Spirited

Generally, there's not much to it - but it includes some more advanced programming topics. So you should probably study up a bit on threading, asynchronous patterns, and network sockets. But once you're comfortable, you'd just start with your socket system, then add cryptography to decrypt requests and encrypt responses, then add a database for persistence, and then you just handle one message type at time as the client requests it. It's honestly a bit of a pain to set up, but you can absolutely do it. I'm working on a new wiki right now, but I'd suggest looking at other sources around the patch you want to target. If you want a reference for how I built Comet (a skeleton project that just implements login for a bunch of patches), then you can check that out here: https://gitlab.com/spirited/comet. My full history of commits should be there on the main branch. Best of luck to you.

Oh, this one? https://mega.nz/file/EdBVEA6K#BabczA8VmbnU-iMJQ97sOSwMxcipiFTE38hIt4njQ2c

Thank you very much for this explanation! It worked to upload the server and test perfectly. Awesome! Congrats, and I hope you enjoy running your server.

Ah, if you're using that source, then you need to use the provided launcher in the project. It's because that version of Conquer Online uses SRP6. Back then, that wasn't public knowledge or a public implementation, so the launcher included in CSV3 bypasses SRP6 and reimplements RC5 (the previous password encryption).

Are you using a clean client? If not, then I'd try that first.

Nice. I remember when Windows Blinds used to be a thing and everyone had a customized Windows XP desktop to make it look like glass. Lol

I'm not super knowledgeable when it comes to client stuff, nor have I tried doing rotations in Conquer Online (so super out of my element), but isn't a tile in Conquer Online 16 pixels tall and 32 pixels across?

So, if we say Konichu is chasing you, then this can happen when you spawn Konichu outside of your client's screen distance with MsgPlayer. That could be a race condition where Konichu's spawn is sent to your client before it's received a response from your own jump (the client isn't updated, but the screen on the game server is). It can also happen if you're simply trying to spawn a player outside of screen distance (but I'm guessing you've triple checked those by now). For the race condition issue, I'd recommend looking at how you're processing movement overall and how you're sending responses. Movement should generally be single-threaded per map / map bubble (most actions should be in my opinion), and the next movement shouldn't be processed until the messages for the spawns and movement response are in queue to be sent back to the client. Since messages queued and encrypted are in order, that'll ensure that the spawns and movement response messages are processed first before any follow up movements based on that server state. Make sure you have MsgAction type 102 (or whatever QUERY_PLAYER is) implemented on your server, too. That'll at least let you heal when these occurrences happen (if you can't fix it right now). Best of luck with this.

Hey all! I had to remove the PayPal donation amount from the donation page... the plugin didn't work as expected and is listing some random value. Sorry for the lack of visibility. We're currently at $15 in donations from PayPal and $50 from GoFundMe. Thanks for your contributions, and I'll be sure to keep y'all updated regularly. I'll be very happy to get away from phpBB.

Hey all! I got word that GoFundMe is unavailable in certain countries, so I added support for PayPal. If you'd like to give it a try, then you'll get access to a new Donors group. It doesn't currently add anything besides the status on your posts, but I hope the addition of PayPal helps include those in countries such as China and Egypt. I'll close the GoFundMe once the sum of the two donation pools meets our goal. You can donate and check how much we've raised via PayPal here. Thanks so much for your feedback!

Welcome to the board, and thanks for posting feedback here. Yeah, I think my stance on AI has gotten more closed / strict. I'm mostly against how the AI models are trained using the hard work of creatives across the internet without permission or compensation. Until that improves, then my stance doesn't change. But I do hope that this leads to more evolution in the private server space. Like people considering voice acting for some crucial NPCs. Or different applications of machine learning. That'd be cool. It's nice to see servers like this one experimenting a bit.

Also, I wanted to talk a little about my plans once we get the license... I'd like to make Cooldown more game preservation focused: Conquer Online, Era of Faith, and other TQ games would be under a new "Game Preservation" section. We'd still have our independent section for Indie development, but that'd be a secondary focus. A Downloads plugin with IPS will let us host mods for Conquer Online and other games, and let it all be easily browsable. Clubs would allow groups of developers to share code and more using their own private forums. Blogs would let members write about their project development / showcase their work. Eventually, I'd like to add a plugin for showing private servers that are online, what their online status is, and how many discord members their discord has. On top of that, having a more modern forum and theme would be very nice additions to the usability and management of the forums. I can't do this alone though, so if you have the ability to donate, I would greatly appreciate that. Using non-pirated software is a must for this type of forum and the longevity of it, and I want to continue doing this forum and its members right. Thanks for reading.

