4 years ago today, with little more than a month of organized network packet capturing and just 16 days prior to the closure of the retail worlds on January 31st, we took the first step to re-opening the portals to Dereth
Since that day, GitHub Insights tells us that, as of 1/15/2021, there have been 4,190 commits by 59 contributors, 18 binary releases, and 208 content releases, all over the course of these past four years.
Yet while those stats are interesting, they fail to express the amount of actual work poured in to this project by easily hundreds of people collaborating in data collecting, parsing, code writing, formula cracking, fervently discoursing, bug crushing, tool building, and ultimately rebuilding content spanning nearly 20 years of game-play.
The following are a couple of videos which attempt to visualize the project:
ACE Development Visualized | 1/15/2017 – 1/15/2021
ACE Content Recreation Visualized | 7/15/2018 – 1/15/2021
There is no easy way to describe the sum total of all of this collaborative effort other than the game play itself, which we believe to be the most complete and accurate way to experience Asheron’s Call available today, but here is an interesting snippet that tries to quantify it in one way:
We also wish to spotlight those who answered the call by hosting the many worlds we’ve played together again on since retail worlds closed: https://treestats.net/player_counts?servers=All&range=All
Coldeve
New Horizons
Inflicted
Drunkenfell
RIPtide
Levistras
LeafDawn
Potato AC
Winterthaw
Dawnsong
ACENoESCape
GamesDeadArena
Shadowgain
Ragnarok
Terracon
Gloomfell
Living Auberean
asheron4fun
Disciples Of Bael’Zharon
LostWoodsAC
ACPrime
Nightfall
RisingSun
Thistlecrown
as well as all of the private worlds known and unknown alike
We cannot express our gratitude enough to all of those people who have participated in this project over these past four years in helping to preserve, restore, host and continue this game we’ve been enjoying since 1999.
Thank you for your passion, time and energy!
From the beginning, our principle goals have been to provide a completely open sourced emulator with content that accurately reproduced Asheron’s Call as of 1/31/2017, and we’re proud to have achieved so much progress in that goal, and to continue the good work of ultimately seeing those through to completion in the future!
And to that end, we’re pleased to bring to you the 19th binary and 209th content release of ACEmulator:
Latest Server release v1.19.3805 includes the following:
– Added support for newly restored content in latest world database release
– Minor adjustments to several different systems to better emulate some
game world mechanics
– More thread safety/crash prevention code changes
Latest Database release v0.9.209 includes the following:
Newly restored content:
– Crystalline Crag
– Virindi Rescue
– Liberation of Uziz
– Seed of Power
– Raising Grael’s Island
– Mukkir Aspect of Grael (Mukkir Slayer)
– Splitting Grael (High)
– Shadowfire Stone Quest Updates (Shadow Slayer)
– Nexus Crawl (Ned the Clever has returned!)
– Dream Reaver Investigation
– Aerbax’s Prodigal Tumerok
– Fuzzy Bunny Slayer Quest (Seasonal)
– Fallen / Banished / Rare Kill Tasks
– Elemental Kill Task
Adjusted content:
– Update Undead Slayer Quest
– Update Quest Hamud’s Demise
– Adjust Hidden Presents giftboxes (text changes to match retail)
– Tou-Tou Fixes (Text changed to match retail, spawn adjustment)
– Update Gear Crossbows (Added WepSkill to X-bows)
– Update Mace Stamped Spectral Ingot
– Crafting Aqua Vitae now matches retail values
– Crafting Alchemy Gems now matches retail values
Take note that it is important to update both your server binaries/code and world database to at least v1.19.3805 and v0.9.209 to correctly experience newly restored content!
