Dekaron

So, the game is managed by Nexon and more people quit each day.
How about we do something about it? I like the game and I dont want it to go extinct because some company doesnt give a flying fork about its future and only wants to drain players wallets. There's a huge-ass gap between paying players and free users. The gap is so big in fact that a regular non-donator player has no chance at all against a paying user. But wait! there's more. There's a gap between hardcore money pumpers and "regular donators" too! To be the best you literally have to pump hundreds of euros each month. That's because they keep adding new event items that can be upgraded for a certain period of time only (like 2 weeks or a month). While you can farm the ingredients in game, it's a chore and you'd have to spend around 30 hours a day to fully upgrade the item. *cough* mitera necklace *cough*. There's an "easier" way, you can buy the same ingredients from Dshop. Some people spent over 300€ upgrading that single necklace. IN ONE DAY! Thank god there's a 500€ donation limit per month, otherwise some would go over that quite easily. Of course nexon "fixed the bug" with drop rates. After 3 weeks or so.
Anyways, my rant is over. I hate the way nexon manages Dekaron so I thought I should do something about it.

So I talked to a friend of mine (well known dekaron reverser and programmer) and we figured we could create an emulator for it.
I'm an IT student and I thought I'd give it a shot too. We went our separate ways in creating the emulator, but he paused the project on his side due to being busy with real life stuff.
So at this point I'm working alone on my project. I dont have much time due to studies, girlfriend, general real life stuff, but every free second I get is wisely spent in the compiler.
At this point I'm pretty much done with Login Server and database support, I'm using action 9 databases with MSSQL 2008 R2 for the project. Dekaron has changed a lot in the past few years, but vast majority will agree that Action 6 was the best time of the game. It was more skill oriented than gear like now and non-donators had a chance against donators (and it was quite apparent since Dshop was mainly for visual stuff).
Now the interesting stuff:
I'm pretty much done with loginserver, I have full database support at this point and I can log in, create chars, delete chars and almost everything is flawless. Multiple sessions are also supported at this point, so I can log in with multiple clients. Random DCs (like when you close the client) wont cause errors, you can log in immidiately after you close the client.




The hard part in working on a pretty much dead game (there's no action 6 servers around......) is figuring out packet structures. Thankfully we still have action 2 files, which are similar to action 6 in the way they work, so it's going to be quite a lot of help in getting stuff to work in future.
Now that loginserver is 99% complete (I'll explain the missing 1% soon) I could move on to gameserver. Once some major things are settled, it's going to be a matter of adding new features to the game.
The only feature that I couldnt seem to get to work yet (mainly because of packet structure changes I assume) is parsing suit items on charscreen. The client doesnt throw any errors, but items are not displayed yet. I'll have to debug the exe to find out why.
Yes, the server will go live. There's no telling how long it'll take, some things are harder to figure out than others, but I'm not going to give up. I enjoy working on this project, I learn a lot and I want to see Action 6 back in action.

Wish me luck!

a tiny update, the missing 1% turned out to be a database issue.
so I suppose you wanna see the end result?



its been a while since I released a follow up.
its because I was busy and suspended the project for quite a while, I ended up throwing the code in the trashcan, and I started from scratch. I remade the loginserver and tested it with a couple of people. they found many errors which I corrected right away and right now I can say its a stable version. I also started coding the gameserver and today (22.01.16) I made it in game
here's a screenshot with proof that it is indeed a6:


got an exam tomorrow, so I wont be able to continue working on the project today. once I'm back I'll try to add more features and release another follow up.


24.01.2016:

yeah, so I passed the exam and went straight back to work on the emulator.
movement packet took me around 4 hours to figure out and I gotta say, gamehi devs were stupid when they designed it. there are 4 differnet bytes that do exactly the same thing. and 2 different bytes that describe the angle youre looking at. No idea why that is.
I also added support for private messages and GM notification broadcast



and also version.ini parsing and some more stuff. anyways, I'm going to sleep, spent quite a while on this today and I'll do the same tomorrow. I'm hoping to finish adding other player support tomorrow.

25.01.16:

today's gonna be the last day of "visual" updates (I think). From now on I'll do the tech stuff like handling items and stuff.
items are finally properly handled by the client.
and picture for today:

the game looks so much better in 1920x1080...


ok, finally managed to see other characters and chat. theres still a lot to do but we're making progress.



ooh what a pain it is to handle all the items
I dont even have an idea yet how to do it properly. But I finished the character stat class today pretty much, so thats good, right? no screenshots for you coz I'm too lazy to log in 2 chars (but they do show the right class and rank now)