Just so I understand, is the effect completely client sided? Or are you sending a packet / message from the server to display this when they spawn in? Is it a status on the character, or an effect you manually send?

Hey all, I'm really happy with how much we've grown over the past few months. The metrics only continue to go up. And while our little community has continued to grow and gain small popularity with the community using the board we have, we encounter lots of small hiccups with our current board software: Pages not loading correctly despite there being no issues from the host Poor support for member customizations and projects (blogs, clubs, etc) Poor support for downloadable content (which would be great for hosting client mods and themes) Poor support for SEO (a huge issue if we want to continue growing) Poor plugin integration (plugins conflict and don't play nicely with each other) In my own testing, Invision Community (referred to as IPS) fixes all of the issues mentioned above. IPS is a paid board solution that offers lots of tooling and plugins for growing our community. It also offers conversions tools that work with our board so we can keep our memberships, topics, sections, and more. We had this board software before when the board was operated by Michael, but it was nulled. I believe it's in our best interest to purchase the software license for it rather than risking hosting using a pirated copy. The cost of the solution is $499, which I can contribute $100 towards for getting us started. I'm asking for help from the community to crowd fund our forever license to use IPS for Cooldown. After the funds are released to me, I'll purchase the license and begin work. The forum may not be upgraded for a month or two while I prepare the upgrade, but I intend to perform the upgrade as soon as possible after the purchase is made to alleviate peoples' frustrations with the current board. Thanks for your time and interest, and I hope you consider contributing (even if it's only a small amount). Link: https://gofund.me/3263ccca

Just for context, is this an effect you're importing from a higher version of the client? And which message / packet are you using to send this right now? There're a few message types for sending effects, so it could be we just need to switch out the message type you're using.

Well, there's a thread for that too. Hehe

when I read this "There're a lot of ways custom dialogs can be made". Do you know one way on how to do it or place where I can start learning it? I'm not really someone who can best answer that. I've seen ImGUI used a lot recently... and that's probably the approach I would take.

Thanks! Is there a thread post somewhere related to steps to do when upgrading a source? I am thinking, if you're updating a client, there has to be changed in the source as well. Yeah, a lot can change depending on the patches you're trying to upgrade a source between. I wouldn't imagine there'd be any guides since sources are all different and patches are all different. Which patches are you going between?

Yeah, I have a full mirror of patches here:

Hmm, I'm not sure if you're going to find anyone supporting Paradise Conquer based servers. It's not a clean source people want to support. Did the project include the launcher's source code? If it did, then I'd try looking through that and see if there're any examples you can learn from. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine. There're a lot of ways custom dialogs can be made, and if you want to use the existing custom dialogs system in your server project, then you'll have to do some more research on your own. Maybe there's someone out there who can help, but idk anyone personally.

Artificial intelligence isn't a replacement for real intelligence and talent. It can only do so much using guesses at what problems are solved by Stack Overflow. It's no more helpful than Googling, and may be worse since it only gives you a single opinion without source references. I strongly advise against the use of AI in Conquer Online server development. It has no idea what Conquer's internal data structures or messages are, nor the contents and meaning of your own source / this project. A "prompt engineer" is not an actual engineer. With that said, a reminder to the community when working with these LUA scripts: they are from a binary leak from TQ, and distributing them is not allowed here. You're welcome to talk about them here, just don't distribute them. Thanks!

Hm, weird. You don't get a MsgConnect on the game server side, but you get the connect event? What language is the client you're using?

I don't really have a comment about this.

I mean, I'm personally in favor of making things more accessible rather than obfuscated. There's no stopping scammers in any private server community; Conquer Online isn't an exception to that. But making things more accessible also means an easier entry point for those who aren't as well versed in C#. On that note though, just due to the complexity of Conquer Online and the state of projects as a whole, there's really no getting around needing to know C# right now. Saying that's a requirement is sorta gonna get you a "well, duh" response from most people. Maybe that can change sometime in the future (like Comet was going to be dockerized with a dashboard / installation web project for setting it up easily), but that's just the state of things for now.

I'm actually really happy seeing this project. Not a lot of projects get forked and improved in the Conquer Online community while also remaining open-source and active. This is one of the only examples I've seen. It's really cool to see Dragon also getting used for the launcher. You can always contribute back to his project via pull requests if you want to see those things. Fang is my old name, btw. I changed it to Spirited a long time ago, but it still gets referenced here and there. This is the original project Canyon was forked from: https://gitlab.com/spirited/comet