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Star Wars Galaxies Emulator Test Server Hits Alpha
from the star-systems-through-slippery-fingers dept.
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CoffeeHedake continues "This all comes after much very bad press for SOE, after completely changing the game mechanics of Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. The game has had a rocky history, with nerfs and bugs abounding, but the latest 'NGE' or New Game Enhancement patches have led to the detrimental decline in player population. SWGEMU was formed with the hopes of allowing players to 'roll back' their experiences to a Pre-'Combat Upgrade' state of the game, months before the ill-fated NGE was implemented."
"The SWGEMU will allow private, emulated game servers to be run by anyone with the hardware and bandwidth to support the load, possibly allowing customized environments, and game mechanics, as well as a 'dungeon master' control of the server, possibly even over a LAN."
"News has spread, even throughout the Sony Online Entertainment forums of SWGEMU's latest success. No word from Sony, as of yet."
I'll give odds (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://evilempire.ath.cx/)
Re:I'll give odds (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://evilempire.ath.cx/)
One years salary is cheaper than a lawsuit, and does not set a precident the same way losing a lawsuit might.
Re:I'll give odds (Score:4, Insightful)
"Execute Order 66. Wipe them out. All of them."
Then again, considering how the SWG game has (de)volved over the past couple of years, maybe "Do Not Want" is the appropriate snarky one-liner to use here.
Sony could do the gaming world a lot of good if they laid the smackdown on the NGE (sucky thing in current release) and permitted the pre-CU (the "live beta" that got released for the first couple of years) codebase to be emulated. They've gone on record as saying they'll never revert to pre-CU gameplay, so why not put the pre-CU game engine to good use? With decent scripting, you could make a pretty good game out of that. The reason SWG sucked donkey cock wasn't really the fault of the engine, it was that SOE never grasped (and still doesn't understand) that Star Wars is a story, not a skin for an FPS.
How To Resolve Links! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~eldavojohn/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @03:26PM)
This is, of course, with the exception of the screenshots hosted by gamerspace [gamerspace.net] or the video [youtube.com] (which really just seems to be a transition of the stills). Note, I'm not sure if the YouTube video is the same as the one from the mirrors, I'm still downloading that.
I should also point out that the forums are tightly moderated as swgemu is not looking for trouble with legal issues regarding SOE. I think they've had tangles with them in the past and don't enjoy discussing it. I don't actively post on swgemu but am thrilled by the idea of what they are trying to create. The concern by SOE is not only stealing paying customers but also the fact that if this is open sourced, then anyone will be able to see the reverse engineering work which means a whole lot more attempts on hacking the servers.
Most importantly, there are no dates set whatsoever for this project. I am just sitting back and waiting for hopefully a chance to play a game I once knew and loved. A game that exists no more. Pre-CU SWG.
I guess it had such a huge client that most of the functionality had to be sitting on each client machine and the server required some interaction. Hopefully this reverse engineering provides a stable alternative. If you'd like to contribute, help them with the datapack [swgemu-datapack.com] done in a Wiki format! If you're interested in development for the team and know C/C++, check out this post [cprogramming.com].
Bets anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
same fate as bnetd? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://syn.cs.pdx.edu/~jsnow | Last Journal: Sunday July 11 2004, @08:36PM)
In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://religiousfreaks.com/)
Sony files lawsuit in 3..2..1..
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]That's great news! (Score:4, Funny)
(http://tpno-co.org/)
As Chris Rock said it best... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh dear god... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
And it's going to make it possible for Sony's legal team to achieve their "absuive lawsuit quotient" months ahead of schedule.
Seriously. It's like they're begging to be crushed. I can't think of a company with less sense of humor than Sony, and I really can't think of anyone who protects his IP better than Lucas. They're going to combine to form some sort of mega-legal-robo-proctologist, and they're not going to stop until they get to the back of the SWGEMU team's teeth.
I guess I'm happy and sad for them. They're like happy little lemmings.
