Agreed. That's the first thing I thought when I noticed it.

Absolutely *not* a practical way to compress zone files. I'm on dialup, and I really don't want to download a 24 mb file each time they want to make a change to 1 of the 20 zones that are in that file.
Granted, the zones don't change often... though I don't see that as a good thing either. It means SOE just slaps the expansion zones down and 24 hours after the expansion's release they probably don't ever even visit them anymore.

Allegedly they now use 'differential' patching (2nd paragraph in this link):

http://eqlive.station.sony.com/suppo...ew_patcher.jsp

which sounds like it only downloads the bits of the file that has changed.

Launch google, search RTPach.
It is being used since a looooong time now with games patcher, like WC3, C&CG, like always, SOE is so last year ...

Bytes Patcher, new files system, whats the problem if EQEmu is still "up-to-date" ? Also i still think and maintain that EQEmu should have its own client, to take eqemu out of eqlive, because this is the only real solution, yes keeping EQEmu "up-to-date" is nice, but its bypassing the problem not resolving it~

Nice to hear Freaku isnt dead btw ;)

1) I'll probably try reverse-engineering it sometime in the next week or so. Compressed file formats are simple in general.
2) The 24MB download would be a one-time thing. From there they'd simply update single files.

Well, I'm back to work on FreakU finally. I just finished off the last of the _major_ changes to the UI code (they started with creating it in the first place ;) ) and now have:

Movable windows
Clickable buttons
And some other spiffy stuff that I probably forgot (first time I've touched the code in 2 or 3 weeks)

I'll put up a tarball on http://freaku.gforge.linuxpowered.com in a bit :)

the website says: 195/254 Rendered properly (76.772%)
does that mean that its almost done and is the zones the only thing needed for freakU to be completed?[/quote]

i am sure there is still LOTS to do after making zones render properly :D

Glad to hear you are back at working on Freaku.

Im actually making new custom zones, and i will wonder how FreakU will handle this, well, what do you plan to add to freakU that will make the life of eqemu easier (zoneproxy implementation, possibility to read 3DS ?), i know its too early for those kind of questions, since freaku is pretty alpha, but im curious.

Im not a prog, more like a graphist, if you need any help, PM me, i will be glad to help on Freaku project.

To answer hypershadow's question, we're so far from being 'almost done' that it's not even funny. Simply making all zones display properly is a fraction of all the work.

KhaN: We may make it possible in the future to read 3DS files, but we'd need some way of tying it all together because of the extra data that's in WLD files. If you have any ideas on this, let me know.

One of the points of FreakU is that ZoneProxy won't be necessary since the client will load any zone you throw at it.

I doubt that loading .3DS files is a viable option since there they don't contain other important details, like a BSP tree or other very important information specific to WLD files. We know how to create WLD and S3D files for the most part, so I don't think it's a major problem. One thing I'd like to see is someone port OpenZone's S3D and WLD code to C++ so the EQEmu team can use it for handling line-of-sight calculations.

WC

For me, if client is done, and if peoples like WC can decode WLD (to create weapons, models, all graphics), EQEmu will have the possiblity to take eqemu out of eq, read you will be able to create your own custom world, from scracth, without any eq contents.
Maybe im a dreamer, but i would love to see eqemu becoming a sort of opensource MMO, where peoples will be able to build their games with tools like OpenZone and the one Sandy is creating, well you got me.

3DS example, by thinking of it, i would prefer to see a MSH importer, like you build an object/items, and you can directly see in with FreakU, because render under 3D modeling tools and EQ Environnement are not the same. MSH-SCN file format WC done are great, im sure they would be a way to use them as a quick viewer for FreakU.

Now, this bring in my mind another question, if FreakU is DX9 based (like EQCLient), will it be possible to implements things that are not in EQ Client (Bump Mapping ?). I know those kind of question are wayyy to early compared to where FreakU developement is ... but .. im curious :/

Thank you KhaN! I had the exact same idea. I want to be able to create a completely custom world :)

I also want to be able to _build_ worlds in FreakU, both offline and online. I want to make it a completely integrated development and design tool.

FreakU is OpenGL and SDL-based, btw. I don't use windows or any of MS's other proprietary bullshit.
Oh, and yes, bumpmapping can be implimented. I'd also really like to play with normal mapping, but both of those technologies will require building completely new content. Should be fun :)

**** **** !!!!!

/me reread al this to make sure this is not a dream or a joke

Yup, EqEMu would greatly improve from a free client, i want to throw in some help if i can

free means no-pay, but above all, means EQEMu players control over it.. OMGz, we need that. Let's stop trying to catch up with live. Create new worlds :)

**** **** !!!

got to re-read again :D

FYI, downloaded the tarball (0.2a), and compiled under both linux (slackware 9.1) and cygwin-gcc for windows.

Everything went perfect (one single warning in eqnetwork.c, lines 49 and 50, redefinition of a macro), though i could not build with the configure script.

Running (windows only) is ok on small zones, but larger ones are waaaaayyyy toooo sloooow. I'm not sure the GL libs i'm using are hardware accelerated though :(. Are you clipping the planes to LOS anyway ?

looking forward to hear from you, i'll browse through the code in the meanwhile.

'later