PseuWoW

[wolverine]

Hello, everyone. I'm trying to follow the suggestions of Unkle Nuke and a few other people on here. My heart lies in the .NET field versus the C++ field. I want to learn C++, but am still more of a .NET fellow. Either way, I'm thinking about picking up the old PseuWoW project where they left off 4 years ago.

Yes, I just went through their repo on sourceforge and github and as for the official repo on sourceforge, there has been no marked progress since 2010. I was thinking that it would make the perfect official MaNGOS Client.

My biggest problem with PseuWoW so far has been the fact that I have succesfully built it several times, according to visual studio. However, when I go to run it, it gives me a hard time about not being able to find the config files and then it crashes out. It gives me a hard time about the config files even if they are in the same directory as the exe. So, in regards to that, I was in hopes that someone might have been able to make PseuWoW work for them under windows and could explain to me how to get it working. Once I can see it in action, I can start converting it and making it into an official MaNGOS Client.

[Unkle Nuke]

When you built the client, did you rename the config files as directed in the Readme?

PseuWoW never made it much beyond the point of logging in to the realm and wandering around the maps. It's most popular use was as an in-game chat client. As I recall, PseuWoW is supposed to work with MaNGOS Zero, One, and Two, but our continued work and changes to the build system may have outdated his code. shlainn never got around to adding later client/server versions.

shlainn's Github repo shows a steady flow of commits throughout 2011-12, mostly minor updates. You can clone from his repo for the latest official code: http://github.com/shlainn/pseuwow

You may be better off using PseuWow as a rough guide while taking the client source from something like Ryzom Core as your base.

However, it's your idea so you're the boss!

[wolverine]

I thank you very much, Unkle Nuke.

I will look into Ryzom Core. I think that I tried Ryzom once as a client and couldn't get anywhere with it.

Right now, I am installing Ubuntu 14 onto a virtual machine so that I can work with MONO as well as VS. Unfortunately, VirtualBox is being very resource heavy for some reason so I am experiencing everything from hardware lag to software lag.

Anyway, Ryzom Core for base.

What I am thinking is actually hardcoding the client, of course, and then adding in a few things like possibly an external chat system mode, a mail mode and then adding in a very nice Admin mode that would allow you to either log into the remote system or the game itself and give you a nice interface that you can use to do all your GM stuff with. But most of that is still down the road a ways.

Again, thank you for your input, Unkle Nuke.

[wolverine]

Ugh! I got Ubuntu 14 into a VM and there's no apt package for MONO, so I have to compile it myself and forgot that part of the make process required sudo access, so I have to reinstall.

Oh well. At least once it is done I'll be able to double-check *nix compatibility on my own.

BTW, does anybody run BSD of any sort? It would be kinda interesting to see how much of our work here is BSD compliant/compatible. I tired getting OpenBSD to work for me, but couldn't even get it to install. It said I had the wrong CD in the drive, but there was only one.

[Unkle Nuke]

My apologies, Wolverine. I made the assumption you were picking up where FalseGenesis and then shlainn had left off with creating a full open source clone of WoW.

Rather, it seems your idea is more along the lines of creating a "GM client" like those they use at Blizzard. In that case, my suggesting Ryzom core may not matter so much, unless you're building a playable GM client. Honestly, I like your idea of a full-featured swiss-army knife admin console. It's certainly an original idea. I don't believe anyone else has seriously tried it. If you like, have a look at Bannor's MangoLin. He's come as close as anyone to having an all-in-one admin/GM utility that's a stand-alone application. A lot of good ideas went into it and I much prefer MangoLin over all the PHP/webadmin tools. It's also an enormous pain to set up Apache and PHP just for administrating your private server.

Will it be a terminal-style application or will there be a full GUI which puts all that admin/GM power just a mouse-click away? For example: Would you use Lua and some of the WoWAce libraries so addons can be scripted to customize it? The possibilities of what you've suggested are exciting, indeed! :cool:

I knew you'd find something! Can't keep a smart brain like yours shackled for long.

