18 ms·

Ragnarok MMO open-source HTML5 client

176 points by mihai_ionic 12y ago

jeremymcanally 12y ago
I can't get the demo to connect to the server, but the screenshots are super impressive. The amazing part to me is that Ragnarok is still going. We used to play it in high school along with Helbreath because they were free MMOs and we had no money. :)
- skeeterbug 12y ago
  iRO was not free. The only time it was free was during the beta IIRC. After that there was a fee.
  - yelnatz 12y ago
    Hasn't it been free to play for years now? They get their revenue from their shops, like how most private servers do it.
    - skeeterbug 12y ago
      It is free to play now. The comment I was replying to seemed to indicate it was the earlier years of RO. Maybe I was mistaken.
mimog 12y ago
Demo doesn't work. Not super impressed.
- andypants 12y ago
  The game server seems to be down. It worked when I tried it yesterday, and it plays pretty much exactly like the official client. It really is very impressive!
- sebgeelen 12y ago
  The servers have probably been HN DDOS
- vthibault 12y ago
  Sorry for the problem, it should be fixed for now. (cause: temporary ipban of the proxy server by the emulator server because of too much floods in the login module).
viiralvx 12y ago
Oh my Lord...This just took all the way back to my teen years, I played RO from like . . . 12 years old all the way until I was 18/19ish. It was an amazing game, I know I still log into my buddy's private server every now and then to PvP a little bit and it's always a fun time!
- kawsper 12y ago
  Just starting the demo, and hearing the music gave me chills. I have spent countless hours in that game.
  - viiralvx 12y ago
    I don't know how such a minimalist and simple could be so addicting. War on Emperium, PvP, and hours grinding cards. And even on low rates, just getting lost in these various worlds, exploring every little map...so many memories.
- ddispaltro 12y ago
  For some reason, this game and Shadowbane have always been timeless for me. I am guessing its the amount of customization for each toon.
dmead 12y ago
the ragnarok beta got me re-interested in the old snes rpgs. good stuff.
toblender 12y ago
I really wish I found this 3 days ago, spent almost all of Sunday trying to get RO to run on my macbook without dual boot :( Nice work, time to spam LoV!
aeturnum 12y ago
Ragnarok has long been a center for OS development of one kind of another. When I was younger I was part of a team of people trying to add the WoE feature set to one of the server emulators. I wasn't very capable, but I helped a little. I recall that it was made more difficult by the comments in the source code being in japanese.
keithxm23 12y ago
This is awesome. Felt so nostalgic while going through the videos and screenshots. What an amazing game! And great work Vincent and team!
possibilistic 12y ago
I never played this game, but back in HS/college I recognized that it brought one of the largest shares of traffic to my video game strategy guide wiki. The RO guide underwent constant maintenence by fans, and was subject to extreme organic growth despite no manual intervention on my part. The level of curation, attention to detail, and the extent to which it was taken was fascinating--and I didn't initiate any of it. I was always impressed by the Ragnarok community. Sadly, memory of those days was marred when a trusted friend that was running sysops hijacked my domain name account and stole the site from under me when I was overseas. But it was a good lesson in never trusting anyone and not to under any circumstance reuse passwords. (Granted, I swear Godaddy's password reset was an idempotent no-op back then... My account changes never seemed to persist.)
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "idempotent no-op" Isn't that the only kind?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mhd 12y ago
Hope that this is better code than the OS Ultima Online stuff I looked at years ago. Which looked a lot like decompiled binaries, even the original code…
- byuu 12y ago
  Ultima Online was just a nightmare. They constantly released major protocol changes with each new patch, and those were pushed out on an almost weekly basis. It was still really fun though to play as a GM on your own little personal server and melee guards. Oh, I'd give the world to play that game again, pre-Trammel, with the active user counts that existed back in the day. The only choice today is the ruined mainline (WoW clone) servers, or ghost-town private (T2A) servers :(
JonLim 12y ago
Incredibly impressed. I'm at work, and it's working superbly, with no noticeable lag or stuttering. I... I should stop. Great work!
u124556 12y ago
I wonder in how many years we'll be able to play WoW or GuildWars2 on our browsers.
Kiro 12y ago
Where is the actual JS code for the client?
- vthibault 12y ago
  You can find it at https://github.com/vthibault/roBrowser/tree/master/ https://github.com/vthibault/roBrowser/tree/master/ in the src folder.
abjorn 12y ago
Now you can grind your life away from the comfort of your own browser.
leishulang 12y ago
when will Starcraft brood war html5 that are capable of 2v2 online multiplayer available?
- sitkack 12y ago
  18 months?
- Lambdanaut 12y ago
