Zonewalk - Panda3D based simple zone viewer

[rhyotte]

Would certainly be nice to have an open client ... one I hope would be usable on linux natively.

[Aengor]

Zonewalk (and what ever might become of it) is being developed using the Disney/Carnegie Mellon Game Engine Panda3D and Python. That means right out of the box it runs natively on Win32, Linux and OSX

[Caryatis]

Would certainly be nice to have an open client

Straight up will never happen. People like Aengor work on the coding portion of a client because they are learning new things. There is nothing similar for asset creation. If you have the skills to re-create the assets in EQ(models, textures, animations, particle effects) then endlessly creating things is a job, if you don't have the skills then nobody is going to want to use your shitty assets. Its not even like a modeler or animator would want to increase their skillset by re-creating EQ assets as they are so old and primitive.

The only way a non official client will exist is if somebody finds a way to import eq's assets and then ignores the lawsuits that are sure to come.

[Aengor]

Originally Posted by Caryatis

The only way a non official client will exist is if somebody finds a way to import eq's assets and then ignores the lawsuits that are sure to come.

Thanks for your comments! I'm interested (and pretty much clueless wrt to the legalities involved) Would you care to elaborate on the above a bit? Or anyone else? Considering that zonewalk (or any of the other converter, viewer, whatever, tools being talked aout/linked to on this site) already exactly do that (reading "importing eq's assets" as "using as is" in this case)

a.) a software, like zonewalk, that allows the user to view file contents (EQ zones in this case) that he has (legally obtained hopefully) on his hard disk. What about the legality of that? Not talking about the EULA (which it probably violates, but in my understanding that, at maximum, warrants an account termination since its a license violation but does not infringe on any copyrights)

b.) does the picture change (and why) when said software can connect to eqemu and allow you to play the game? I mean, its still not distributing copyrighted materials (the user has to have them already) Loss of business, because people could decide to play on eqemu (using the open client and soe's client side content) instead of the official servers? But if so, how is this different from playing on emulated servers as people are doing already?

Interesting.

Regards
A