Re:Oh dear god... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh dear God indeed - my mind's eye! That's an image I *really* didn't need!
Sick 'em Sony... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sick 'em Sony... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.nsrealm.com/)
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of you weeping over this, try http://www.eve-online.com/ [eve-online.com] Sure it's nothing like SWG, but it's a MMORPG that actually seems to give a damn about it's userbase and isn't catering to the largest $$ segment of the population.... Not that I'm bitter or anything! (Rest In Peace SWG.... Rest in Peace).
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
I think of all the talent and passionate hacking involved in an effort like this, and it breaks my heart to think that it'll probably get shut down by lawyers.
Let's Just Say The Obvious... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.creimer.ws/ | Last Journal: Friday January 26 2007, @12:40PM)
Unless Sony's legal department shows up with the police, then you may want to ditch the Emulator instead.
Re:Let's Just Say The Obvious... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.creimer.ws/ | Last Journal: Friday January 26 2007, @12:40PM)
Whats up with the random redirections? (Score:1)
(http://www.gizmo.com/)
Something is amiss
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
The Rebellion needs to hide the plans!!! (Score:3, Funny)
If Sony comes after them... (Score:5, Funny)
These aren't the emulated servers you're looking for.
Yoda says.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yoda says.. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://anomalyent.com/)
*this is not the post you're looking for*
it was a good game (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, seriously (Score:5, Funny)
IP already paid for?! (Score:4, Interesting)
This would be great.. (Score:1)
(http://www.dr-dyna.net/)
Seriously though, from a player's perspective.. is anybody going to get on this server and play, and build up a character, just to find out in a few months that the lawyers sent a nastygram to sombody and the servers get turned off? Or, are you going to end up with modded servers that just are not fun to play on because they are only hosted on some cable modem somewhere?
Meh, I dunno. If they can really hold 3000 people, thats great. If they can stave off Sony's lawyers for a few years, they may even be able to breathe life back into this game.
It took them this long because... (Score:4, Funny)
NGE IS HEAVEN compared to the prior state (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://www.webgeekworld.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 27 2006, @07:47AM)
Soe was MILKING the players by putting goals that is hard and far to reach constantly.
So that game was turned into a question of 'when, how, and where do i grind ?' - Nothing star wars.
The crowd that started the game in fall 2003 had already cancelled by then as the game had nothing star warsy left.
With nge, the "uber godmode" players, the powerplayers, Item sellers, sith wannabees (and they were a many of them) have lost their 'godly' status, as the grind was almost halted.
From what i understand, the poster of this article is just another biased powerplayer.
It is PLAIN stupid to come back from 8-hours long workday and KEEP ON WORKING IN A GAME THAT YOU PAY, instead of playing the 'feel' that you pay for.
Crap, in short. Star wars is way better now.
And that is Sony's entire problem (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday August 17, @05:34AM)
The only defence I got for my taste is that it was a unique game, the above poster could have simply moved to WoW and found the game he wanted. Or even Everquest 2.
As for the grind accusation, well that is partially true. If you wanted to be a jedi pre-nge you had an ungodly grind ahead of you.
For the longest time in SWG the way to unlock jedi was to master a number of random and unknown proffession to master. This lead to a lot of people grinding to jobs they didn't want. For instance you character might require you to master chef and commando and doctor. Not exactly a logical combination.
This unlock method did give the game something unique though. It had lots of experienced players in the end game giving up their high levels in job X and starting over in Y. This made for a very dynamic game with more people in mid level then you will find in other MMO's.
But they changed this and unlocking Jedi became a pure XP grind. You had to convert your various XP points into jedi XP points at a bad exchange rate. This meant a couple of things. First nobody grinding for jedi bothered with learning new jobs. Because of various game mechanics people just grinded the easiest proffesion to master and then grinded XP like mad. They needed a truly unholy amount of XP too. Far more in fact then you needed before to grind different proffesions. And while before you got to experience different types of playing you now had to grind XP in one job.
