Wow you guys are hilarious.
Well i guess its time to say a few things.
a) - good developer -
you cant easily judge by the programming language somebody is using, ofc you have most freedom with C/C++/ASM, but ever tried to program something bigger in ASM? its hella work. the way you would usually go is to just to code your regular c/c++ and try to find a few tweaks for asm optimization, although you'd rarely find one, as nowadays compilers do a frigging good joob. something university taught me ( i find myself holding a b.sc. in biochem and one in computer science ) is that its not necessarily about the language you use, but your creativity of developing algorithms. porting them is actually easy. performancewise it doesnt matter in this particular subject, we are not doing some super steezy algorithms to calculate how molecules connect or proteins fold ( i've done work in that field, trust me its hard), where we need tons of computing power. despite this, i suck at networking stuff. i can do the basic stuff but i wouldnt want to do much more. (i even made a sro bot once, but dude what's that all about?) well im starting to drift into OT... to keep it short: development is a wide field, you shouldnt judge about somebodys qualities by gamerelated developing like silkroad.
b) - advancing sro files / protecting your stuff -
Well... Writing a good packer, code virtualizer, obfuscater, w/e is plenty of work and pretty much the job of 2 people. A mathematician for the algorithmic part and a programmer to realize it.(much simplified) you can't just easily protect your stuff. there's always a way, i wont go much into detail right now, but if you have questions, ill try to answer them as far as i can.
advancing sro files isnt that hard, as most parts are not hardcoded and those things that are, can be altered quite easily in most cases (like levelcap) and even the navmesh stuff isnt implemented that difficult ( in comparison to how other games handle it), but you cant just easily fix known bugs just by asm changes, most stuff would require us to obtain source codes and recompile with fitting edits.
if you really want to provide new content to the game, the way to go, would be to write an emulated server from scratch and implement a few ways to make sure things go the way you wish ( for example having your own loader that verifies with your serverlar and inject a dll (which needs to be protected as well all over) into the sro.exe to handle some verifying tasks while you play, so things happen your way.
best example is the dupe bug with SN, did you fix that? if you did, please tell me how, much curious such wow.
man i suck at writing. i'm really losing my central theme over and over.
just hoping you get what i'm saying. there's some stuff you can do with srvlar files, but not quite much in comparison with what you could do with an emulator and own stuff.
and being a good developer doesnt mean to be hyper hyper in c(w or w/o ++), or being able to do everything super duper cool, it just means you have a field, where you excell.
protection is hard to achieve, dont underestimate it.
coding language doesnt matter for something like sro , or sro server emulation, we dont need perfect performance, neither do we need to have kernel access for what we are doing.
well just fuck it.
anybody brazzers prem?
oh and completely on topic:
cap 10, i never got beyond those creepy turtles, northside of jangan.