Project Available - Server emulation for online game

Hello all,

I've been browsing multiple forums throughout the internet in an attempt to find someone who can help me with a project to develop a server side communication utility for a fairly simple online game. My attempts to find someone who is both knowledgeable and willing to help haven't been so positive. If anyone here is willing to help or direct me to someone who could help, it would be much appreciated. Please respond to this post or private message me to get the details.

Thanks for your time,
John

This is probably the same negative response you've received everywhere else, but reverse engineering a game server, even for a simple game, is an immensely difficult and time consuming task.

If you're not looking to pay someone, your best bet is to try to find someone who is a programmer and actually plays the game. It's unlikely that you'll find a volunteer who doesn't play the game who would do this.

If you are looking to pay someone, expect to pay at least 5 figures to have it done right.

Thanks for your response. I appreciate you taking the time to type out a complete response. I have attempted to find someone who has a connection to the game who can program, but I have failed. If I did pay someone to complete this project, I am not sure it would be worth the investment because there won't be a real return except for the enjoyment of playing. If I did decide to pay, would you have anyone in mind who would be interested?

Thanks for your reply.

He needs a web service or something similar, not a reverse engineered game server... You've suggested that the only way for him to get what he wants is through the most difficult solution imageinable.

Send me an email, OP:

myprogrammingservice (at) gmail (dot) com

Thanks.

A "web service" that handles server side communication for an online game can accurately be called a game server, can it not? And based on the fact that there presumably isn't a freely available game server implementation for the game, I would say it's fairly safe to assume that the communication specifications are not freely available either, which means you would have to reverse engineer the protocol to write a web service for it.

So explain to me how this doesn't involve reverse engineering a game server.

It's possible that the game he's referring to is HTTP based, but nothing in his post indicates that to be the case.

That is exactly what I said.


"Communication specifications", like what? There is such a capability of making your own socket handling classes?

The code to handle sending and receiving data over sockets is the easy part. The hard part is learning what data you actually have to send.

For example, pretend you had never heard of HTTP before and it was not documented anywhere. When you connect initially to an HTTP server it tells you nothing about what you're supposed to send it. Could you randomly guess that you have to send the string: "GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n" in order to get any data back from it?

You could figure it out without too much trouble by observing the packets exchanged between a web browser and a web server, but HTTP is a simple plaintext protocol that only involves a few control packets. Most game server protocols are binary (for efficiency) and are far more complex (because unlike HTTP they are not stateless, and they have to deal with the two-way exchange of lots of data).

How do you communicate user input to the server? What control characters do you send before transmitting the data? When and how often do you send it? What data does the server return to you after you send it? Those are the types of questions that need to be answered to define the communication specifications.

Obviously those are problems that need to be solved, but he's asking for someone to create a server that will communicate with his game. There is no pre-existing protocol such as HTTP to "reverse engineer".

The thread asks for "server emulation", which strongly suggests that there is indeed an existing protocol. If there weren't an existing server and protocol then this would be about server design and not emulation.

But whatever, I'm done arguing. This is my last post on the matter.

Hello all,

Thanks for the replies. I have a copy of the game that i could send to anyone who would have time to take a look at it. Would anyone be willing to check it out to see exactly what the project consists of?

Thanks!

Yeah, send me an email at the address listed above.