  Never if Blizzard has anything to say about it. Every time somebody tries to port SC, Blizzard shuts them down. Their lawyers are bloodthirsty.
- slacka 12y ago
  The tools to decompile starcraft were released on github. The next step is to recompile it to HTML5 instead of ARM. You can read about it here: http://pandoralive.info/?p=3089 http://pandoralive.info/?p=3089
aaron-lebo 12y ago
Are they using assets from the original game (if so, are they legally available), or is everything open source and original content?
- andypants 12y ago
  It uses assets from the original game. Tou can download the desktop client and assets for free from the official ragnarok website, but I don't know if it's legally allowed to use the assets in this way. All the privately run servers also use the original assets. This web client automatically downloads the required assets though. When I used the demo it just worked automatically. I didn't need to manually download anything.
- serf 12y ago
  Yes they are using original assets. No it's not open source or legal, but Gravity appears to have given up on legally defending the game after eAthena got to a workable stage, as witnessed by innumerable pay-for-items private servers which all profit on original assets created by Gravity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAthena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAthena
bundy 12y ago
Welp, time to go recreate my Sniper and go MVPing. Thanks for the post, definitely going to check it out!
chao- 12y ago
Some of my earliest lessons in "how not to write software" came from listening to the ranting of a friend who worked on the original eAthena implementation (i.e. back when it forked from the Japanese Athena project and gained the "e" in its name). All of the fragile handoffs between the multiple server types (character, map, login) and the client. Most notable were the mountains of code, network and otherwise, that had to be written in knowingly buggy, inefficient or incorrect manner simply to properly mimic the official server functionality. There was also one attempt to make an alternative client for the official servers to deal with some of the lackluster interface issues (longstanding, serious/obvious bugs from 2002 that lasted until 2009ish). From what I recall, it was way too much work, and the core features were easier to deliver as a sort of (eula-breaking) addon to the official client.
- BoppreH 12y ago
  I've read parts of the eAthena source code recently (https://github.com/eathena/eathena https://github.com/eathena/eathena) and was very impressed with the code quality. Maybe they fixed the code base, or I didn't hit the worst parts, but I left feeling it was in good hands.
  - chao- 12y ago
    Oh yeah, while I haven't read the source directly in years, it is much changed. I was referencing 2004, only six months or so after iRO officially came out of beta. To say it improved since then is an understatement. Based on what I last knew about the scripting capabilities of the Gravity server implementation (circa 2008), I can safely say that eAthena eventually came to provide an easier model for rudimentary content creation and management than the official software. Never mind security. Trying to wrap your head around the code behind why opening a dialog via item X and performing client action Y on the keyboard would bypass what should have been a server-side security check for a very important game mechanic was a lesson in all sorts of SE principles. Unnecessary coupling and spooky action at a distance, for starters. Repeat this a hundred times and mix in a handful of SQL injection points, plus some fundamental disagreements in how and when the game's content assumed characters would appear on a new map, versus how and when the official servers actually worked. I am curious if and how eAthena eventually deviated from some of the idiosyncratic behavior of the official game servers. From what I've heard in the years since I stopped playing, though, is that Gravity took the profits from their microtransaction e-store and managed to actually plow that money into improvements for the GM team's ability to meaningfully manage their servers and community. So my first paragraph likely applies only to a bygone era.
d357r0y3r 12y ago
Next up: open-source HTML Ragnarok Online bots.
- copypasteweb 12y ago
  Meanwhile you can probably connect HTML client to already existing open-source non-HTML bot [1] using its bot-as-a-proxy feature. Adding automation stuff directly to HTML client shouldn't be hard, assuming network protocol handling and state keeping already provided for you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openkore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openkore
hardwaresofton 12y ago
This game was the first MMO I really got into. In the back of my mind, I always wondered if a project like this could be done (given that RO is MUCH less resource intensive than the quake engine, and other html5 demos I've seen, etc)... I am so happy to see this project exist, I love this.
mkr-hn 12y ago
I saw this a few months ago. I never thought I would see it on HN.
pesto88 12y ago
welp, time to make Second Impact before Paul finds out
gdiocarez 12y ago
Yeah!
notastartup 12y ago
게토레이드

