About Project Rubi-Ka
Project Rubi-Ka is a server emulator project for the classic science fiction massively multiplayer roleplaying game Anarchy Online, originally developed by Funcom.
The end goal of this project is to produce server software which is fully compatible with the Anarchy Online client to allow for players to experience the game far into the future, even if the original servers shut down, and potentially to play on alternative third-party game servers which uniquely differ from the official live servers hosted by Funcom.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here's the answers to some questions which may be on your mind. If you still have questions after reading, please feel free to reach out with any questions you have, or join the project!
How can I get involved?
We're always very happy to welcome people to the project, whether you're just interested and passionate about Anarchy Online like we are, or if you'd like to offer your skills and/or services to the project. We're especially always in need of good software testers, so if you think you could help us track down a few bugs and write up decent bug reports, please join the Project Rubi-Ka community!
Will you make money with Project Rubi-Ka? Do you take donations?
No, this project is entirely not-for-profit, and while we appreciate the sentiment, we're not accepting donations at the moment. If we ever need to consider spending more money on our server infrastructure, we might consider opening donations, but we will never profit from Project Rubi-Ka or add any sort of cash shop to the game. If you want to give us feedback, positive or negative, the best place is on the Project Rubi-Ka discord.
Are there any servers I can play on?
Yes, but you should not expect a normal game experience just yet. We still have a number of bugs ranging in severity from game-breaking to very minor, and you should not expect stability from our servers yet.
We may also wipe the databases, erasing all of your characters and progress, without any warning.
Which server(s) should I play on?
This is less of an issue to worry about anymore, because we've now hidden Notum from the server list, meaning that only Ithaca will show up there by default, but you can still connect to Notum if you need/want to for testing purposes - check out the section labelled "How do I connect to Notum?" on this page for details on how.
Long story short, you should play on Ithaca unless you have some good reason to play on Notum. We currently host two servers, named Notum and Ithaca. Ithaca is our testing server, it has much better hardware and will be a lot faster and more consistent to play on than Notum, although it may not have the very latest version of the emulator software running on it.
The Notum server is our dev server where the latest version of the emulator is deployed. It automatically gets updated whenever a developer makes a change to the code, so it can be highly unstable and you're likely to experience a number of bugs when playing on it. This server is only really intended for developers to use to check how their changes perform on a live server.
How is Project Rubi-Ka made?
By carefully inspecting the network traffic that occurs between your computer and Funcom's game servers, it is possible to determine how the Anarchy Online game server handles characters' actions and write code to emulate that as closely as possible. This is how we have developed the emulator behind Project Rubi-Ka. We have not seen any of Funcom's source code, and we have never had a copy of the official server software - Project Rubi-Ka is entirely the work of volunteer developers who are passionate about Anarchy Online.
We have, however, benefited hugely from the excellent work of other third-party developers of Anarchy Online tools and resources, who have been good enough to share their source code with the community over the years.
What's the legality of this project?
While none of us are lawyers, to the best of our knowledge, this project does not infringe on any laws - as mentioned above, we haven't ever seen any of Funcom's source code, so the emulator itself is an original work, made to be interoperable with the Anarchy Online client.
We feel it's quite unlikely that Funcom would ever take action against your accounts on the live Anarchy Online servers because of your participation in the Project Rubi-Ka community, but be warned that you do so entirely at your own risk.
What features are implemented?
Currently, we're a good way through development, but we still have quite a long way to go! Here's some of the things which are working, at least in part.
Supported features
- Walking, running, jumping and swimming.
- Zoning - travelling from one area to another.
- All major transportation systems such as Whompahs, Grid and Fixer Grid.
- Chat, including support for various channels.
- Equipping weapons, armour and implants.
- Concealment/hiding, sneaking and searching.
- Regular and special attacks, damage, death, and killing monsters.
- Loot tables, looting monsters, and getting credits from corpses.
- Gaining experience and levelling up, including title levels.
- Investing improvement points (IPs) into skills and attributes.
- Interacting with NPCs for shopping, conversations and quests/missions.
- Insurance terminals, saving, respawning, XP pool.
- Vendors, shopping, buying and selling.
- Crafting/tradeskilling.
- Gaining and investing perks points and using perk actions.
- Casting nano programs such as buffs, pet summons, combat spells, etc.
- Player organisations (including our awesome custom UI!)
- Probably a lot more that I forgot!
Not supported yet
- Land Control / Tower Battles
- Alien Invasion
- Lost Eden
- Legacy of the Xan
- Most quests and missions
- Probably a lot more that I forgot!
Here's some of the things we're prioritising working on at the moment:
- Dynamic missions (e.g. mission terminal missions)
- Complex NPC quest conversations (e.g. with scripting)
- Various bug fixes (these are regularly showing up!)
What expansion packs, if any, are you intending to support?
Long term, we would like to support most, if not all, of the expansions, as well as potentially creating some content of our own, but we haven't made any firm decisions yet.
At the moment, we have basic support for the core game, some of the Notum Wars content and a good chunk of the Shadowlands content. We are planning to prioritise work on the core game (Rubi-Ka) first, but we're not restricting anything at the moment. When we get closer to launch, it is possible that we will restrict players to the core game, to focus our efforts across a smaller development space.
Can I host my own server?
At the moment, no, the emulator is not available for public release, for a few reasons. Primarily, it would be quite a lot of work for us to support people setting up their own servers as it's quite a complex task at the moment. However, we haven't made a decision about whether we will release the emulator publicly when it's done for people to run their own servers, or just host it ourselves and provide public Project Rubi-Ka game servers - Anarchy Online already is quite a niche game and so it would be a shame to split the community across many servers. This is a decision that we're glad we don't have to make right now to be sure.
How do I connect to Notum?
At the moment, Notum is hidden from our server list to avoid confusion, you shouldn't use this server to play on - it's our dev testing server, the performance is much worse than on Ithaca and it can only really handle one player at a time and struggles to deal with large playfields. If you do need to connect to it for some reason (e.g. to test a bug or because a developer has deployed a change to it you want to check), you can connect to it by following this process:
- Browse to the directory which contains your Project Rubi-Ka launcher.
- Create (or edit) a file named servers.json
- This file should contain an array of servers with three properties: "serverName", "loginIp", and "loginPort". Here is an example file:
[
{"serverName": "notum", "loginIp": "217.79.255.79", "loginPort": 6000}
]
Once you have created this file, the Notum server should show up in the server list.