Ramblings of a crazy person
 

I come with an idea. I know as exciting as the emulator is to everyone that discovers it, I am sure the community is inoculated against posts like this one, where someone has a new idea. With that being said, I know my own nature of getting side tracked with pet projects that never seem to be finished; so, I am not sure how far I could get with this.

Now that I have created plausible deniability for the future... I was trying to think of a project that falls within my abilities and would help me learn some of the emulator. A thought that I had was to create a lightweight client in a browser that uses a global broker (network server) to proxy JSON structs to the c structs and the related server.

Browser Client (2D)
-Uses the .txt maps for the zone representation (possibly as vector graphics for zooming)
-Uses AJAX for asynchronous requests
-Basic symbols to represent Players,NPCs, and Mobs.
-Possibly even a MUD like interface to begin with, with all text commands

Broker
-Server in twisted,http://www.twistedmatrix.com/
-Convert JSON structs to cstructs
-Act like a client without the graphics

Some thoughts on what people think as far as risks and challenges would be great. Since I am very new to the code, having started reading through it this last week, I know there is a billion things I am missing that could make this impossible. Coupled with my lack of game development experience, and we have a recipe for disaster :) Conveying proper movement speeds in flattening 3d movement to 2d movement strikes me as a challenge.

I figured I could look at the mob files and the bot code to give me an idea of a lightweight first go.

I also saw some mention of OpenEQ, and wondered if someone thought there might be some value in looking there, and if so, anyone have any particular areas they think I should focus into first?

Lots of questions, I know... lots of wishful thinking, you bet! :)

Kit

I started capturing packets between the client and the server so I could begin to understand the sequencing of ops. Still crawling my way through this. I have to admit, I don't know much about that sort of thing; so, it has been a learning experience. I looked at the packet collecting projects already in CVS and the one in PEQ's downloads. I could not get the first to work, and the later seemed to me only collected certain packets for privacy reasons. I decided to work from captures of Wireshark (something I have never done). \

When it comes to scripting, I am comfortable with python; so, I looked to the impacket module to parse the packets. Well, embarrassingly enough, I ran into an issue of not having RTFM for Wireshark, and I assumed the collection was a raw dump. This caused me headaches with the packets not looking right, but with a little investigation I found the pcap format, and was able to get things going. So, though I have not gotten much further along, I now am now beginning to look at the sequence of how things work between the server and client.

If I get no where at all, this is turning out to be quite fun.

Kit