176 points by mihai_ionic 12y ago

I can't get the demo to connect to the server, but the screenshots are super impressive. The amazing part to me is that Ragnarok is still going. We used to play it in high school along with Helbreath because they were free MMOs and we had no money. :)

skeeterbug 12y ago
iRO was not free. The only time it was free was during the beta IIRC. After that there was a fee.
- yelnatz 12y ago
  Hasn't it been free to play for years now? They get their revenue from their shops, like how most private servers do it.
  - skeeterbug 12y ago
    It is free to play now. The comment I was replying to seemed to indicate it was the earlier years of RO. Maybe I was mistaken.

mimog 12y ago

Demo doesn't work. Not super impressed.

andypants 12y ago
The game server seems to be down. It worked when I tried it yesterday, and it plays pretty much exactly like the official client. It really is very impressive!
sebgeelen 12y ago
The servers have probably been HN DDOS
vthibault 12y ago
Sorry for the problem, it should be fixed for now. (cause: temporary ipban of the proxy server by the emulator server because of too much floods in the login module).

viiralvx 12y ago

Oh my Lord...This just took all the way back to my teen years, I played RO from like . . . 12 years old all the way until I was 18/19ish. It was an amazing game, I know I still log into my buddy's private server every now and then to PvP a little bit and it's always a fun time!

kawsper 12y ago
Just starting the demo, and hearing the music gave me chills. I have spent countless hours in that game.
- viiralvx 12y ago
  I don't know how such a minimalist and simple could be so addicting. War on Emperium, PvP, and hours grinding cards. And even on low rates, just getting lost in these various worlds, exploring every little map...so many memories.
ddispaltro 12y ago
For some reason, this game and Shadowbane have always been timeless for me. I am guessing its the amount of customization for each toon.

dmead 12y ago

the ragnarok beta got me re-interested in the old snes rpgs. good stuff.

toblender 12y ago

I really wish I found this 3 days ago, spent almost all of Sunday trying to get RO to run on my macbook without dual boot :( Nice work, time to spam LoV!

aeturnum 12y ago

Ragnarok has long been a center for OS development of one kind of another. When I was younger I was part of a team of people trying to add the WoE feature set to one of the server emulators. I wasn't very capable, but I helped a little. I recall that it was made more difficult by the comments in the source code being in japanese.

keithxm23 12y ago

This is awesome. Felt so nostalgic while going through the videos and screenshots. What an amazing game! And great work Vincent and team!

possibilistic 12y ago

I never played this game, but back in HS/college I recognized that it brought one of the largest shares of traffic to my video game strategy guide wiki. The RO guide underwent constant maintenence by fans, and was subject to extreme organic growth despite no manual intervention on my part. The level of curation, attention to detail, and the extent to which it was taken was fascinating--and I didn't initiate any of it. I was always impressed by the Ragnarok community. Sadly, memory of those days was marred when a trusted friend that was running sysops hijacked my domain name account and stole the site from under me when I was overseas. But it was a good lesson in never trusting anyone and not to under any circumstance reuse passwords. (Granted, I swear Godaddy's password reset was an idempotent no-op back then... My account changes never seemed to persist.)

dllthomas 12y ago
"idempotent no-op" Isn't that the only kind?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mhd 12y ago

Hope that this is better code than the OS Ultima Online stuff I looked at years ago. Which looked a lot like decompiled binaries, even the original code…

byuu 12y ago
Ultima Online was just a nightmare. They constantly released major protocol changes with each new patch, and those were pushed out on an almost weekly basis. It was still really fun though to play as a GM on your own little personal server and melee guards. Oh, I'd give the world to play that game again, pre-Trammel, with the active user counts that existed back in the day. The only choice today is the ruined mainline (WoW clone) servers, or ghost-town private (T2A) servers :(

JonLim 12y ago

Incredibly impressed. I'm at work, and it's working superbly, with no noticeable lag or stuttering. I... I should stop. Great work!

u124556 12y ago

I wonder in how many years we'll be able to play WoW or GuildWars2 on our browsers.

