Hi, I'd read that the server code/database is planned to be made open source when it's considered "done" enough. I was wondering if there was any approximate milestone you had planned for when that may be. I'm thinking at some point it might be fun to make a private EverQuest server just for friends and family and although EQEmu's great it doesn't quite have the great exact match of server/client versions that makes TAKP feel like a complete game. Apologies if this is the wrong place for this question, I just couldn't see an answer in the FAQ and didn't know if this is something the staff may have discussed much.
If the server code is released, is it locked to PoP era, or can later expansion be opened up using it?
Bumping for Elves vs Dwarves. Tbh even if u kept it closed source Axzten is a trustworthy bro. Thx for your consideration.
Rob, Torven, and solar, I'm curious to know what limitations you've come across when it comes to the client and adding content. I remember there being an item limit, right?
The way EQ works the client is the entire game, that's why EQEmu was a natural project to come from it, some of it is 'easy' to start with. I don't mean to diminish all the server side work by saying that - the NPCs, items, all the scripts, the combat logic, chat, raids, etc are server side of course, but a lot of it is both server and client. When something happens, the data sent between client and server is just a notice of an event and some identifiers as to which entities are involved, and both the client and the server are supposed to compute the game state. They arrive at the same result by looking up all the rest and simply knowing the game logic since they're both supposed to be built from the same source code and should stay in lockstep with each other naturally by just running the same code in response to the same event. This was a constantly changing thing through the life of EQ, even the original things like AC and ATK changed over time as the game was patched week after week, so a big part of what we've done here is figured out what the specific behavior was for our exact version and replicated it on the server. Items are one of the more flexible things but even those have behavior that changed over the years, for example the ability to click them without being equipped, and also click from a bag. All of these things are so drastically different that I wouldn't even consider the idea of using TAKP client/server as the base for something that is from a later era. Anything is possible with enough effort but it's different from what we've been doing here.
I remember there being probably at least 2000 empty item DB slots, it could be up around 5000 for all I can remember. There's thousands of slots of just old gm event items or 1-time events, or legends server items etc. We use some of those items in our anniversary events though, so they aren't completely invalid. But if someone is looking to free up more item DB slots, I made some lists a while back of epic 1.5 and epic 2.0 items and some other out-of-era items : Out of era items in database ID #1000 - 10000 | The Al'Kabor Project - PoP era Everquest (takproject.net) Out of era items in DB #10000-20000 | The Al'Kabor Project - PoP era Everquest (takproject.net)
The biggest limiter is not having a working server to observe anymore. If AK were still running then just about everything could be figured out with accuracy given enough time. There are things I've spent many hours trying to estimate that I could figure out with certainty in five minutes if AK were still up. Even if AK were still up, it's very hard to nail down NPC spawn rates and item drop rates, because to get high accuracy for these you need large data sets. Many drops are fractions of a percent. Spawn and drop rates would probably be at the top of my wish list for data leaks or whatever. I've built many tools to extract data from carefully prepared logs that would allow me to get all kinds of data if AK were still up, but if Daybreak's servers change stuff then I have to resort to old logs and digging through old comments and the like. Sites like Steel Warrior going offline was a big loss.
