After looking over forum stuffs and changelogs for months, I'm simply curious. This project has gone a lot further than I had ever anticipated and it's so awesome and gets me excited for the future of it. For awhile there I was worried this was going to be something great that started and then stopped. So... "we" have come this far. For you developers and owners of this amazing server I was just curious: Back when you guys decided to start this project, and you began making the foundation for TAKP, did you guys expect this much work and dedication when it came to re-creating a very close but better version of the old server with your (our) own goals, rules, and boundaries? Was the scope of putting this all together something you saw as fairly quick and painless that you could work on casually or did you know it would be years of time spent and frustration and real effort invested? What with all of the research, the code, the people, the website/forums, the dramatics, and allocating people that were really good in their fields it's cool to me that you have a lot of the people necessary for this. Did all of you guys meet on the original Al`Kabor server or did you have to find people willing to do said things as a hobby? I guess I'm just wondering how it all came to be and how you all met and put it together. The sticky clearly states what the project and server IS but doesn't really go into detail as to how it all got put together. Was it just Speedz and Rob at first and they found people willing to help out or was it already a group of bad-asses that saw this needed to happen? Some prequel story would be fun to hear as to how this all became to be what it is today. Even though I was here in alpha, I was just excited about what was happening, I don't really know any back story aside from logs that some people had from AK and whatnot. I'd be curious how many of the brains behind it came aboard. As always, we're very grateful for it and the time spent making this what it is. It wasn't long ago that I remember saying what I thought was goodbye to AK forever and it'd be fun to hear how it all came about before people were already crying about mob rotations, camps, and pulling techniques again.
Great idea I imagine that a lot of people probably started not with TAKP, but by making contributions to EQEMU first. The great part about open source and things like github is that anyone can stumble across a project and decide to try and contribute.
TAKP needs a journalist, it might become legendary in days to come, ha! The work done here is no less than superior for a project like this. Look at the minds behind it and the kind of people it takes to run such a "simple" recreation of a game that grandfathered MMO's. Especially when you bring about names like EverQuest in the gaming industry!
I saw Secrets' client hack on Rerolled and couldn't resist the allure of a REAL classic EQ server back around Nov 2012. I played the server hardcore for a year. (some of you may have seen my videos) When Sony issued the shutdown notice, I panicked that the last source of classic EQ data was about to be lost. I had played Project 1999 previously, and enjoyed it a great deal, but they are a different era. Since I was aware of the emus however, I basically made it my mission for the last month to collect every piece of data that I could for them. During that month I had discovered Project EQ and found the EQMac subforum there. I originally just wanted to collect as much data as I could then hand it off and leave, but I was somewhat dismayed at the state of their database which was, frankly, bad. I couldn't turn my back on my favorite game of all time and let it die; certainly Daybreak's progression servers are nothing like classic. Nobody seemed to be collecting mob statistics even though it's not technically demanding at all. Later on, deciphering Sony's game mechanics was also an interesting puzzle. I dumped 4 gigs of video and a large spreadsheet of NPC stats on Cavedude and Rob, plus wrote some analyses about it on the PEQ forum and they asked me to help with the database work and I agreed. The success we've had here makes it hard to stop, honestly.
Torven, you must come from a science or math background of some sort? I have always been impressed with your data collection and statistical analysis.
Well, I discovered eqemulator and PEQ back in 2008. To make a long story short, I wanted to help PEQ shaped up a bit since it has some god awful pathing and no NPC interactions and overall it was just in sad shape so Cavedude enlisted me. I had logged in on live to get pathing, the emotes, and npc to npc interactions. One of the things that were lacking on live was the original zone such as freeport, commonland and such. I discovered EQMac in 2010 and I desparately want to subscribed there. I eventually got myself a PPC IMac and downloaded the mac version of everquest and began working on pathing and such for PEQ. So from 2010 to 2012, I had played on Al'Kabor and did some work for PEQ so pretty much all the data I got in the original zone were incorporated into PEQ. Both Cavedude and myself became very interested in preserving AK as we knew one day it may eventually get sunset. It became a reality when SOE announce the sunset so we began to do all sort of things to try to come up with getting packets and data from AK. Luckily SOE decided to prolonged it for another year. That really gave us a chance to do what we needed to do. I'm very thankful for this project and to all that are involve in it.