Kiro 12y ago

Where is the actual JS code for the client?

vthibault 12y ago
You can find it at https://github.com/vthibault/roBrowser/tree/master/ https://github.com/vthibault/roBrowser/tree/master/ in the src folder.

abjorn 12y ago

Now you can grind your life away from the comfort of your own browser.

leishulang 12y ago

when will Starcraft brood war html5 that are capable of 2v2 online multiplayer available?

sitkack 12y ago
18 months?
Lambdanaut 12y ago
Never if Blizzard has anything to say about it. Every time somebody tries to port SC, Blizzard shuts them down. Their lawyers are bloodthirsty.
slacka 12y ago
The tools to decompile starcraft were released on github. The next step is to recompile it to HTML5 instead of ARM. You can read about it here: http://pandoralive.info/?p=3089 http://pandoralive.info/?p=3089

aaron-lebo 12y ago

Are they using assets from the original game (if so, are they legally available), or is everything open source and original content?

andypants 12y ago
It uses assets from the original game. Tou can download the desktop client and assets for free from the official ragnarok website, but I don't know if it's legally allowed to use the assets in this way. All the privately run servers also use the original assets. This web client automatically downloads the required assets though. When I used the demo it just worked automatically. I didn't need to manually download anything.
serf 12y ago
Yes they are using original assets. No it's not open source or legal, but Gravity appears to have given up on legally defending the game after eAthena got to a workable stage, as witnessed by innumerable pay-for-items private servers which all profit on original assets created by Gravity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAthena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAthena

bundy 12y ago

Welp, time to go recreate my Sniper and go MVPing. Thanks for the post, definitely going to check it out!

chao- 12y ago

Some of my earliest lessons in "how not to write software" came from listening to the ranting of a friend who worked on the original eAthena implementation (i.e. back when it forked from the Japanese Athena project and gained the "e" in its name). All of the fragile handoffs between the multiple server types (character, map, login) and the client. Most notable were the mountains of code, network and otherwise, that had to be written in knowingly buggy, inefficient or incorrect manner simply to properly mimic the official server functionality. There was also one attempt to make an alternative client for the official servers to deal with some of the lackluster interface issues (longstanding, serious/obvious bugs from 2002 that lasted until 2009ish). From what I recall, it was way too much work, and the core features were easier to deliver as a sort of (eula-breaking) addon to the official client.

BoppreH 12y ago
I've read parts of the eAthena source code recently (https://github.com/eathena/eathena https://github.com/eathena/eathena) and was very impressed with the code quality. Maybe they fixed the code base, or I didn't hit the worst parts, but I left feeling it was in good hands.
- chao- 12y ago
  Oh yeah, while I haven't read the source directly in years, it is much changed. I was referencing 2004, only six months or so after iRO officially came out of beta. To say it improved since then is an understatement. Based on what I last knew about the scripting capabilities of the Gravity server implementation (circa 2008), I can safely say that eAthena eventually came to provide an easier model for rudimentary content creation and management than the official software. Never mind security. Trying to wrap your head around the code behind why opening a dialog via item X and performing client action Y on the keyboard would bypass what should have been a server-side security check for a very important game mechanic was a lesson in all sorts of SE principles. Unnecessary coupling and spooky action at a distance, for starters. Repeat this a hundred times and mix in a handful of SQL injection points, plus some fundamental disagreements in how and when the game's content assumed characters would appear on a new map, versus how and when the official servers actually worked. I am curious if and how eAthena eventually deviated from some of the idiosyncratic behavior of the official game servers. From what I've heard in the years since I stopped playing, though, is that Gravity took the profits from their microtransaction e-store and managed to actually plow that money into improvements for the GM team's ability to meaningfully manage their servers and community. So my first paragraph likely applies only to a bygone era.

d357r0y3r 12y ago

Next up: open-source HTML Ragnarok Online bots.

copypasteweb 12y ago
Meanwhile you can probably connect HTML client to already existing open-source non-HTML bot [1] using its bot-as-a-proxy feature. Adding automation stuff directly to HTML client shouldn't be hard, assuming network protocol handling and state keeping already provided for you. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openkore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openkore

hardwaresofton 12y ago

This game was the first MMO I really got into. In the back of my mind, I always wondered if a project like this could be done (given that RO is MUCH less resource intensive than the quake engine, and other html5 demos I've seen, etc)... I am so happy to see this project exist, I love this.

mkr-hn 12y ago

I saw this a few months ago. I never thought I would see it on HN.

pesto88 12y ago

welp, time to make Second Impact before Paul finds out

gdiocarez 12y ago

Yeah!

notastartup 12y ago

게토레이드