Forum :: Game Development :: Emulating a discontinued game.

How are hard is it to emulate a client of a discontinued mmorpg?
There's a game called destiny online , the creators suddenly put the game server down along with the website and they disappeared suddenly leaving hundreds of players reminiscing their past.

do you have the knowledge to reproduce how the game functions?

you'll definitely need organizational and programming experience

don't forget you'll have to emulate the server too. was this a client game or browser game? not sure if it would be easier to use trial and error to reproduce the communication protocol and only emulate the server while using whatever client they supplied already.

---
I not hacker

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its
whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Albert Einstein : Really Great Quote Ramy!

In theory it's possible but it would be so much harder without having any reference at all of the protocol. You'd almost certainly have to work through the client code a bit to see how it reads packets, and do a lot of trial and error testing.

If there are significant parts of the game that are hosted on the server; for example maps, monsters, etc. there would be almost no point in emulating the server with none of the original assets available. At that point you may as well make your own mechanically similar game inspired by it.

I just spent half an hour or so writing a reply -- and got an error when I sumbitted, aparantly I'd been logged out.

Anyway, the gist of it was that understanding game networking in general is important, after that, reverse engineer (decompile, deobfuscate if appropriate) the client, look for recognisable text strings for context, look for networking system calls, etc. Here are some links relevant to the first bit:

http://gafferongames.com/building-a-game-network-protocol/

http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/development-deployment-of-multiplayer-games-vol1-book-online/#/

A PDF of the beta of the above:

http://ithare.com/wp-content/uploads/beta-vol1.pdf

I've been playing with my own project of this sort for just over a year, my server implementation is about 10k lines of rust (including parsers for some of the game's file formats, it's bitpacked serialisation, implementations of it's multiple levels of ARQ (optional per packet and per event group), it's own file server, and so on), and is getting close to something people could actually use. I had a nice shortcut in that the client is written in java, which decompiles well, though still took many months to deobfuscate and understand it's implementation of the protocol. It's certainly enjoyable though, and I expect someone with more experience would make faster progress than I have :3

Good luck & have fun ^^