I started on EQEmu back in 2002 when I started getting sick of SOE and their way of releasing expansions. I was very impatient and got distracted easy so it was very sporadic involvement. I never really worked on the server code. Mostly just messed around with it locally to learn code at that time. I took a few big breaks and came back in 04. I forgot my original login so I made a new account and that is the one you'll see me under today. I messed around some more, created helper tools as setting up a server was obnoxious. Much more so than it is now without the aids of repacks and such. Took a few more breaks and kept coming back. Somewhere around 2011-12 I started playing on AK and found rob. Some of the details here I tend to forget, but him and cavedude were already active in the preservation. We all had a sense of the last truly classic PoP server being gone soon. At that time it didn't seem dire, but we slowly did things here and there. Then the announcement came and we went nuts getting data. After a bit they rescinded the announcement and we still collected, but I think it slowed a slight bit. I still felt the urgency behind that it was just a matter of time. But I was no where near skilled as CD and Rob in data collection and what was needed. I did collect a number of simple things like some vendors, all the boat paths, and many zone in-zone out log in-log out packets, as well as brief full zone collects in PoP and starter zones. Some of which I think got lost in a hard drive death. The main drivers behind this early on I'd have to say was cavedude and Rob, Secrets had, and has great moments of wow factor in contributions. Our release date would not have happened without a few of those. Once Secrets and Cavedude made a huge stride in stability and getting the OSX client to connect (once OSX could connect it seemed more stable than the PC client). We started the server out of my house. The first dev server was a Dell 2850 with 4gb ram. We ended up killing it, tho I think it was already on its last leg. The CPUs were dieing a slow painful death. So I bought a Dell r900 and moved the main server there for a bit. Once we knew we wanted the public involved, we himed and hawed about who would make a sane account creation and tracking setup. No one wanted to. Hell i didn't even want to as I knew nothing of web design beyond DreamWeaver, and that was even minimal. But we needed it. I had doubts about what real contributions I was making to the project at this point since my collects had no where near the volume of the others, and well my code skills were not even close either. I decided I may as well do something no one else wanted to. So then I started just tossing keys around and ended up with our version 1.0 account tool and tied it into the forums. It was buggy as hell but worked enough. Not to mention not very secure lol. Then Akkadius helped me out a bit in learning a new way of thinking in web/php. After that I think I got it up to about version 3.0 and Atri helped a bit at that point. Atri's time was brief and I won't go into details, but he did help me learn a bit more. Between Akkadius and Atri I ended up with version 4.0 after their help and discovered phpbb was not cutting it. I was doing things that phpbb was not designed to do. In fact a friend of one of our GMs who does web code was shocked (I gather) that I got it to do what it was doing at that point. So we went to Xenforo. My god that was a welcome change. I could and still can do sooo much more with it. After a bit we moved the primary "live" server to where it is now thanks to Akkadius. We then used my server for the dev server. Then a extra warm summer hit along with all the early drama, the server was costing far too much $$ in electricity, so we moved the dev server to the same server rack as takp is on. I then took a much needed break for a little bit, but still usually ended up doing something related to takp about every day. Since then I have focused on features, ease of server setups, setup automation, web tools, loginserver, and quests. Most of my work is behind the scenes and rarely makes it to the changelog as it's not "in play" fixes or additions unless it is quest work. As well as a majority of my work has been in the web design too. Now I work on improving my already improved code skillset and I do some minor code work (with the exception of the item tracking system and loginserver overhaul , which was two of my largest server undertakings to date). I am now working on a few super secret things related to eqmac and eqemu in general. These are pushing my knowledge past its limits. But I am stubborn about learning. Must do it to get anywhere. Some details are slightly hazy and rob may chime in to correct anything I missed or am slightly off about. But I wrote this quick and off the top of my head. I forget exactly when Torven joined in the mix of this, but rest assured if it wasn't for him and rob as well. Classic beta release and Kunark would have been delayed quite a bit. Then you have Haynar, I also am hazy about when he slipped in, but we sure have improved exponentially with his help and drive for perfection.
