The Al`kabor Project (EQMac) - PoP 1/5

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Lenas

Trump's Staff
7,454
2,206
This server is meant to be a complete recreation of EQMac (Al`kabor server), and supports both a PC client and of course the official Intel Mac client. This is the only EQ Emu that is platform agnostic (someone even has it working in Linux).

Everything You Need to Start

Wiki
Boards
Account Creation (Board Acct. Required)
Server Progress Tracker


What's this about?

This project started in or around 2010 as a PEQ project where developers from PEQ would log on the OSX server known as Al'Kabor, using a ppc client to record pathing, quests, and the likes for the zones that did not exist on the PC version of Everquest. In the spring of 2012, SOE announced the closures of many of their games including The Al'Kabor Server and Everquest Online Adventure. A hacked PC Client was used by other developers in EQEmu community and it was unknown by the players at that time. It was quickly leaked to the public assuming the server would be shutting down for good. At that time, a couple of PEQ developers along with a couple of others in the eqemu community wanted to find ways to preserve the server as it is since it was the only unique "Classic" server. The Server sunset was postponed due to players plea to keep it alive for another year before it shut down for good. It also gave us a chance to develop tools to collect and to find a proper codebase which then became a PEQMac Project. We decided to make it a project apart from the PEQ project to avoid confusion. So we decided to call it The Al`Kabor Project since it is more universal with using a pc client as well as the mac client.

Goals:

Our goal is to make it as close as it was on the official Al`Kabor Server with bug fixes as well that never made it to the Al'Kabor server. With the eqmac community help and all, we believe that goal can be achieved.

The Al`Kabor Project Team.

Please sign up and help out, the project needs a bigger population to help test out higher level content, find bugs, compete quests, etc.
 
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pointyboot

Bronze Knight of the Realm
167
3
I've been wondering what has happened since data collection.

It seems that the "pcmule" (I'm guessing this is Secrets' hack) client would be required. That is a massive bummer. Any chance on Titanium? Please? I'm begging you, please don't make us use the hacked PC client, jesus fucking christ.

At this point it's hard to imagine there's much retention of mac players. I know PEQ absorbed a very small amount and my money is on most of those not even playing anymore. Many, including myself, REALLY want a legit POP server akin to P99 and this is the best chance I've seen so far. PEQ, while being pretty cool, unfortunately is not very welcoming of players who aren't interested in boxing.

Sorry for the pessimism. The P99 model is proven and there is a gaping hole where a PoP version should be.
 

Secrets

ResetEra Staff Member
1,860
1,856
I've been wondering what has happened since data collection.

It seems that the "pcmule" (I'm guessing this is Secrets' hack) client would be required. That is a massive bummer. Any chance on Titanium? Please? I'm begging you, please don't make us use the hacked PC client, jesus fucking christ.

At this point it's hard to imagine there's much retention of mac players. I know PEQ absorbed a very small amount and my money is on most of those not even playing anymore. Many, including myself, REALLY want a legit POP server akin to P99 and this is the best chance I've seen so far. PEQ, while being pretty cool, unfortunately is not very welcoming of players who aren't interested in boxing.

Sorry for the pessimism. The P99 model is proven and there is a gaping hole where a PoP version should be.
EQMule's client is required. I'm beginning to agree though; Titanium is more readily available and I don't see why it shouldn't be supported instead of or alongside the native Mac client.

The other option is we use the Gates of Discord client, or the EQ Evolution client. Either one would be a better option than the crashhappy clusterfuck that is the EQMac windows client.

Maybe I can get Haynar to fix position updates for the older/newer client translations. I doubt he'd be interested but worth a shot.

Or Hobart could release his Windows client with a pdb. I'd accept that too.
 

Muligan

Trakanon Raider
3,209
890
Really interested in this... I still have my EQMac Client on my Macbook. What do I need to do to help out?

Also, anyone seen or spoken to Hobart in a while? He always seemed like a cool guy willing to help out.
 

Torrid

Molten Core Raider
925
611
Are the zone crashes and run speed issues happening in the later clients? If those can't be resolved we may be forced into a newer client anyway. Hell we'd conserve bandwidth from a client that didn't send duplicate packets I would imagine.

I was kind of hoping p99 wouldn't mind sharing some of their client and security hacks; those would make using Titanium much easier to swallow.
 

Secrets

ResetEra Staff Member
1,860
1,856
Are the zone crashes and run speed issues happening in the later clients? If those can't be resolved we may be forced into a newer client anyway. Hell we'd conserve bandwidth from a client that didn't send duplicate packets I would imagine.

