would bring back the traffic or the popularity do you think maybe the storyline itself is enough to keep the traffic and the game going I have full source code to every version of this game


my question is do you guys think it's worth taking it to direct x10 and 11 remastering everything and making the game beautiful again you think it's possible to breathe life back into this game before it dies completely or do you think it's just time to let the game die and what we do we can't compete with any of the other games :(

Interesting question and outlook. If ROM was open source then yes, but my opinion is it's owned by RW, they should be the ones bringing life back in to it. Any effort we put in without their consent is ultimately a waste of time. We all know the end of ROM is near. It can surely be refreshed with newer engine and gfx. I would like to see that. There is just something special about making a fully custom set of gear that keeps me playing it. And i think Arcadia is breaking grounds rather well with custom content. Time will tell how far they can go with it, custom LUAs, totally unique Plots, custom maps. At this stage I think they are the only ones able to keep the game alive longer then RW has planned. But IMO Arc are going too far to fast, but then some ppl like that, im just a slow old fart.

DX 10 or 11 can add some new special effects, but as it is now already special effects kill FPS, not sure if that is issues with file accessing the gfx from the game folders or not (which I tend to think it is) since I can cache the entire game in ram with this pc.

The game itself is what keeps the game alive, its a very nice game, mismanagement has destroyed a few servers, other server are on an endless path to death cause its admins will not budge from the 10yo concept of how to run the game. P/Servers give players what they want basically, better bang for buck, more game options. Official servers are what is holding it back. If Officials die off then RW will stop too, so putting work in to a project like this might have some reliance on officials picking their game up. Item Shop example (Officials [---] is this big, private item shop is [--------------------------] this big. And Diamonds on officials is [---] this much, privates [-------------------]. Players want more, privates are giving it to them, officials are not.
Keeping this game alive longer will take more then just some new code. The Developers should be looking at more then just GF to manage the game. Ever wondered how many servers there could be if RW replied to emails about the cost of obtaining the game for commercial purposes, or if they released the basic engine to the public like other games have so the public can develop content for the greater whole.
I would like to see a positive come of this, but is it too late to try ?...

Nice post, which contains most part of info you need to know.
Also, simpliest way to improve client would be some fixes to game engine(which would reduce lags and wouldn't waste alot of time).
But no, I don't think that client improvement would save ROM. Most part of ROM players are old players, new gamers go to another AAA projects.

OK I understand what you guys are saying

but from my point of view I still believe it is possible to bring RoM back to life and give it a new feel I also believe that would be very easy to attract new players with new content and gear I have the ability to make gear and new maps and more if the retail servers do die I still do not think the game will die the game is amazing and the storyline is amazing and believe it or not I have contacts at the company and have told me once the game dies I can do whatever I want with it

Kitty at runewaker employee of the company has told me personally the game is dying and they do not have the capability to save it cuz I have too many projects so they're going to let it die

however I do not think the game should ever go open source that is really bad for games but I do believe me and my team can bring life back to this game I see the none of you are optimistic and ever think outside of the box you think that the retail servers Die the game itself will die when people like me have everything they need to continue the storyline and can and will do it

as long as someone have a server up for this game this game will never die
however I've already started building the new engine and have the game running in direct x 11
my frames have already dropped from 50 to 120

Yes, game is nice and, for ex., I have alot of good moments with it(met nice people, got start with programming and alot of my current knowledges are based on ROM development), but, for ex., I got bored of game process and now only help with server sometimes to those one, who ask about it.
As for game reborn, you would need good game designer, not reworked engine. As I already say, it wouldn't help much, but designer can help you with new interesting(!) content. Biggest ROM problem on current moment is that new content isn't much diff from old - you got encreased stats, 2 dungeons with ~ same game mechanic and new mini-game once at year. This's biggest game problem(biggest, but not the only one, ofc.).
From programmer side you can only realise new ideas of game designer and optimize client(less lags, less memory usage, less angry ppl). Also, you can try to fix those memory consumtion of zone.exe.
If you would need help, I can try to make some code-parts on tasks if would have time and would wanna to do it. BTW, you know my skype, so you can write me.

@theDomo
I'm interesting in what you do to improve fps of the game.
Can we talk more?

I spent days analysing that code and I must say I am disgusted with it.

The whole thing looks like a pile of crap. You cannot refactor it easily because there are no tests (or maybe no one bothered to publish those...). The only decent looking code is inside Rune Engine or belongs to 3rd party libraries.

I just can't stop wondering why they even bothered with creating classes, since most of them are singletons with static methods anyway... Sometimes I get an impression that some student by pure luck managed to write working piece of code and other people were mindlessly copying it around - LUA scripts is worst example, same chunks of code copied 10 times in different files - why? Human done obfuscation...? Drugs? A lot of test code around, commented out chunks, some weird leftovers... They could not even keep their opcodes unique!

Client side-only verification, race conditions, heartbleed like problems, sql injection vulnerabilities... There are so many things that need fixing first before even trying to introduce something new...

As for reducing memory footprint for zone.exe, the simplest thing would be to unpack fdb files and organize extracted data in a way that can be easily mmaped into a process address space (though if you want to mmap more than 4GB, you need to make your process 64bit), this may cause some latency problems just after startup, but you can just fill operating system buffers by reading data (warm up). Advantage of that solution is that all processes will be using same chunk of physical memory for static data and if memory gets tight OS should be able to evict pages that are not used, since they are backed by persistent storage.

