Question for the Devs...

Any discussion not related to the other forum topics
Post Reply
Magiknight
Posts: 153
Joined: Tue Sep 04, 2012 12:42 am

Question for the Devs...

Post by Magiknight » Sat Aug 18, 2018 10:53 am

Have you ever thought of abandoning Dark Star and just trying to build a new game from th ground up along the same lines as FFXI? It has been so long since FFXI was the star it used to be. That star is only getting farther away. The fan base is shrinking everyday as we age. There are no new players interested in FFXI. Add to that he fact that Dark Star is so old and still isn't really an acurate representation of FFXI. Please don't take that as a negative comment on your work... But is it possible that building a new game would more worthwhile?

User avatar
TeoTwawki
Developer
Posts: 527
Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2013 9:50 pm

Re: Question for the Devs...

Post by TeoTwawki » Sat Aug 18, 2018 3:42 pm

Magiknight wrote:
Sat Aug 18, 2018 10:53 am
Have you ever thought of abandoning Dark Star and just trying to build a new game from the ground up along the same lines as FFXI?
Yes. One of my side projects is basically that. But unless somebody wants to do a whole ton of 3d model and texture work for free it will probably never be released. Just something I ticket with occasionally.

I dunno about the others, they've never talked about it.
Hi, I run The Demiurge server.


Image
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. - Martin Golding
PLS USE [ code ] CODE TAGS [ /code ] WHEN POSTING CODE
DO NOT PRIVATE MESSAGE ME ABOUT BUGS

NiQ
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 28, 2018 6:56 am

Re: Question for the Devs...

Post by NiQ » Tue Aug 28, 2018 7:18 am

Magiknight wrote:
Sat Aug 18, 2018 10:53 am
Have you ever thought of abandoning Dark Star and just trying to build a new game from th ground up along the same lines as FFXI? It has been so long since FFXI was the star it used to be. That star is only getting farther away. The fan base is shrinking everyday as we age. There are no new players interested in FFXI. Add to that he fact that Dark Star is so old and still isn't really an acurate representation of FFXI. Please don't take that as a negative comment on your work... But is it possible that building a new game would more worthwhile?
I actually registered just to give my opinion on this - Working on a project like DarkStar and working on a new game are two completely different things and different challenges.
Sure, developing a game requires programmers but you also need 3D modellers, character designers, composers, voice actors, animators and probably a zillion other things I'm not even aware of. You may have noticed that the size of FFXI is around 13GB - I'd say almost all of it are the game assets, the code is only a small part.
DarkStar is mostly code and in size is only around ~100MB, less than 1% of the game size (though a server with a large player-base will probably need significantly more storage for the big databases) - and I doubt that the original server code on SE's official servers is much bigger - the code may be similar in size but there are no graphical assets on the server side so you don't need these people for server side.
However for server emulators like DarkStar there is another unique type of people you need - you need excellent reverse engineers, and for projects like this is even way more complex than the typical reverse engineering projects since you don't even have the original server software to study - you only have the game client (which is incredibly complicated by itself) and you have to study it and the network communication between it and the official server, learn exactly what everything is, use only that to get an understanding of what the server does internally and re-implement it well enough so (a) the game accepts it as an official server and (b) that enough things work for the project to be usable. This is one of the biggest reverse engineering challenges possible and what makes DarkStar so brilliant. As you figured out this is not relevant at all for the development of new games. I think only a relatively small team of programmers and beta-testers can work on both.

Post Reply