I feel your pain with that CD detection error when installing OpenBSD. I encountered similar issues with an older release of Linux Mint Debian. (Yes, I do distinguish between BSD and Linux, there being a significant separation between a true Unix and something that is only "POSIX compliant". ) You may want to look at MirOS. It's been receiving a lot of attention from the BSD community lately (not sure if it is due only to Mir being unaffected by Heartbleed). It is synchronized with OpenBSD development, but has a completely new bootloader and package manager you may like better. FuguIta is OpenBSD on a LiveCD. Perhaps you can use that to solve your installation trouble. If you're one who is a fan of the BSD 4.x branch, then DragonFly may be what you want.

A word of caution: Aside from Heartbleed, a new vulnerability was just found in FreeBSD, where the memory space for reordering packets can be corrupted. Someone forgot to place a check for when the TCP stack allocated to unordered packets fills up. They have instructions on the FreeBSD site for manually patching the flaw until someone releases a package to fix it.

As for BSD support of MaNGOS, I think it's a given you'd be the only Dev for that platform. Right now, we're lucky to have any Linux Devs, let alone Unix and others. It's going to take a long time to rebuild the team, but you can look upon this as the chance to establish yourself as the Lead Dev for just about any of our POSIX platforms. Some people might see doom-and-gloom, but the reality is there are also a lot of opportunities that were locked out or claimed by others in the glory days. There are now open to us new directions which are only limited by imagination and commitment.

[wolverine]

Well, right now, I can answer one of your questions very easily. Feast your eyes upon this:

This is version 0.0.1 of the new launcher I am working on for MaNGOS Client. As you can see, I am seriously considering GUI and being able to not only play the game but being able to manage it all from one program. I'm planning to write a check after I figure out how to access the database through my program which will check to see what level your account is. 0, 1, 2 or 3. That will be how the program determines whether you should be issuing GM commands or not.

As for BSD, it would definitely be interesting to start that up. I have Ubuntu in a VM right now and am still not overtly thrilled with Linux. I haven't been interested in Linux since '96.

As for BSD, if anyone knows how to set that up, any and all input would be greatly appreciated. Not to mention, a brave soul who might be interested in helping me out with MONO testing of my client on Linux would be appreciated as well.

Also, in regards to Dragonfly, I just went and looked at the screenshot. It's pretty sweet looking. Hopefully it runs fairly well under a VM. Otherwise I might have to break out my server and reformat it for BSD.

Stupid Virtualbox. It gives all the right network adapters, it even get DHCP support when I'm installing. But when I boot off the HD, it drops the network support and says that it cannot establish a connection. Doesn't matter which network device I pick in the installer, it inevitably fails on the installed OS.

[Unkle Nuke]

VirtualBox has a problematic history with losing network connectivity. It seems to affect BSD and Windows more than Linux, probably because those two OSes implement sockets differently than Linux, the native platform for VirtualBox.

It's been a while since I last played with it, but I recall the problem has something to do with the connections timing out. Try setting up script to send a ping at a set interval to keep the connection alive. You'll have to experiment a bit to find the right value for how often you ping, but 10 seconds is a good starting point since I vaguely recall the timeout occurs around 20 seconds.

[wolverine]

Thanks, Unkle Nuke. Something you said got me to thinking. I switched to VMWare Player and everything is working the way it should now.

[wolverine]

My apologies if I have managed to get anyone excited about a client specifically for the MaNGOS system, but with the support of Unkle Nuke, I have decided to go in an entirely difference direction. I'm going to be working on porting M2 to BSD and then integrating that into the git release of M2.

Once I make some headway, I'll be making a new git repo for M2BSD and then people can start checking it out as they choose.

BTW, programming in C++ in *NIX I have done. Many times. But I will have to branch my knowledge out a bit as well. I know how to run CMake and Make, but have never written for either of those programs. Most of my custom work has been manually linked through CC or GCC. So this is new territory indeed.

Thanks again for the support, Unkle Nuke.