So before to unlock jedi you played a scout, then became a dancer and then went on to craft weapons for lets say two months. To unlock Jedi after the village was added you just grinded XP in a combat class for six months. Whoo!
Ah! but you don't need to grind a Jedi at all do you? Well no, and before the village if you avoided the jedi/holo grind you could have a really fun game playing the mixed job you wanted and if you wanted a change, well there were plenty of holo grinders around to make sure that the game was very welcome of job changers.
SWG was far more a sandbox game and the holo grind that a lot of people choose helped in that aspect by supplying the game with a load of mid level players. Imagine a WoW or EQ where 50% of the players are NOT at the top level. This would mean that you no longer need to race for the top. That it is the mid level game that is most important.
Sadly SOE never managed the game well, all the "special" stuff was very high level indeed. It ain't just SOE fault, I don't really know of any MMO that adds extra mid level content.
But the NGE changed all this. It is now far more like an EQ or WoW game in that you choose a proffesion and then just ride it to the top and sit there running the same high level content until a new expansion comes out wich adds a few levels.
Offcourse some people prefer it but they are not "right" they just got different tastes. My beef with them is that they already got plenty of games for them. Why did SWG have to become another run off the mill MMO like all the others.
Imagine if I said that America Football would be better if you couldn't touch the balls with your hands, except the goalie, and the goals should be smaller and the balls should be round. Would you not say to me, go play soccer?
SOE turned SWG into a WoW wannabe probably because they wanted the WoW subcriber numbers. That is understandable except that it didn't work and never could work. First of WoW is already WoW and trying to out WoWing WoW is as likely as say out Coca-Colaing Coca-Cola. There is a market for clones but if you really want to stand a chance you usually are better of making a product that is unique or at least offers a safe heaven for people who do not enti
Good time for Sony to make nice (Score:3, Funny)
Cease and desist is imminent... (Score:2)
This is your second chance people... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.terminalcore.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 06 2005, @10:52AM)
If you want anybody to be able to reverse-engineer things for compatibility purposes then you better speak up right now. Otherwise this will be smacked down as hard as BNETD was.
And BNETD wasn't even substituting for a pay-to-play service so you can imaging what Lucas The Hutt's lawyers will do on this one.
You thought Vivendi was bad...
Pre-CU SWG was the game with the potential (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://wcmi.myftp.org/)
In Pre-CU SWG, you could NEVER SPEND A MINUTE in combat and still be just as vital a part of the game community as a Jedi Master. It had a combat system and UI that was awesome, you spent time on strategy, not toolbar watching and button mashing. It had no levels, only skills.
The CU took the heart out but left the body mostly intact. It was a boring and slow combat engine and nerfed player power to the point of requiring a group to do mundane things like level grinding. Non combat roles got marginalized at that time as anti decay kits and uber loot rewards from the expansions replaced crafted items.
The NGE then destroyed the body, taking away the skill system completely and reducing 32 mix and match professions to 9 static ones. Jedi ceased to be a long term game aspiration and became selectable on startup. There ceased to be anything at all to work towards.
Throught ALL of this we have been screaming for classic servers, which would make the pre-Cu vets like me very happy. No, says SOE, play THIS or else.
Well, even John Smedley admitted on the SWG forums that SWG players have been voting with their feet and that subscriber numbers have been falling since the NGE. Their response has been to shove half assed versions of stuff taken away since NGE back into the game slowly but surely. Rumor has it after the latest combat revision (yes, they are STILL changing the combat system every 6 months) that subscriber levels dropped even more, and consequently, the lead developer recently posted about bringing back turn based combat with a target lock (like all other MMO's use).
So now we have the pre-Cu emulator. The time has come for SOE to either give us our game back, or else, we will take it out of their hands. The Emu project is about to go open source, and no matter what they do with lawyers, just like DeCSS they won't be able to stop it once that code is out there.
Ohh, No! Stupid, stupid, stupid! (Score:4, Interesting)
If only they had put their efforts into Planeshift [planeshift.it] to get it on with a viable open source alternative to WoW and GuildWars. But, no, they had to ripp a commercial product. Great. Wonderfull.
