Asheron's Call server emulator
For the past 6 months I've been working on building a server emulator that works with the original 1999 Asheron's Call game client (as well as the beta and preview clients we have access to). The initial main challenge was that the network communication layer was so different from the end-of-retail (2015) client that other server emulators worked with, that it was like archaeology. I spent several months working with Claude to piece together a server that could run with that version of the client. In some ways that was the easy part, because then I needed to restore all the launch-era game mechanics that had been abandoned or changed over time, and then restore all the content and quests in the game world as they existed at the time of release. Luckily there were some very anal retentive people over the years that fastidiously documented every last detail of the game while it was still running and Claude helped me pair tooling with excellent pattern matching skills to help slowly restore the game world over the period of the last several months.