Happy 4th ACE-iversary!

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:

Important Disclaimer: The preceding stats generated by SCC: https://github.com/boyter/scc These stats do not confer any real world value or exchange of goods and services. All participation has been purely for voluntary, educational and non-commercial purposes only.

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!

Play

To connect to any Asheron’s Call emulator server you must first install Asheron’s Call, update the client files, and optionally install Thwarglauncher.

Download the Official Asheron’s Call installer from Turbine
((If the link does not work, right click – Copy Link Address and paste in to your browser.))
Run the ac1install.exe and install to the default location.

Download the End of Retail Client Files
Drag the 3 files inside the .zip to your Asheron’s Call folder and choose Replace when prompted.

Download and install Thwarglauncher

  • Accounts for most ACE servers are created on first login.
  • If you have trouble logging in to a specific server you can join the server Discord by clicking the icon next to the server name on Thwarglauncher

If you’re playing Asheron’s Call on Windows 10, you may have an issue with DirectX. It doesn’t occur for everyone, but for those that get the popup about DirectX failure/errors, first try this workaround:

When at the Character Selection screen, before clicking on Create Character or Enter World, Press and hold the Alt key, then press the Enter key.

The game should switch from Full Screen to Windowed mode and continue to work correctly.

Once you are in the world, you can adjust the game window to be higher resolution.

Meet Our Newest App, ACViewer

ACViewer is currently a work-in-progress, multipurpose DAT file viewer for Asheron’s Call portal and cell DAT files.

With this tool today, you can view many of the objects contained within those files, including object models, particle effects, textures, images, sound files, and landblocks which include over-world landscape and dungeons.

The above pictures represent only a sample of what you can view with this application right now and there are plans for many more features to come. Eventually moving towards DAT modification and even a full-on WorldBuilder like functionally for new content development!

Click Here to download ACViewer! 

Visit the GitHub website to download this tool and explore Dereth in new ways today! You can also click on the Discord link to the left to keep up with our changes to this new app as well as our other projects. Progress is made nearly every day on all things Asheron’s Call emulation.

Stay tuned for future announcements about our first downloadable releases of ACEmulator server software, in addition to the source code repo downloads!