Freelancer Server Reverse Engineering

[massdriver]

could cost another year or two to implement this even for those who already reversed any other server code. At this point your task wont be actual as SC will take it’s profits and most of FL community probably just change available engines. But ofcourse as a student it could be a nice experience to feel.

[Cinka]

That would be a preferred approach if you know absolutely nothing about server. Concider it a black-box and replicate whats going in and out.

This is not the case however: we do have all the binaries. What we need a systematic approach of re-building the entire server executable. One that is applicable at any part of Freelancer, say the rendering engine, so that we may reverse this too if it is demanded by a mod.

[Alex.]

massdriver wrote:
could cost another year or two to implement this

People have been saying this for years, definitely more than 2. We could’ve had it by now.

[FriendlyFire]

… even for those who already reversed any other server code.

It’d take years for those who’ve already spent years hacking through it, so I very much doubt there’s any possibility that we could’ve had an alternative server engine by now.

Plus, at that point it’d be better to just start anew and not have to deal with Freelancer’s quirks.

[massdriver]

=Alex= wrote:

massdriver wrote:
could cost another year or two to implement this

People have been saying this for years, definitely more than 2. We could’ve had it by now.

Guess why nobody spent those years on it. Such task has no estimate in time and efforts, it will be easier to implement completely new game, that could just reuse FL resources.

[w0dk4]

Yeah. I think at this point it would make a lot more sense to start a collaborative Unity project rather than to reverse engineer Freelancer completely.

[starworlds]

This is almost being discussed like its something that is going to be done!

Now now people dont get me all excited and what not!

[StarTrader]

Yes, Deja Vue, mes amis!

[Ursus]

I would think the directplay protocol stuff is pretty well known by now. Just a question of motivation at this point. Seems to be lacking.

[massdriver]

Ursus wrote:
I would think the directplay protocol stuff is pretty well known by now. Just a question of motivation at this point. Seems to be lacking.

DP is no problem, but you need to understand actual ingame client-server communication protocol, ingame messages what they mean and how are sent. Then you need to build custom server that will behave like real one, which includes physics handling in same way as FL does, AI system, account storage, anti-cheat etc. As you might see there’s already a lot of options to do.