C#

Optimized pathfinding

After some tests of the community, we found that many instances of monsters on a map will cause a lot of memory usage. As I found out, the root of the cause was how we do the pathfinding for the monsters. Because of that, I took this as a challenge

OpenMU

The power of the Attribute System

I want to show a nice powerful feature of the OpenMU Project - the Attribute System.

OpenMU

Project Status - Easter 2020

I want to give a short status update on the OpenMU project.

C#

Demo Console Client for MU Online

For a test of the new nuget packages of MUnique.OpenMU.Network.Packets I wrote a small demo client. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/sven-n/MuConsoleTestClient It encapsulates most of the packet creation and parsing for you, so you don't have to mess

OpenMU

Recap of 2019

In this post I want to recap what was accomplished in 2019 and what will come next in 2020.

C#

Generating message structs by data

In this post I want to explain how I'm planning to generate ref structs in OpenMU and how this fits into the big picture.

C#

Handling packet structures in .NET - a new way?

Parsing and serializing network packets in .NET in a safe, performant and elegant way can be quite tricky. C# ref structs might be the answer.

MU Online

SimpleModulus revisited

Recently, I was working on getting game client version 0.75 to work with OpenMU. One big obstacle was the SimpleModulus encryption which was somehow different in the earlier versions of MU Online. You can find an analysis of it here. According to a change log in a leaked 0.

Redux

Understanding the relationship between react, redux and react-redux

react and redux are basically independent libraries. You can use react without redux and redux without react. What glues both together is the react-redux library. I don't want to write a full blown tutorial about react and redux, so I'll keep it short. Disclaimer: I'

OpenMU

Migrated AdminPanel to Redux and TypeScript

I finally finished the migration of the AdminPanel from JS/JSX to TS/TSX and fluxxor to Redux. I want to show you a short summary of pitfalls which I encountered and how I solved them. Not using npm When working with JavaScript you almost can't get around

MU Online

On item duplication exploits and how to prevent them

Hello, first of all, if you're Webzen or a private MU Online server owner or developer, don't take this post as a threat. These item duplication examples which I will describe are known to me since many years. As you might imagine a lot of other

MU Online

About game server architecture patterns

Hey there, I found a really nice blog about game server architectures: https://gameserverarchitecture.com If I would categorize the original MU Online game server into one of the mentioned architecture patterns, it's probably mostly the monolithic one, with some slight signs of the map centric pattern in

C#

Loading complex data with PostgreSQL JSON functions

Problem With an extension of initialization data, where I added definitions of NPCs and Monsters and their spawn points to about 10 game maps, I noticed that the time to start the server went up dramatically - from ~13 seconds to over 1 minute. The reason was, that my strategy

Release

MUnique OpenMU Network Analyzer

Hey people, today I release a little tool to analyze network traffic between server and client which use the mu protocol. The cool thing is, the packet structures are defined in xml files, so it can be extended like you wish. Changes on this xml files also work on-the-fly -

OpenMU

A closer look at the MU Online packet encryption

in the past days I wondered why some parts of the encryption and decryption keys for the network packet encryption (aka SimpleModulus) are actually the same. So I tried to dig a bit in the SimpleModulus algorithm and the usage of these keys. Lets see how this keys (e.g.

OpenMU

ChatServer v.0.1.4

Today I decided to add a new release for the ChatServer (ExDbConnector). With the feedback of a RaGEZONE user we managed to get it actually working with a real season 6 game server :) It's always a satisfaction when you get something working, especially if you're the

OpenMU

Naming of the OpenMU Project

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton Some of you might have noticed, that there is a private MU Online Server "OpenMu" and maybe several other (dead) projects with a similar naming. I want to clarify that my

Release

Chat Server v0.1.0-alpha

Today I release a spin-off project of OpenMU. It uses the ChatServer and it's dependencies of OpenMU, but additionally I wrote an adapter to connect it to a non-OpenMU ExDB-Server. So you can use this as a complete replacement of the original Webzen ChatServer. A lot of server

C#

it compiles... ship it! :)

Yesterday, I finally managed to get the Travis CI build running. This was a bit tricky, because Travis CI runs on Linux with xbuild (not msbuild) and uses the mono compiler. Because of Linux, the file names are case-sensitive, which is different from Windows. I also think that calling msbuild.

Release

There it is :)

I finally decided to push my project to GitHub. You can find it here: https://github.com/MUnique/OpenMU About the current state: It's not complete, and probably there are many bugs left. I didn't connect a real game client to it since years, until a

OpenMU

A little status update

Hey, I guess you wondered why it takes so long until I put my stuff on GitHub. I hope you understand, that I don't want to put some broken stuff online - I think most people will try it one time, see nothing works, and never look at

Entity Framework Core

.Include(...) is not the right solution to load 1:n relationships

When I read about what people suggest to load 1:n relations, it makes me wonder if they know what they are doing. In Entity Framework Core, basically every LINQ expression translates into one SQL statement. When you do Include(...) on 1:n relationships (collection navigation properties), you are basically

Entity Framework Core

Workaround for missing n:m mapping feature in Entity Framework Core

A lot of guys are complaining on GitHub that implicit mapping for many-to-many relationships is missing for Entity Framework Core. I don't see this missing feature as too critical. With some clever patterns you can implement workarounds without affecting your business domain objects too much. I'll

MU Online

MU Online Season History

I guess some people wondered which features got added to MU Online with each new season. Me too, so I did some research until Season 6 some time ago. Here are my notes: Season 1: * Crywolf event * Castle Siege event * Fenrir pet * Ancient Items (which drop in Land of Trials

MU Online

Coming soon

I'm preparing of going open source with my little game project, which I want to publish under the MIT license. It's a game server implementation (some people would call it an emulator) of a MMORPG, called MU Online. I'm working on this project since