What a waste of brainpower.
How Quaint (Score:1)
(http://www.hormel.com/)
Wasted effort (Score:2)
(http://www.psychochild.org/)
Unfortunately, it's wasted effort. Consider that in this case the emulator writers are facing two companies not known for their patience in dealing with people violating their intellectual property: Lucas and Sony. It's only a matter of time before the lawyers come knocking.
I'm a small-scale online game developer myself, and I appreciate the work that goes into this type of effort. But, really, all that work would be better used if people would write their own games instead of trying to build emulators for existing games. Yes, it takes a bit more time and effort to write your own game, I will admit. But, we really need a wider variety of games out there. Coding a server is still a bit of deep magic. Anyone working on an emulator project would help the industry more by finding other developers able to fill in the missing pieces to make a full game. You don't have to work for years to make a WoW-killer; smaller games like Bang! Howdy [banghowdy.com] can be made on a relatively modest budget and schedule.
In the end, we see more opportunities for innovation if this happens. So, please, stop focusing on making emulators and start focusing on making new games. Or, at the very least, start an open source project to make basic technology. It'll help everyone more in the long run.
My thoughts,
UO (Score:1)
(http://camcosc.com/)
Too many jokes... (Score:1)
Brave people (Score:1)
Convoluted headline (Score:2)
George Lucas is Darth Vader (Score:1)
Response may vary. (Score:1)
Nice (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday January 05 2007, @12:57PM)
I'll let you stand there while I, Boba Vader, slaughter you with my red triple-bladed lightsaber!
If this works out.. (Score:1)
(http://wormbrain.com/)
100% Emulation? (Score:1)
Remember Bleem? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem! [wikipedia.org]
Bleem was basically sued out of existence even though I'm pretty sure they were in the right and no existing playstation code was used. The difference may be that Bleem was a commercial enterprise and this SWG emulation apparently is not. I guess that's a pretty big difference but I'm still surprised that they were allowed to get as far as they have.
The Banned and Dienfranchised await (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:One Big Problem (Score:1)
The most recent revamp last Nov. left professions gutted; collections of resources, items, and loot useless; leaving veteran players with little to hold on of the original game they once enjoyed.
The game has never been complete, but the orginal game was similar to a skeleton needing fleshing out, while the current game is a pile of broken bones from several different animals.
Re:history has proven (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:One Big Problem (Score:2)
My analogy would be buying a broken PS2 on eBay for the purpose of fixing it.
SWG post-CU post-NGE is a broken PS2 hit with a sledgehammer. You can try to put it back together, but it will be a serious pain in the ass and probably won't be worth the effort.
SWG pre-CU pre-NGE (aka SWGEMU) is just a broken PS2. Probably not too hard to fix, and in the right hands, could be made better than the original.
Okay, so maybe it's a bad analogy, but it's at least funny and kinda describes the situation.
Re:Great Interest by SWG folks (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday June 21 2004, @04:25PM)
Now that would be a bit of a paradox, wouldn't it? A Sony which cares about its customers and about what they want? (And for that matter a Raph Koster that cares about customers, instead of doing some more ego-masturbation along the lines of "I know what players find fun better than the players themselves"?) Now that's one mental exercise that's not for the uninitiated or faint of heart. It's a bit like trying to imagine a fish that can't breath water, or a really tall dwarf, or a triangle without three sides, or the sound of one hand clapping.
They probably ARE full of shit (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday June 21 2004, @04:25PM)
They probably _are_ full of shit. It's just some funky way of bragging that their game is too complex to be emulated. And, let's face it, bragging is half of what the SWG team is all about. They're too busy polishing their own statue to even fix the damn game. So whether they'll actually make a job offer or not is pretty much irrelevant there. The main point was just to brag.
Mind you, with something like this on one's CV, one can probably get hired anywhere anyway. So it's not like SOE is their only option, or like that dev was saying anything we didn't already know.