My history... I submitted a few fixes for linux based showeq after 2005. Nothing major. After Seaxouri quit doing work on myseq, I picked up doing the development work and maintained it from 2008-2013. I dinked around with EQEmu off and on over the years. In 2010 I found Project 1999, and liked the concept. So I started submitting patches for fixes based on EQEmu code. A lot were not so great at first. But I kept trying. They eventually accepted me on as a developer. I have helped dev on P99 since, with breaks here and there. I tried to play on P99, but my preference to box, made it not so fun. I did some help with netcode on Shards of Dalaya a few years ago. But their development team focuses on bringing people in from their player base, so it didn't work out for me to join their team. I saw a few posts about takp on p99 boards after it started development. But person posting was so annoying from my p99 history, I never gave it a second look. When the server made its release about a year ago, I took another look at it. Saw that cavedude was one of the main developers. It was a name that I knew. So I asked Rogean about him. And he vouched for him being a standup guy. I started checking into who the other people were on staff doing development work. Looking into their history in the EQEmu world. I started playing on the takp server. I saw a lot of things I helped work on improving at p99, that could use work on here. Game mechanics. Things that make game play smoother. Thats my specialty. I started hanging out in IRC. Something I had not done since my IRC days back in the 90's when I learned to program. I actually ran chat servers and programmed on ircd and an oper serv on a small chat network named ChatNet. If you look in old versions of mirc, my server is even in there, Pocatello.ID.ChatNet.org. I started submitting pull requests for takp, and they accepted me into their developer ranks. I currently develop on p99 and takp. I am good at figuring things out, solving problems. Improving game play, making things smoother. I have a bachelors in Physics. A masters in Nuclear Engineering. I do data analysis and pattern recognition for a living. Programming helps me relax, since it is just a hobby and it has been since 1996. H
I had no idea PEQ existed until AK got sunsetted. Suddenly Elrontaur the first was dead. AK was the only EQ I had ever played and I was fully aware that it was radically different than any other EQ in existence. I heard rumblings inside Destiny that a group was collecting data from AK in an effort to recreate it. A few people got scans made of their toons, so that they could be recreated on a new server emulator. I was a non believer in the AK sunsetting, but eventually I saw the writing on the wall. Sony's outdated security was failing and the new PC clients easily took advantage of AK's exploitability and SOE had no choice but to stop throwing money away on AK development, and the song was over. I followed some of our new guildies to The Grand Creation PEQ server. The Mac client was basically the PC client with a horrid WINE wrapper to run it in a bottle on your Mac. It's game performance was terrible, the graphics would lock up during raids, and my experience on there was miserable. To make things worse was the game culture on the server. Everyone basically macro scripted an army of alts, and the dead would dance. It was at that moment that I realized how tragic the death of AK was, because it was truly the last classic EQ experience available and to me it was gone forever. Our Destiny core raid force started dispersing and many of our raiding players vanished into the mists. Players that I looked forward to greeting online every now and then, became memories. It was a sad time for me, because these folks were just as much my friends as any of my IRL crew. In some ways, I new them better because people will tell you crazy stuff via text. Then I heard more rumblings of an Alpha EQ Mac Emu on the Destiny website, and immediately attacked the significant learning curve involved with getting the client installed and configured and then proceeded to fail miserably at connecting. I was then admitted into the Alpha program by Speedz and connected up for the first time. Elrontaur III was born. Suddenly my crufty old EQ Mac client was connected in native mode, and was running 3000% faster than it ever did on SOE's crummy blades that they ran AK on. The project was brutally alpha, there were game stopping usability issues, and the client was bugger than I thought possible. But amazingly, somehow, almost everything worked. I was stunned that anything worked on TAKP Alpha. It's like Modding a Ford Model T to a Ferrari engine. You think that the Model T will blow it's doors off at Ferrari speed, but somehow it all holds together. The primitive EQ Mac OS X client welded to an EQ EMU framework. Just bloody brilliant. Alpha testers started popping up, and a tiny population took on the monumental task of debugging the Alpha Classic EQ Mac Server. Aside from the playability bugs, the EQ EMU Server code needed severe tweaking because