Saturday, February 27, 2010

Small Update on testing

Well i guess its time for an update, so i've been going on alot about opening a private test.
We are very close to it thanks to mark he's done some extraordinary work, at the moment we're hoping to start it on the 30th if not shortly after.

The purpose of the private test is to get as much feedback as possible on the server performance and bug feedback, because at this stage we'll be adding all the ucgo features into the server and also testing new additions to the server framework e.x. clustering.

I know the wait on this server has been long and tedious but we're close and i think all of you will be happy with how much care we've taken on this new server software i really think you will all enjoy it, especially when we're at the point of running events!

Shortly after the test i believe we will have some sort of NPC's in the game, in an ongoing test to build and improve the AIServer, so be on the look soon to see some new information on testing!

Monday, February 22, 2010

First Post - the start of a dream

Hello everyone, mark has had his blog for a while i figured i'd create one as well to let you all know.
That he;s not the only one responsible for this great server software we're creating, first i'd like to post a bit about myself!

My name is Brian im 20 years old borb on 06/04/89, i've had my nose to the grindstone for three years now on ucgo development, i'd like this opportunity to explain a little about the project also.
The project in the beginning consisted of two developers myself and dragoonith, for those of you that played with me in ucgo during the day's of official knew me as "Dante", now onto the project.

The project started in 07 about 5-6 months before ucgo went down officially i wont go into specifics but at that time dragoonith and myself were aquaintances, we played the game a bit together off and on.
The day i heard of ucgo's tragic upcoming death i was speechless i thought to myself "how can a game thats so well recieved in japan and here in the "US" to those who knew of it be shutting down?

So at that point i didnt know what to do, ucgo was so dear to me i had made so many great friends, with the japanese, chinese and other americans the news for me was almost unbearable.
But there was hope this hope came from having a friend very knowledgeable in packet reversing and mmo server construction this man is Xenozephyr, on a side note everyone of you whether you play my server or johns should thank him for intiale ground work on ucgo, when i contacted him about ucgo i was distressed and didnt know what to do, but he offered an alternative, create a private server for ucgo i thought to myself "i cant do this im not smart enough", he assured me that "you can never go wrong following your dream".

So, with my limited programming background mainly VB.net and C# i decided to give it a go, so for a few 100$ Xenozephyr reversed UCGO's packet encryption and some essential file formats which led to the creation of some tools to decrypt and extract UCGO's file's and a tool no one should be without in this line of work a custom "UCGO Packet Sniffer" built upon his latest packet sniffing framework, at that point dragoonith agreed to fund the tools and packet encryption, after about two weeks Xenozephyr had most of our tools done he released the packet sniffer to us so we could begin sniffing net traffic between the UCClient and server, which led to us and many others in the community catching packet logs of UCGO while playing in their game session, these packet logs were vital to the servers recreation, at about a month in we finally we able to pay Xenozephyr for the packet encryption, at which he gave me some examples of its use and some advice on my first server project he said to me, "at this point all you should worry about is creating a dummy server and reversing the UCGO packets and documenting their variables and uses".

Then soon after that i began work on the server named "Titans-Server" in Visual Studio .NET 2003 coded in C++, my first steps into the world of server programming coming from a mostly game programming background was a hard transition at first but alas about a week into it i had a semi functioning info and login server.

This proved to be a hard task at the time because i was a newbie to net programming and Reverse Engineering, but with his help i quickly learned to reverse engineer packets and learn some great things about C++ from him after that we we're on our way to resurrecting UCGO.

There is alot more to the story which i may explain later but at this time this is the short version

Right now we're developing a new server built with the framework of Apache Mina and the powerful java programming language.
So far we've built the info, login, cms and game server they are mostly a W.I.P but this is beginning to look very professional especially with our clustering ideas.

We have zoned in, and can currently walk around in game, Mark our very young and talented team mate has been working on the multi-client system, this will enable the players to see other players in simple terms.
I had set a deadline and said by the end of february i'd have something to show our test team, if things keep going as well as they are and mark keeps churning out his high quality work we may make it, however in the event we dont, a test should follow early march, thanks for reading guys.

Oh, and about xenozephyr, the man who taught it all to me is the original dev for SWGEmu he made pre-cu possible via is superb reversing abilities, like i said everyone thank him because without his patience and eagerness to teach a somewhat capable mind of the asrt of mmo packet reversing and server emulation, we wouldnt be where we are today!

So if your reading this make sure you post a comment giving thanks to him, and i'll get him the link so he can see all of our gratitude towards his initial hard work!

thanks for reading!