Also it would be interesting to try have two processes serving game, one responsible for managing player data and network communication, and the other one for rendering and UI. If the latter crashes, it could be respawned quickly without disconnecting user from the server... though I find games not crashing at all more pleasant...

Nice post, nice ideas.

Hello,

maybe anyone knows something about Patches and SQL? Please send me a message. :)

Remastering would make this game awesome again.
The game itself is very good, i played many other mmo's after Runes. But never gave me the same feeling of wanting to return to the world of the game. Runes of magic is a world where you want to come back to, must be the magic in the name ;-)

I am no coder or anything so i would be of no use to a remaster, but for discussion.. i would say yes.. this game should be DX11 with some nice shaders, new textures on the world, maybe speedtree if possible, maybe its possible to do something with the source and Cryengine even? And make the game more sandbox style as well?

Sign me up if you need to retype quest texts and all :-)

Dont touch the music tho XD

Some Fun Stuff

Patch Notes from August 2009 Patch 1.8 - Secret of the Goblin Mine

Dear Community,

Some of us may have, under certain circumstances, encountered a strange issue in the Runes of Magic client during the last few weeks.In zones and areas that are very crowded with other players it may happen that with some PCs the Runes of Magic client allocates a lot of system memory to display all the different models and armour textures.

Generally the client frees that allocated memory again. There are however cases when players who have turned up their "Character Details / Paperdoll Detail" to maximum, use e.g. a teleport to jump to other crowded areas with even more players. In that case the client tries to allocate even more memory without freeing the already allocated cache.

Thanks to the detailed reports our players sent us, we were able to pinpoint the issue. To solve the issue permanently parts of the client's memory management have to be rewritten. The systems programmers are already working on revamping, testing and optimizing this as fast as they can.Until we have implemented this fix in a new client version, we would like to ask all affected players to reduce the "Paperdoll Details" under "Options / Display Settings" (press ESC to access the Options menu) by moving the slider to the left.This will reduce memory usage and the client is less likely to close itself.We will inform you as soon as a client update is available.

Thank you,

Your Runes of Magic Team


And well all know what happened about this still 10 years later ^^

P.S: Anyone happen to have a working Chapter II Client/Server ? Or was the Chapter IV client/server the earliest we got public ?

Funny thread : I was talking about it with some friends a few days ago and wanted to see if some people were wondering about a "remastered" version of the game, to summarize my discussion with some friends, from a simple player view and from a developer / project manager PoV :

We can all agree there is a ton of positive aspects and good ideas into the game : runes, add stats to your gear, jewel things, double classes combos and so on which have been destroyed because Runes of Magic have been thought as a simple F2P-cash grab copy of World of Warcraft.
Even if the game wasn't bad (and from my point of view, I think the game was pretty amazing when he has been released), we can also agree on the thing that from let's say.. 65/70 to now, there is barely nothing new that have been added, except bugs and copy/paste of what have been done before.
I wanna say it because a lot of players forgot it : the background beyond the game history is.. really cool? Even with the few last zones they released.
But, the game has not evolved for 8+ years - It was a decent copy of WoW at some point but did not evolved like WoW did - Dungeons are still based on pretty simple mechanics (which are bugged most of the time) and I'm not talking about textures that are still the same today.

So, what is required to make Runes Of Magic great again from a player PoV?
- total textures revamp
- dungeons rework to ensure the game is not an eternal gear-check and to make it challenging aside of "Is my gear good enough ?"
- in-game economy should be also reworked so we're not just playing a cash-grab P2W game
- PvP-wise, the game is/was a terrible mess and would probably require some love
- and I'm not talking about some toxic mechanics of the game that have been adeed and just bored most of people (Proof of Myths, mini-games currency and so on) that would also required to be reworked

And we just talked about what would be needed from THE PLAYER point of view..

I try to spend some time into the code and things related to it and I think anyone who spent sometime into it could agree on this : It just feel like a pile of shitty mess that have been randomly put and is somehow working, god knows why.
There are just so many things that would need some time to be rewritten, changed, refactored etc..
I hope some guys here know the concept of "technical debt" and can understand how insane this debt is concerning this videogame...
Oh and yeah, I did not mention that the tools that have been used to make this game are purely not enough to make a game that would would "Ok" in 2022 so there is also a ton of work and time to put into these tools.

Before giving my personal opinion of what might be the best way to make Runes great again, I also wanna mention that the game still belongs to RW so, as far as I know, any effort put to make Runes better than what he is would be wasted since theorically you're just now allowed to do it and I highly doubt that RW gonna publish the source code and say "our game is dead, we offer this to the community and wish they can keep it alive", I'm almost sure that I've read and heard that several people tried to contact them and nothing was possible.
Yeah, private servers are alive but we all know why are they all destined to die : they are dedicated to the RoM community, which is going smaller and smaller every year and they are barely no new comer in it.

What I think and we all agreed while talking about it is that Runes of Magic is dead and can't be saved even if RW & GF allow people and the community to work on it for all the reasons I mentionned about how shitty anything related to how the game is technicly.

The best way to keep Runes Of Magic universe would probably be a project "inspired" from it but designed from scratch with modern tools - UE4/5 and so on.. But that's also the most expensive option and I don't think a RoM fan got enough money, knowledge and time to make this dream alive..

I'm not familiar with Ragezone but feels free to contact if you wanna talk more about it :)