I was kind of hoping p99 wouldn't mind sharing some of their client and security hacks; those would make using Titanium much easier to swallow.
'Hacks' on titanium are far less worse than everyone makes them out to be.

Stuff like item dupes, one-hit-kill hacks, etc, are really non-existant on EQEmulator. The only big things are warping (which is logged for giant/short hop warps) and moving rapidly through zones (which is negated again by distance logging based on the location of zone points). Beyond that, there's stuff like no falling damage (If you take falling damage in this day and age and consider that an advantage, well...) and infinite breath (Kedge/The Grey only really zones you benefit from with this, and they can actually be scripted to require EB on the server if it came down to it.). And when there are major hacks, most of the transactions are logged (see: QueryServ project that Akkadius is working on) and the issue is easily reverted with a single database query.

Beyond that... the only things you would want from P99 are the pathing fixes (Haynar has done a lot of work on them) and really EQEmulator's pathing system isn't that bad, just no pathing nodes are made at the moment for a majority of zones.

As for zone crashes... yes, but not to the extent they are happening on TAKproject. Runspeed, no, those issues aren't happening.
 

Torrid

Molten Core Raider
925
611
To clarify, what I meant by p99's hacks are the things like removing target rings, changing con colors, removing maps, and the like. i.e. making it more classic. Also their client monitoring.
 

Deruvian

Lord Nagafen Raider
637
114
Are Speedz and Robregan the only two developers that are actually working on this project? It seems as if they've overlaid data which was mined from AK on top of the base PEQ code set, but with the server being untethered from the rest of EQEMU, I assume due to the project's use of the new client. If the concept is basically to turn an Emu server into Al'Kabor, I would assume the number of minor fixes to mechanics and whatnot to get the game working correctly through even Velious must be in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Although I appreciate the concept, it has taken the guys on P99 a number of years to even get the game to be mostly correct through Kunark, disregarding the whole Mac/new client aspect. Without some secret sauce that I'm missing here, this project seems like an exceptionally tall task for two guys.
 

Torrid

Molten Core Raider
925
611
The team size is small, but there are others. Rob and Speedz are the most visible because of the work they do. (and they do put in some of the most time)

I'm sort of a jr. member and most of the work I'm doing isn't really specific to this project as much as it is preserving the classic game in publicly available spreadsheets, videos, logs etc; and I sort of 'reverse engineer' the game mechanics to ensure accuracy. I just deciphered the resist algorithm for example. Since it's the same now as it was in PoP, it can be applied to both the EQEmu and TAKP codebases.
 

Rogean_sl

shitlord
9
0
To clarify, what I meant by p99's hacks are the things like removing target rings, changing con colors, removing maps, and the like. i.e. making it more classic. Also their client monitoring.
I contacted Secrets to see what client they are running so that we could code our DLL to work on both servers. However, they are running the same windows client that was hacked to work on EQMac, and not the Titanium client, so it wouldn't be compatible.
 

Lenas

Trump's Staff
7,454
2,206
Theoretically, what would it take to make the Titanium client compatible with EQMac? Is it even possible?
 

Secrets

ResetEra Staff Member
1,860
1,856
Theoretically, what would it take to make the Titanium client compatible with EQMac? Is it even possible?
Long story short, it would be possible, and I actually had it working for a bit before the team decided to scrap it because of how translations between the two clients worked for position updates.

Possible? Yes, but a lot of dev work would be needed to make it crash-free.

There's also the option of invalidating the older client and making it titanium-only to begin with. That's up to the PEQMac team as a collective, and not any single individual.
 

Deruvian

Lord Nagafen Raider
637
114
Tried to get on the website today and it seems to be down. Is this project still operational?
 

Lenas

Trump's Staff
7,454
2,206
The website and server are both up, last server reboot was 12 hours ago, soooo your ISP might just suck.
 

piggvomit_sl

shitlord
91
3
Really looking forward to this- Maybe a P99 alternate since the economy is shit there. Hopefully we continue to get updates on a launch or beta....
 

Frenzic

Lord Nagafen Raider
884
61
Really looking forward to this- Maybe a P99 alternate since the economy is shit there. Hopefully we continue to get updates on a launch or beta....
Yea I havent heard anything for a while, but I'm absolutely looking forward to this. I like secrets and the work he's done in the past so I have high hopes. Anything is better than P99 and their corrupt staff.
 

Frenzic

Lord Nagafen Raider
884
61
I made an account but have no clue how to get the client. I'm on PC and never played on the official mac server so I don't have the cracked files. Anyone know how to get them?