Bravo!

[galoko]

I just want to thank you for your monumental work. I was literally astonished to find all of this available for free. However, I keep wondering—did the LU4 team do even more work, or did the source code for the Lineage 2 client leak at some point? Given all this guesswork and ancient UE2 docs? Just want to say—bravo!

[realratchet]

Thanks. I'm not aware of any available source leaks other than headers part that are part of the leaked map editor for Interlude which are not much use to me because offsets are all wrong in the game version I'm using. Even having proper headers would be useful to me because it would eliminate a lot of guess work. There's also very old UT leaks which while sometimes helpful a lot of the stuff NCSoft did is custom. I haven't tracked much of what LU4 does but my impression was that they re-implement all the functionality in the UE4 while just loading textures, meshes & animations which is the easy part as the UE asset format is pretty well known (see UEViewer). I'm trying to actually preserve things like lightning and so I usually need to dig pretty deep into assembly for certain things.

[realratchet]

Also to add to that my plan was never to package the assets themselves into the client and instead the user would select where the game is installed and load assets from local disk thanks to the newer HTML5 APIs allowing this. This way NCSoft can't pin copyright infringement on me & no overhead for transferring assets back to the client from server saving infrastructure costs. Granted that idea is so far away it doesn't matter now.

[galoko]

Yeah, makes sense. I was also looking into bunch of tools, UEViewer, etc. It's super hard to decipher these file formats, since 1/3 of it is custom, 1/3 of it is unused and 1/3 of it is UE2. I went with easy path, I have C++ converter that first converts every L2 file into human readable JSON and then I parse that JSON into GLTF. Of course a lot of data is missing, it's overwhelming how rich UE2 format was back in what, 2000, 2003 or so. I'm really interested in visualization of sound placement, and also I want to learn how to glue character models together into single GLTF, maybe one day.

[realratchet]

I haven't done much in sound handling other than decoding but I think that there are two types of audios: soundscapes and point sounds. Point sounds are self explanatory, soundscapes play when you enter certain portals/bsp trees. A lot of the UE format extensions that L2 adds are things like intensity and shadow maps, sometimes it's even multiples for each segment of the daytime to simulate day-night cycle. Decoding this for terrain is the last thing I was working on. As for characters, it's actually pretty straight forward. It's mostly standard UE2 animation scheme but the character models are made up of multiple segments where each segment is different armour, here I have samples of same character using different armour https://x.com/Lineage2JS/status/1598373104010596354 and even with basic character controller https://youtu.be/VWZ_7xrkiiw

[galoko]

I was mostly looking into NPCs
https://galoko.github.io/l2-gallery/

[realratchet]

Oh that's quite nice. Heads up, in case you're not yet aware the game stores mob attachments like Antharas'es glowing in UEScript, I never got to making an emulator for it but I read all the bytecode successfully although there's available human readable version packaged with it too. In any case good luck.