Developer & Design Tooling

Over the past 7 months we have worked dilligently to understand as much of the Anarchy Online clients as possible. Much hard work has gone into parsing the client side relational database (rdb). We have the many of the record types mapped and the dive through each bit and byte continues. In our journey, we've often stumbled upon interesting easter eggs and oddities throughout the client and the rdb.

The reason we have spent so much time understanding the rdb is because ultimately we would like to create a world builder/editor similar to "Tide". A tool that will give us the ability to view, place, modify and edit textures, meshes and other statels.

This is an incredibly challenging task! FC has burried (albeit perhaps unintentionally) all sorts of hurdles to overcome. Variations in rotational math, forward byte order, randomly reverse byte order, 3F1 (don't ask), we can go on and on.

But we do enjoy the work. It is sort of a hunting game. Digging through bytes and getting an idea of what is what.

One thing we thought we'd share is yet another example of FC's quirkyness. Has anyone ever noticed that in Old Athens there are bottles lying around the ground? Litter!

If you look closely you can see the texture below. To think some game designer likely in the late 90s sat down and sketched out that little bottle. Digging through the internals of this game has taught us the appreciate the love and time put into the smallest of details.

More to come!

Sincerely,

Portaler

Developer | Co-Founder