ACEmulator News! Entity Framework + New Discord + Physics!

Hey everyone, thanks for your support and continued efforts over the past year. We’ve made some great progress and are more committed than ever to bring to the community an open source emulator.

Firstly, we’ve moved to a new discord. Any new emulator/development discussion from the core team will be handled there: https://discord.gg/C2WzhP9

Additionally, we’ve made some great improvements with our code base. The new code should be much more developer friendly. We realized there were significant performance issues with the previous code. In addition, the complexity was over burdensome for new developers to participate in.

We’ve switched to .net core 2.0.

  • Performance increases.
  • Improved cross-platform support.
  • Exposes developers to the newest .net technologies that they may find in the real world.

We’ve switched our database model to Entity Framework Core 2.0.

  • Switches ACEmulator to popular, well documented ORM framework.
  • Significant performance improvements.
  • Scaffolding support greatly reduces the burden of adding tables/fields to the database.

Physics!

If you’ve been following our commit history, you’ll notice that gmriggs has taken it upon himself to implement the physics model for ACEmulator. The goal is to have a physics engine that very closely represents what the client is doing/expecting. So far his progress has been amazing!

ACLogView has been overhauled.

ACLogView, originally developed by tfarley, is the invaluable tool we use to view pcap data collected during the massive ACEmulator community effort in December 2016 – January 2017. Slushnas has spent a great deal of time improving ACLogView, it’s parsing accuracy as well as included documentation to make it easier than ever to bring back the world of Dereth.

We’ve made a lot of progress over the last year and hope to continue that momentum!

We’re always looking for new developers. With the recent changes to our code base, it should be easier than ever for new developers to get involved!

ACEmulator Core Goals

  • Reproduce Asherons Call as it existed as of January 2017.
  • Produce an emulator engine that is both performant, but easy to understand and develop for.
  • Encourage community participation and involvement in the project.
  • Use patterns/practices/technologies that developers may find themselves exposed to in the real world.

Thanks for the support!