Greetings 👋 I'm Tim

[tim]

Conquer Online Journey:

I first played Conquer Online around 2005, exploring platforms until about 2011(ish). While I work in web development, the allure of Conquer Online's coding realm has always intrigued me. Not sure if this is okay for here - but looking back, I still remember the first time I saw botting in action. It caught my attention, and I couldn't help but think, "This is awesome." That moment sparked my interest in conquer online programming.

Programming Skills:

My expertise lies mainly in web development, specifically in JavaScript. However, the world of CO2 development has been a long-standing curiosity I've yet to fully explore. I'm eager to dive into C# to contribute more effectively to this community.

Learning Philosophy:

I find joy in collaborative learning. There's something special about growing and discovering alongside others. I'm here to absorb knowledge from this community and contribute to the collective learning experience.

Excited to be a part of this community and looking forward to learning and growing together!

Im working on a MacOS so I'm not sure how even feasible this whole idea of Conquer programming is with that setup.

Do we have some form of Discord channel that where we can have quicker conversations and set up ideas/working?

Cheers,

Tim

[Spirited]

Welcome Tim! I know CptSky does all of his development work on a mac. You could probably run some of his projects in Qt, if you'd like. I know the newer versions of dotnet also work on mac (same with Visual Studio Code). Idk if there's a good discord for talking through that sorta stuff, but I'd say your best bet is probably COPSv7 (C++ Qt) if you wanna mess around with servers. Best of luck, and feel free to create threads for any questions you might have!

[CptSky]

Welcome! As Spirited pointed out, I’ve been on a Mac since 2009, so most of my work has been done on one.

For running the client, you’ll need a VM. I’ve tried running CO on Crossover (I.e. Wine under the hood), and there are too many graphical glitches. Mainly, how the UI elements are positioned (with the GUI.ini file) is wrong and you’d need to update it. Never considered worth it for me. The official Mac client was ported really late to 64 bits, so except if you work on really recent patches, it isn’t compatible with supported macOS versions.

For coding, before .NET Core, I mostly used Visual Studio in the same Windows VM used for the client. I’ve had success porting my own sources (specifically COPS v6) to be able to run it on Linux/macOS using Mono. Most public sources won’t run as they do DllImport to call native libraries.

To develop directly on macOS, for .NET, I’m using Visual Studio for Mac (previously Xamarin Studio). It works up to .NET 8 and works great in my opinion. Sadly, it is now dropped by Microsoft. The new .NET plugin in VS Code is now the encouraged way to develop on macOS, but I still find that some features are missing so for now I’m sticking to VS for Mac. They are what I’d recommend to you.

P.S. For C++, I’ve used QtCreator, which is quite nice. But you won’t find much resources outside of my few C++ releases for CO2 in that language.

[tim]

Hi CptSky,

Thanks for your input on my post! I've managed to get a Windows machine for now, and I'm thinking of starting with C# given my current beginner level. However, I'm still very much interested in macOS development, as it's my preferred OS.

I've already set up the Comet source and plan to delve deeper into it to potentially build on it. But that's a goal for the future, as I'm still finding my footing in the conquer programming world. I detailed my process on a separate thread of how I set it up. I'll try to help improve the gitLab README with some pull requests eventually as well.

I'm planning to set up and study the Redux source next.

I appreciate your guidance and look forward to more exchanges!