it was based on the current EQ EMU game mechanics, and TAKP/AK game mechanics were radically different. Plus EQ Mac started in PoP, so there was never any server like the one we were debugging. It was literally taking the shards of the broken OS X client and forging an entire new game around it. A stupendously gigantic undertaking for such a small crew of dedicated developers and die hard testers. I could remember entire weeks where I would be the only client on the Alpha Server, forging forward trying to test the content as well as I could with my solo Eru Wiz toon. Eventually, rob took pity on me and let me box a cleric Doing game development on this scale isn't an easy gig, even when you are being paid to do it. It sounds like it would be a lot of fun, but it's really just staring at millions of lines of code. The Alpha development of the server was bumpy, and when beta finally came around, we had to wipe all of our Alpha toons and start brand new fresh beta toons. Aside from a few code bumps here and there, this beta version seems to be stable enough to build the remaining expansions to the game. The real challenge remaining for this project is purely social. Now we have to spread the word far and wide, to all of our ex guildies of AK that the Jedi Temple has been restored, and we need all surviving Jedi to return. We need to find players old and new who want to play on a real EQ classic type server, the one that SOE accidentally created, then stupidly turned off. Honestly, I would play on TAKP even if only 1 or 2 other players were on. But I'm sure we can reach many EQ players who want to relive the dream with us. Speedz and Rob both tell me they are onboard to develop this server all the way to PoP. I've learned to believe what they tell me.
Thank you all for sharing your stories. You guys are doing amazing work! Really have enjoyed this thread.
Thanks Khorpus for starting this thread, and to the developers for sharing. In the last month that Al'Kabor was up ( mid October through mid November, 2013 ) I shared my log in info for Neea ( 65 Temerity Cleric with decent gear and flagged for most every zone ) with someone who said they were from Project EQ and were recording as much data as possible before AK went down. I have always hoped he/she/it got some useful data. I know I saw him ( Z ? wizard ? ) in Sleeper's Tomb on that last day when almost everyone on the server was in the zone .
This is my attempt at keeping this brief. I left out a ton and changed the order of some stuff in an effort to prevent writing a 100 page book. I first started with EQEmu back in 2003. I stumbled upon it because LoY had just gone live on Sony's servers, and I was searching for some information on it. (I had been playing EQ since Velious-ish) So, it was a complete accident. I was a computer tech at the time, but I had no knowledge of coding or databases or anything that could be of use to EQEmu. At the time, EQEmu wasn't much more than a sandbox. You could log in, kill stuff, maybe cast some spells but it was all very rudimentary. But, I was still drawn to it. I started spending more time logged into my little 1 person server spawning stuff and figuring out how things worked than I did on Live. By the time GoD went live, I had stopped playing completely on Sony's servers. Time went on and I started to become knowledgable in MySQL as I played with EQEmu. Eventually, I had gotten to the point where I was writing fairly complex queries, and using Perl to write scripts to automate much of my work. I had started to get a decent (at the time) database going so I decided what the hell, and released it. I didn't figure anybody would ever use it, as PEQ already had a huge following (it was still in its early days too, FNW had just taken it over from tcsmyworld and rebranded it.) But to my surprise, people did use it and some even liked it better than PEQ. I didn't agree, but I still felt pretty good about that. One day out of the blue, Fathernitwit came to me and said he didn't have time for PEQ anymore and asked if I wanted to take it over. I jumped at the opportunity. Now I can go on and on about my time in PEQ. Lots of stories, and happenings. (I could probably write a book, but who would read it?) But, I think the key point is that at some point we started to realize that EQEmu had actually become a playable game. Personally, I had started to fiddle with the C++ server code as I found I needed stuff fixed/implemented for the Grand Creation Server which came with the PEQ deal. My attention started to turn to that, as I had grown tired of writing quests and doing database work. Robregen came in and the exact right time, he took over much of my database duties so I could do more work on the code and TGC's internals (it pretty much runs itself even to this day.) I don't know if I ever told him this, but his database work was the best EQEmu had ever seen - much better than mine. At some point, we began using Al'Kabor for data collection for PEQ as it was closer to our era than current live was. Then things came full circle, and I found myself spending more