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.
I’m a software science student from the technical university of Eindhoven (TU/e) and long time player of Freelancer. I was planning clean-room reverse engineering of parts of Freelancer, at least the FLServer.exe. This is perfectly legal by European Law.
From what I observed the Freelancer Server is only available for Windows, while most servers (I work with) run Linux. Wine is no solution since servers are expected to run stable 24/7.
Re-making the server is a relative smart effort compared to the rest of the game, which is my ultimate goal. If you look at the massive efforts which have been made by the Discovery team the only thing that is holding them back is the dated game engine it self.
StarCitizen looks promising but I don’t think it will be able to capture the charm of the original Freelancer. For example, look at Discovery 24/7. The quality of role playing there is impossible to capture with a large commercial game and the audience that comes with it.
The first step would be documenting general functionality of the FLServer. I’m currently looking for people who have the following skillset: