So...is anyone actually using OpenZone?

[Windcatcher]

You may be waiting a very long time (read: forever). The client will refuse to load any zone that it doesn't know about. It apparently has a list of zones it "likes", and it will load only those. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two solutions to this problem:

1. Write our own client from scratch (yeah, like this will ever happen--paging rickmanx, paging rickmanx)...

2. Write a client proxy. My thought is this: right now, to play EQEmu, the client is pointed at the eqemu login server. It could instead be pointed at a small proxy program the player runs himself, and the proxy is pointed at the eqemu login server instead. Basically the proxy would intercept all packets, listening for the packet from the server telling the client to go to a particular zone. If the zone is one of the "new" zones, the proxy could quickly copy over the new .S3D files to something else (e.g. cshome.s3d), and tell the client to zone there instead. This means all the new zones have to be *exported* as that particular zone (though you could call the .S3D files anything you like).

One wrinkle is when you go from one new zone to another. I don't know what the client will do if it's told to zone to "cshome" if it's already there. Will it reload the zone info or simply skip the process? If it skips the process, then all the new zones have to be exported *twice*, once for one zone and once for another (e.g. once for "cshome" and once for "tutorial"). Then the proxy could simply ping-pong between them. So basically you'd have a winds_test_zone_a.s3d and winds_test_zone_b.s3d; one is exported as "cshome" (that is, the textureset was set to "cshome") and the other is the same zone, exported as "tutorial".

Since a proxy would have to use the same encryption library as the server, my recommendation is that it should be written in C and built at the same time as the server (maybe not necessarily by the server devs themselves, but the makefile should support it). C isn't my strong suit, so I recommend someone else tackle this project if possible. My thought is that the proxy would be a really tiny program that could reuse all of the server code. I don't think it would take someone long at all to code one...

Wind