I've been thinking about this in a slightly more philosophical sense - mainly because my home PC is out of action (actually the PC is fine, it's my house that's b0rked).
In EqEmu customisation is generally based on:-
1. Rule set tweaks
2. Custom quests
3. Custom NPC's
4. Custom Spells
Some go a bit further and have new classes, and so on. The tools that are growing now can potentially allow this customisation:-
1. Zones + models in them
2. Weapon models
3. Particles
This basically leaves "only" NPC/PC model mods left. These I suspect, will be the hardest to change if only because the artists required are pretty thin on the ground. Personally I like the hokey (N)PC models and animations, I prefer the newer modelled zones and weapons (although IMO they've made them all way too fancy on live).
The question is at which point does EqEmu basically become a generic MMORPG development system, and really not much of an emulator at all? Because if you completely change rules, quests, zones,spells, weapons, particles and mobs, then really the only thing tying in that system to Everquest is the client, which is the biggest PITA since currently there are no legally available clients (bar a lucky find on ebay).
I see there have been multiple attempts to make a new client (and I'm even thinking about it since I think I shall have to learn OpenGL for work and quite fancing mucking about with Unity3d too). Presumably though, if you shipped Sony's assets that had been modified to a different format that would be dodgy legally? I don't know if it would be dodgy if you could distribute the export program with the new client, so users would have to have their own legally obtained data files and run the converter before using the new client?
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