Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) Project?

[bertybassett]

Hi Guys

Admit it, you knew this topic was going to appear sooner or later

As development of the WoW flavour of mangos has slowed (and by that I mean a release to the latest clients), are there any developers interested in working with SWTOR?

Or has work already begun? If so, please could you direct me to that.

I've always regretted not learning how to develop Mangos for WoW and I think there a few people like me.

I think a SWTOR project would attract new programmers and may re-invigorate older ones.

If development started on SWTOR I'd really like to get involved.

Hope this was the correct area of the forum to ask this question.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

[manofwar95]

The development hasn't slowed, everyone is just taking a break. But yes I agree a SWTOR project would be cool but there isn't enough game data floating around to even get one started.

[Patman128]

From what I know about WoW and mangos, and what I know from Star Wars, I don't think it could ever happen, at least with any semblance to the game as it is now. Just to get robust features like vmaps and mmaps took years because no one had the expertise or the knowledge to develop them. To do what the Hero Engine and Bioware developers have done would take a ton of effort, and if it was going to happen, I couldn't see it happening in a mangos-style project. It would have to be very organized, and there would have to be very experienced developers involved in it.

But if you really want to do it, here's the steps that would have to happen (ideally):

1. Reverse engineering of the game's packets and data files.

2. Mass gathering of game data. (Whether any is cached and the extent of that, I have no idea; the extent of this dictates the ease of gathering and the reliability of the data)

3. Discussion and exploration of game behaviours. (This would be "How does feature X work?" "What is the formula to calculate Y?" "How does data Z affect the game's state?".)

4. Planning and implementation of a server that fulfills all behaviours of 3 and serves all data from 1 and 2. (Please note that development of the actual software is the last step in the process.)

My final advice to you: before you even write a single line of code, figure out/document/gather 95% of the game (at least). The mangos project is the result of "code now; think later" philosophy, and it's still lacking in tons of data and features. I'm trying to work on 1.12 stuff that should have been documented and debated years ago with only pictures as evidence (if I'm lucky) because the real servers don't exist any more. Please don't make the same mistake twice.

("You" in this post is anyone who wants to write a SWTOR-compatible server.)

Also thought that I would add that I think that, should it succeed, it would be pretty amazing, but again it has to be done properly from the beginning or you're going to waste a ton of time and effort. Moving towards the goal of having a working TOR server is fine; worrying about attracting developers at the start is doing it wrong. What you need is people who want to research, discover, and explore; code writing should not part of the equation at this time.

[bertybassett]

Thanks to you both for your replies.

I'm afraid I'm too much of a novice to gather, plan and architect a system on that scale.

I understand now why the prospect of a project like this is unlikely.

I still want to educate myself in MMO development - so I hope to look deeper into Mangos when I get more time.

[Patman128]

I'm afraid I'm too much of a novice to gather, plan and architect a system on that scale.

I understand now why the prospect of a project like this is unlikely.

Unlikely to you perhaps, at least now. Don't think that you never will though; I know if it had occurred to me before I started with mangos years ago I would have been terrified as well. Even doing WoW probably would have terrified me. But I firmly believe that anyone can learn anything given enough time and enough practice, and that doing this isn't O(n^3) (which is to say, too much time for anything large to be practical).

Certainly you should look deeper into mangos. I'm going to be doing (with near certainty) a full scale documentation of 1.12 WoW that will be put together with community help. If you'd like, I can let you know when things start moving, publicly.

[Patman128]

Just thought this was worth a response.

But yes I agree a SWTOR project would be cool but there isn't enough game data floating around to even get one started.

Well that's certainly not true. All data that could possibly be needed to put together a SWTOR server is floating around; it's being served right from BW's server's! It's just a matter of gathering it and studying it. But AFAIK there's no one doing that ATM.