time playing Al'Kabor than collecting packets and data! The community was the main selling point for me. Most of the people I interacted with rocked. (This was before they went free to play and before the hacked PC client let the flood of people in.) Now, I am not knockling the PC client at all. Once it was out, it made collection much much easier as we were able to use many of the PC tools we had already written. Most importantly without it, EQMacEmu would simply not exist today. But, I will agree that it hurt our Al'Kabor community in many ways. Back on PEQ after a while, I was growing really tired of being a server admin. I nearly quit multiple times. I kept coming back, because I am addicted to EQ emulation. Hahaha. But, something needed to change or I would quit for good. Well, change it did! At the time, my girlfriend and I were living in NJ. The short story is one of her clients offered her a job in California, and she wouldn't go if I didn't go with her. So, we packed up our shit and drove 3,000 miles leaving pretty much everything we knew behind. We didn't even have an apartment lined up - we didn't have time this all happened within two weeks! We lived in a hotel with no wifi for 3 days before we found an apartment. The move was very expensive, so we were really super poor at first and couldn't really afford internet for several months. There was one open router near us that had super slow spotty wifi, but most of the time we drove to Starbucks for whatever we needed. It fucking sucked. I had Steam in offline mode, and I had movies and an Xbox to keep me busy. Not to mention unpacking the apartment, and looking for a job. (Which sucked, in NJ I was a big shot IT dude. Here in the bay area I felt like a little leaguer trying to play for the Yankees.) But without a car, and being in a strange place without knowing anybody led to major bordem. So, I one day decided to see if I could convert the EQClassic source to work with the hacked Al'Kabor client. EQClassic was using trilogy and I already knew the netcode was compatible. This not only filled my time, but also had a mostly successful result (Rob and I were able to log in and mess with stuff once I got back online. It was crude, and buggy but hot damn it worked!) This started my journey on Al'Kabor emulation. Fast forward a bit. Secrets made a MASSIVE breakthrough that changed everything and got The Al'Kabor PC client to log into stock EQEmu source. No longer did we have to use the ancient EQClassic source (it was already way outdated by the time it was leaked) and we could begin building up from the more stable more modern EQEmu source. It meant we were basically starting over again from zero but fuck it was worth it. Sony at some point threatened to shut Al'Kabor down. Rob and I kicked it into high gear collecting. But then the reprieve happened and we relaxed a bit while keeping in mind that it is on its last leg. During this time, I didn't do as much as I should have looking back but I did begin tracking down a version of ShowEQ that worked with our client. I found one and the first step was getting it working. Life and PEQ got in the way, so EQMac went on the backburner for me personally. Then, the second shutdown notice came and this time they were serious. Like a bat out of hell Rob, Speedz, and myself (if I missed anybody else I apologize.) started collecting everything. I got ShowEQ to work on ancient build of Red Hat, and fixed the source so it worked with our client (the code was a tiny bit off due to the changes made compared to stock PC live on Al'Kabor presumably by Hobart.) I instructed those who could to collect packets of them doing everything they can think of with ShowEQ. I began collecting specific packets that we didn't have. Every day all day we did this. Then we think okay, we have the server packets wtf are we going to do about spawns? So I rewrote MySEQ to work with our client and instead of logging in text, I had it logging in SQL compatible with EQMacEmu. Rob and others then went around and caught the spawns in every zone. If the zone had a lot of people in it, or looked wrong he went back and got it again. He went back for rares and uncommons, Rob was a beast. In the end, by sunset I am currently sitting on nearly 80GB of collects from Al'Kabor, mostly packets but also lots of spawns - often multiple trips to many zones. I am sure we have a ton of data nobody else does. From there, I've just had my head down and coding. I've taken breaks, helped with other things sometimes, but mostly I have been enjoying working on the code and watching Al'Kabor being recreated, as the code moves farther and farther away from its EQEmu mother.
And boy, did you guys recreate it, it is a wonder that it works at all, and that it works so well. If Sony would have brought you in as a team, AK would still live and make money, I am sure. Evern better though that you guys had this vision and now it is a newborn baby, I am so happy for you and of course, for me, that you made it happen. Kudos to all who helped to achieve this! I am looking forward to the next 10 or 15 years!
