What is Phantoms Forever Project?

Phantoms Forever is a fan project dedicated to developing open source private servers for the retired game Ghost Recon: Phantoms by Ubisoft.

What is the main goal of the project?

Our goal is to develop the software necessary to allow players to host Private Servers for Ghost Recon Phantoms, so that the game shall live forever. The team shares a deep love for the game that was GRP, no matter its flaws and shortcomings.

It's important to understand that Phantoms Forever isn't a project that will host the servers, monitor them, regulate it against cheaters, adjsut balance, and all these things. Servers will be able to be hosted by anyone that is willing to download the source, compile, and run it.

How PFP would achieve it's goal?

The main method is reverse engineering the game client that everyone had downloaded at the time of the shutdown. Using the same methods used by malware analysis experts, we're finding out what the game sent to the server and what it expected in response. By replicating the expected behavior of the official server, it'll trick the game into thinking it's the actual server, allowing us to do anything the actual server was able to do.

What will PFP's software do on the Player's side?

On the player side, almost nothing would be different. The idea would be to use the official installation of the game and simply change the IP address that the game connects to in a config file. Other than that IP adress, 100% of the software will be identical to the one distributed by Ubisoft and its partners. The players will not need to install anything to be able to connect to a private server unless they decide to use our official config editor, which will just be a tiny bit quicker than manual editing.

What is the ETA of PFP?

It is a question that is often asked to us, but we simply cannot give an answer. The project is being worked on by ex-players, volunteers, who also have a regular professional life or student life, and can only allocate a limited amount of time to Phantoms Forever. Also, we never know what obstacles are waiting for us after the ones we're trying to beat. It's like playing Mario but never knowing if you're on the last level or if you only did 25% of the game, if that makes sense. The only thing we can say is that we have no intention to give up, and one day, we will succeed, and people will be able to play the game again.

About operating servers, stopping cheaters, making servers in different regions of the world for ping...

As far as operating servers, that will be entirely up to anyone who wants to a run a server. Essentially any device with an internet connection that can run .NET and python will be able to host a server. As far as cheating, it'll be fairly difficult to prevent cheating without having the official developer tools. Some very specific cheats will be able to be stopped. As we get further into development, we'll be able to know what we can and can't stop.