rcngrgl

I am happy to see someone understands what needs to be done and works on it, really liked your detailed progress report. Yeah, parsers are a must, but once they are done, you can use every data, model and that's the beauty of it. Heightmaps is simple as you said. I guess my only problem was creating custom shader for blending between areas, originally it was done just by blur or something like that. This took way a lot of time for me. I created parser and custom shader and tweaked lots of times. For some of the effects I've got 1:1 resemblence but still not perfect for all. I don't don't how it is in UE but it was pretty straightforward. I was using heightmap values to create mesh collision and it worked perfectly for maps. And landscapes contain collision data, so it was automatic too. It's either you need to upgrade your graphics or why to even use UE at this point? I was using Godot and happy with what I see. This part I didn't work on yet, it is right to pick anything. Because you can make static shadows and gain performance or make dynamic shadows and have day and night cycle. Yeah, I remember there were a lot of issues with rigging. I don't remember much but I added basic support for adding any rigging easily and had basic character movements to move around map. The main reason why I wanted to do this project was to prevent hackers. My childhood ruined because of them. So I was sending keyboard and mouse movements and matching the movements retroactively based on the ping between server and client. I tried with packet drops, high ping simulation etc. and it was working smoothly. I already worked previously on some MMO company with up to 50k-60k CCU, so I pretty much know what needs to be done on DB, backend, and server. For me this part is the easiest part since it's my main. Headless servers should not use that much resources much but again I don't know much about unreal. For my case it will be for sure higher than the original server since server will calculate character movements, mob hits etc. to prevent hackers but still if you have a baremetal server it should easily handle 5-10k players. I appreciate your afford and I wish you will finish this and have what you hoped. I wish I could have same opportunity. I have a full time work and was working on this project at the weekends etc. The main reason why I stopped is not what needs to be done, but I needed a lot of money for advertisement. Every month some popular server starts with 25k$ rewards and ads. Since mine is not something I can try again and again, I will have one shot. So I decided I need to have at least 50k$ to release it. That's why I didn't continue. I had a lot of missing things for sure. I don't want to discourage you but I worked on this project 2.5 months partially on weekend and made a lot of progress and in that short time. I don't know your experience it changes a lot but seems like you are moving slow. If I roughly calculate I worked on this project around 200 hours and you around 6500 hours which needed to make a lot of gap in progress in between us. If I kept my phase with that 6500 hours I would finish this. I am sorry if I discouraged you. Again I don't know your experience and what you doing is quite remarkable. Nobody will have that much free time and dedication to do this. So I hope you will be moving forward day by day and finally provide us something good. I didn't work on the project for 1.5 years, so I am quite rusty. But if you want to talk anything about the project except when it is related to unreal, feel free to reach me.

I still continue on my development. If I will have significant progress I will open discord channel to share my updates as well as forum posts. I still watch a lot of videos of attemps to remaking the Metin2. I didn't change my mind. It is always the same flaw. People are not trying to convert the existing assets, instead trying to make them by themselves. These includes map tiles, model collisions, effects etc. If creating a map takes some days, it will take days for each map. If creating a collision for an object takes 5 minutes, it will take 5 minutes for each object. Instead I've spent a lot of days for a single map. Now others will take minutes. I've spend a lot of days for a single object with a collision. Now others will take seconds. They will be also put in a map automatically because there are data for that too! You got the idea. Another issue that I see is, not tackling the big parts. I am working on effects now. I've spent my days just to understand how they are working. I need have a conversion for their effect data to the engine I use. Otherwise game will not be playable without the effects. If I focus on every single monster, every map, every item, every something before this. It will be a huge loss. So I am trying to make one or two things work from main features. Once I get the MVP, I can always add the remaining parts. It is a long time after you opened this post, but I hope I was helpful.

I don't think so. When I am playing my version, all the graphics, animations, etc. reminds me the old days. It is not losing the "charm", on the contrary it is bringing the "charm" back. Because it is simple like old days and I know that there will be no cheaters.

I guess I start to understand why. Whenever I am doing something I am looking if someone did it or how they did it. They are always doing it manually. Most people who tried to recreate Metin2 didn't go to the path for writing parsers. Simplest example for this is to terrain. Game files have already data for height map, shadows, tiles, etc. What I see is people are importing height map in game engines but using the other parts. So they are painting the terrain manually. Another example is, game objects like buildings have separate collision file. Need to write parser for that to convert them, or manually do everything. People usually picking the manual option. So, as I guess most people don't have capacity or experience to write parsers for all the required files. Because of that it makes development process much harder. Or they don't have experience at all on MMO game development and they just get overwhelmed.

I worked at a MMOFPS gaming company for couple of years. I know how hard is to develop and maintain the game especially if it is online. But despite that I still decided to develop a replica of Metin2 a week or so ago. I will keep you updated once I give up