So my end of the story is a bit similar to cavedude's... Back in 2012, Rogean and I were going through trying to see if we could make P1999 more accurate to the era. This led to me researching the old protocol of the EQMac client. What initially started as a way to gather data for P99 turned into a new way to log into the game: the EQMac windows patch. Hearing that the server was going to shut down the first time, I figured 'what harm could there be in having a Windows client available for EQMac?' And how cool would it be if SOE saw a spike in population and decided a classic server would be a good idea? Enter the release of the EQMac Windows patch to the public. Chaos ensues with EQMac having a flood of new P99-esque players. Temerity, Desitiny, and The Horde all are confused with their recent population influx. Chaos ensues over contested targets in a P99 fashion. The server was going to go great, until people realized that the server was so vulnerable to attacks. Some malicious cases appear. Layonhands and other people such as newagesoldier begin working on primitive hacks. The server is in ruin, and I know SOE wouldn't let it last, so I started work on the initial fork of EQEmulator that would have support for this era of client. Initially, it was just a 'showoff' project. How cool would it be if I had a client from 2002 talking with one from 2010? That was my initial goal; to support both clients on P99 and let players use the 'classic' interface alongside the new, modernized Titanium client as a choice. It was a hackjob at first. Mixing in EQClassic's code didn't really seem to fit with our code changes to the emulator and that's the route cavedude went initially. I ended up using EQEmulator 0.5.3 netcode and branching in fixes from places like Shards of Dalaya that Shards (and Haynar) allowed me to use. That same code ended up being the basis for upgrading Shards of Dalaya to a modern EQEmu client, by the way. They're currently on the loginserver and you should give them a try. A few weeks pass by and I have something workable. A lot of this code was made when I was still banned on the P99 forums from the Red99 player fiasco that happened there, but I wanted to still get the word out and still contribute to P99 despite their staff disliking what I had done. I knew that there was still things to be preserved and nilbog and I still talked a lot regarding changes to P99 and of course about the upcoming EQMacEmu project that turned into TAKP. Eventually, I got unbanned from the P99 forums, but for the time I posted it, I went under the alias a_gnoll_pup99 and posted this thread: http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1480119 I knew I wasn't going to do this alone. I decided to open source the project and let cavedude know of my intentions to do so. The main reason I open sourced the project was to gather the support of PEQ, and to have a 'peqmac' sort of project that could happen as a result of my project. Cavedude tells me he was working on the eqclassic code that was released. I told him don't worry about that; it's going to be far too much work to maintain and this is something I am in the long haul for. After a few months of working on the code off and on, we find out that the EQMac binary has the structures and opcodes in the client for this era. This speeds up progress significantly and opens the door for not just EQMacEmu but EQEmu in general. A lot of the previous unknown mechanics were ripped from the client by myself, demonstar, Torven, and even SOE devs have posted snippets of modern code that help us indirectly. SOE announces the shutdown. cavedude, robregen, Torven, and various community members packet collect the crap out of EQMac to save it. I continue refining the core netcode with cavedude while robregen worked with the community of PEQ on the content/mechanics side of things. As a result of all of our efforts, we now have a working client, database, and era-specific information, plus a stable development community. Incredibly, we now have TAKP where it is today as a result of everyone's help. The EQMac, PEQ, EQEmu, EQClassic, and many other communities have been supportive and have been a tremendous help in making decisions and I couldn't have been more proud of what we made together. Here's to another year of TAKP and hopefully many more!
This kind of stuff is definitely what I wanted to hear about, thanks to all of you for this. It's officially my favorite thread and so fun to read. I wasn't wrong at all in seeing how much time and effort and brainpower it takes to do something like this and make it work. You guys are straight fuckin' BA. Seriously, the dream team, for all of the people that have been in love with AK since it's inception. Much hugs and appreciation. EQ would have certainly died without amazing people like you and I've found it incredible that there are those out there that are willing to spend so much time making things happen. I hope in the future that everything will be kinda "finished" so that it's just automatic at that point and you guys can play on the server that you've done so much work on and see your incredible accomplishments laid out for everyone to enjoy. Even though that's already the case in many ways.
I'm "only" 32 now but I hope to be one of those people still playing EQ at 50 because of all of your hard work. There are / were plenty of people in their 50's+ playing this game anyway. Some things should never change, or at least don't need to. You know, like chess