I can see SOE trying to hire them just to give them a non-compete aggreement that makes them stop working on the emu, though... Then again, nah, that wouldn't be Sony. They'll just try to sue them into oblivion.
And finally, even if they did get a job at SOE, don't set your hopes too high. It's not like some netcode programmer will be allowed to give much input in game design issues, especially issues that would require getting past some continent-sized egos there. I just can't see it going too well, trying to tell them that you know better then them how to design a game that player would like.
I don't know... I've never worked for them, so I can't say first hand, but seeing the kind of half-arsed run-of-the-mill stuff they churn as content, SOE doesn't strike me as the kind of company that values personal creativity and vision. (And if you read some Penny Arcade rants about EQ2, they seem to be left with the same impression, albeit in their case about the artwork.) Their games are chock-full of such mass-produced illogical crap as getting bone by chopping wood (EQ2), killing deers and bears to find which of them stole a manuscript (EQ2), a sniper scope for a sword (SWG), and other stuff that just makes you wonder. I just can't see someone implementing that kind of idiocy unless they're (A) completely retarded, or (B) just a jaded cog in a corporate machine, that gave up long ago on trying to make sense or to "rock the boat". And it's probably not A.
I mean, seriously, everywhere else you'd get the scripter implementing that coming to the designer and saying "excuse me? did I get this right? I'm supposed to code a quest that has a sniper scope for a _sword_ as a reward? And how? We don't even have the code to attach anything to any weapon." That they went and just coded it half-arsedly as a strength potion that just looks like a sniper scope, makes me really think about it. It's the kind of half-arsed job that people usually do when they're just jaded about their work, and gave up on trying to be anything other than a brainless slave to the wage. It's the kind of half-arsed job you do when you realized long ago that noone gives a damn about your input, thinking isn't rewarded, and you just want to get it over with and set that task as "completed", go home and forget about it all.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
(http://www.pagewash.com/)
After the first month or so of playing CU I got used to it and even began to enjoy it again, however the game had been dumbed down and was not as much fun as a result. Queue the NGE (Next Great Experiment) where the game was turned into a piss-poor ripoff of WoW with some extremely poor pointy-clicky combat style that is neither FPS or traditional MMO. In fact the NGE could quite possibly be referred to as the worst abomination of a game the industry has yet to produce. Pong offered more depth. I gave the NGE the best chance I could -- 2 months -- and then cancelled both accounts (1 with a jedi).
I wholly welcome the chance to play the game that I loved again. I have been playing WoW since about January and while I find it enjoyable, there is not near the depth of the world or the quality of player interaction that was prevalent in the original SWG. I know many people still in SWG who would love the chance to start fresh on a new (old) server. No one, even the hardcore and most devoted players I know, think that the NGE is an improvement. Supposedly it is "playable" now but populations are all but extinct and there is no end-game (pvp is about it -- no challenging instances etc...). Don't even get me started on crafting. SWG had probably the most intricate crafting system of any game, bar none. It was rendered useless and all but removed from the game as a result of the NGE. From what I understand, that problem has still not been addressed. Promises have been made on the forum since December with no significant fixes taking place.
Where SOE should have taken a queue from WoW is in content. I have rarely seen bugged quests in WoW and there are quests for all levels. Sony always wanted to charge for more content. All that was really in the game was "grinding" missions for money so that you could get your skills/levels and then pvp. There were a few dungeons, but nothing was instanced up until the Mustafar expansion and almost everything in the game can be soloed.
I believe having some pre-CU servers would generate content on their own -- interested parties are going to create new maps and dungeons. I am not sure what the game mechanics involved in creating instances are, but I assume that could also be addressed. Regardless, the game had a solid foundation software wise (yes there were some balance issues, but isnt there always in an MMO?). No the game was not perfect, but it was a lot of fun and maybe I am being sentimental but I would certainly welcome the old game back, especially if it was out of the controlling grip of SOE (who I will not do business with until they shape up).