While the most common uses of cores like this is to spin up “blizzlike” servers or “funservers” that use the original content but with boosted XP, loot, etc multipliers, to me what makes them interesting is when combined with client modding, the possibility of custom content — new zones, quests, loot, races, classes, and with some ingenuity even new systems.<p>They’re good foundations to build on. One would be hard-pressed to find an MMO client+server that’s as polished and complete.<p>The legal risks involved make it too risky for anybody within Blizzard’s reach to do anything but private tinkering with, unfortunately. It makes me wish for legislation that makes non-commercial game modding and reverse engineering strictly legal.
Hey, I'm on the contributor team for AzerothCore, mainly focusing on maintaining the docker images and linux build CI! Cool to see it here.<p>AzerothCore's "killer feature" is that it has a module system, where the game server can use C++ code to hook onto events. It's pretty slick and works quite nicely.<p>One of the things I've been interested in working on is setting up dynamic linking for the modules so it's easier to just download the compiled module and run it with the server instead of compiling the server with the module. The biggest problem I've run into with my implementation for that is the .so for each module ends up being on the scale of hundreds of megabytes, which seems incorrect.
Wow, the nostalgia I just got... Idk how it is now, but back in the day, you could easily get 15 players by hosting one these repacks and posting on reddit and ac-web. Ran a shitty level 60 twink server one summer of one these repacks, made a donation item similar to hearthstone packs, where you would get 5 random items. I surprisingly got a few donations... I had to shut it down due to school starting, but man, that was such a fun summer.<p>Its an incredibly fun learning experience to be honest. This really sparked my interest in programming. The freedom to create I felt! To think all i wanted to do was recreate swifty PVP videos... Private WoW Servers Hold an incredibly special place in my heart.
I remember those glory days of Nostalrius before Classic was released so fondly. It was the first time I'd gotten that community feeling in a game again since the early 2000s. The state of multiplayer gaming in general is so toxic and horrid today that I don't bother. But they really had something right in that Vanilla WoW/Everquest/FFXI era. No dungeon finders, no flying mounts, no instanced PVP. Just people figuring things out together and being forced to cooperate.
I've hosted this software server (with and without mods) for friends and family a few times. Its pretty solid and the mods help bring additional fun or to fill in the gaps of low population. If you love WotLK, i'd recommend it.
LandSandBoat (ex. topaz, ex. darkstar) is another server-emulator for similar era MMO "Final Fantasy XI"
<a href="https://github.com/LandSandBoat/server">https://github.com/LandSandBoat/server</a><p>Seems it still has commits from when it was called darkstar made by me :)<p>- <a href="https://github.com/LandSandBoat/server/commit/0de00388eacf018f02bb1bf070c096b8a6b73646">https://github.com/LandSandBoat/server/commit/0de00388eacf01...</a><p>- <a href="https://github.com/LandSandBoat/server/commit/47b3a5f9a3845dca94f5d8a3a9dec340e148c411">https://github.com/LandSandBoat/server/commit/47b3a5f9a3845d...</a><p>Not sure why the code called the compression zlib, but now looking at this code 10 years from now, it's certainly simply a dictionary based compression.
I can't wrap my head the enormity of reverse engineering a WoW (or any MMORPG) server. It just seems like there are so many possible types of inputs to the actual server, with so much of the logic happening in Blizzard's black box, that it wouldn't be possible to come up with a decent server emulator. Impressive work.
Takes me back to playing blizzlike private servers back in the day. I miss those times, as much as I felt that was time I could have spent better. I didn't have the dread of wasted time then, I could simply be present in a way that feels closed off to me now.
I've played around with ACore a good bit, mostly using their docker container builds. Which are amazing and I wish a lot of the other emulators would follow suite.<p>One issue I did run into was with calling the WoW admin apis, which are soap. The documentation seems to suggest they just "work" after changing your server's configuration but I, for all my effort, could never get it too while using the container version
Nice! So this is WotLK? I'll try it out. I left WoW around Cata/Pandaria. Especially the panda thing I found stupid. It was so childish Kung Fu Panda style.<p>Would be nice to go back and visit some of the forbidden areas like gamemaster island and the hidden area under ironforge
I have downloaded and played with this on my computer many times and am very grateful to the great open source community for such a great product. There will be a period of time every year or two that I really want to play, and then I will get bored after playing for a while (the most likely reason is the lack of interaction with friends in the single-player mode). This is my reason. They support writing some scripts in Lua, which is interesting.
I'm glad to see that the community is still going strong. I spent a lot of time working on private servers in the past, primarily on TrinityCore with a few modifications to add support for Lua and misc. features.<p>Hopefully this project continues and adds support/tools for easier content creation and better documentation/customization than we've seen in the past.
Sorry if this is a stupid question but I cannot really understand how it works. I get that this is a server and you can connect to it with a client... but what client can connect to it and speaks the same protocol?<p>You still need to have the WoW client installed, right?
I wonder if you can use the WoTLK Classic client to connect to this. IIRC there was a project to proxy WoW Classic client connections to server emulators like these.
How does it compare to CMangos?<p><a href="https://github.com/cmangos/mangos-wotlk">https://github.com/cmangos/mangos-wotlk</a>
I've never fully understood how custom servers work. These efforts impress the heck out of me. It seems like soooo much logic exists only on the server side, right?<p>Where is all the logic for enemy spawning, their AI, complex raid encounters, etc? I poked around the repo a bit but couldn't find it. Where's all the gameplay code and logic?
These projects are awesome to see, there are similar efforts for everquest. Is anyone aware of anyone trying to create different clients/renderers for these MMOs? A VR client for any of these worlds would instantly be amazing.
> MaNGOS<p>I feel like MaNGOS never really got good enough, and instead all the solutions in use branched off it. At least, MaNGOS certainly had a reputation for being janky and inaccurate 15 years ago
The light path is authoring AzerothCore.<p>The dark path is fundraising from that audience of male 30-45 year olds with massive disposable incomes to make your own game.