This program parses a packet capture file in the pcapng format, like those produced by wireshark, and extracts any data important for the historical preservation of Funcom's MMORPG Anarchy Online.
The overarching goal of this project is to preserve the game in its current state so that it may be played long after the official servers have ceased operation. There has been great effort put into making historical games playable in their original form, such as the MESS and MAME projects. MMORPGs present an extra challenge, as not only is the game logic implemented in a server that is rarely publicly available, but the a large part of the game's content is also held on the server and transmitted to the user on request.
This project focuses on the second challenge, preserving the game's content.
I only tested this on VS2010, but since I intend to run it server-side I will port it to mono as soon as I can.
Get (some of) the dependencies using git submodule init git submodule update
Get ZLib.Net and place it in the lib directory.
Open AOCapture.sln
Open an issue if I forgot a step lol
This program parses and reassembles TCP packets into a stream, and parses AO packets. (in part thanks to the PcapngFile and AOtomation libraries)
It doesn't do anything more than that yet. It needs to:
- extract the data into a database.
Other modules will need to:
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deduplicate the data, merge conversation graphs, infer spawn locations and movement patterns, infer shop price distributions
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bundle winpcap along with an uploader and nice UI, since we don't want to require that users run wireshark.
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a web front-end needs to receive the capture files.
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It would be a Really Good Idea to discard authentication data before file upload, but that would require having a whole parser on the client side.
It is my hope that the program developed in the deduplication and merging phase of the project will be reusable for other MMORPGs. Ideally someone would do this far earlier in a game's lifetime. (AO is 13 years old!)
While we will never be able to recreate the original experience of playing an MMORPG, since much of it is driven by the players, I hope to at least preserve the worlds in which we played. If you want to preserve the rest, you'd need MMO journalists and historians.