I never played this game, but back in HS/college I recognized that it brought one of the largest shares of traffic to my video game strategy guide wiki. The RO guide underwent constant maintenence by fans, and was subject to extreme organic growth despite no manual intervention on my part. The level of curation, attention to detail, and the extent to which it was taken was fascinating--and I didn't initiate any of it.<p>I was always impressed by the Ragnarok community.<p>Sadly, memory of those days was marred when a trusted friend that was running sysops hijacked my domain name account and stole the site from under me when I was overseas. But it was a good lesson in never trusting anyone and not to under any circumstance reuse passwords. (Granted, I swear Godaddy's password reset was an idempotent no-op back then... My account changes never seemed to persist.)
Some of my earliest lessons in "how not to write software" came from listening to the ranting of a friend who worked on the original eAthena implementation (i.e. back when it forked from the Japanese Athena project and gained the "e" in its name). All of the fragile handoffs between the multiple server types (character, map, login) and the client. Most notable were the mountains of code, network and otherwise, that had to be written in knowingly buggy, inefficient or incorrect manner simply to properly mimic the official server functionality.<p>There was also one attempt to make an alternative client for the official servers to deal with some of the lackluster interface issues (longstanding, serious/obvious bugs from 2002 that lasted until 2009ish). From what I recall, it was way too much work, and the core features were easier to deliver as a sort of (eula-breaking) addon to the official client.
Oh my Lord...This just took all the way back to my teen years, I played RO from like . . . 12 years old all the way until I was 18/19ish. It was an amazing game, I know I still log into my buddy's private server every now and then to PvP a little bit and it's always a fun time!
I can't get the demo to connect to the server, but the screenshots are super impressive.<p>The amazing part to me is that Ragnarok is still going. We used to play it in high school along with Helbreath because they were free MMOs and we had no money. :)
I really wish I found this 3 days ago, spent almost all of Sunday trying to get RO to run on my macbook without dual boot :(<p>Nice work, time to spam LoV!
Ragnarok has long been a center for OS development of one kind of another. When I was younger I was part of a team of people trying to add the WoE feature set to one of the server emulators. I wasn't very capable, but I helped a little. I recall that it was made more difficult by the comments in the source code being in japanese.
This game was the first MMO I really got into.<p>In the back of my mind, I always wondered if a project like this could be done (given that RO is MUCH less resource intensive than the quake engine, and other html5 demos I've seen, etc)...<p>I am so happy to see this project exist, I love this.
Hope that this is better code than the OS Ultima Online stuff I looked at years ago. Which looked a lot like decompiled binaries, even the original code…