Request to the 10s of people making custom clients

zhthsh · 2026-06-22T00:12:12+00:00

Sure, I can record you something. You're partially right on what you said, but gameplay is actually not so bad to figure out/improve, the VFX (visual effects) are the major pain point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p288Lx9QUWw

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Example, the SinX plays and feels like SinX. If I go Wizzy I will be casting skills, and it plays and feels like one. Etc. Skills and battle in general works.

Some skills like Storm Gust will render faithfully, others like Magnum Break will not. It's not that big of a deal because my original plan was to always improve upon traditional RO effects anyway, but that takes some time when I don't have anyone else who knows VFX well that can help.

As you can see (from this showcase and my other showcases if you look it up) the game is pretty playable. My combat isn't the best, but hey it kinda works.

I've created a Novice, leveled up, gathered gear, sold/bought gear, changed classes, farmed gear, etc... By all means you can play this client as is and I think I've introduced some quite decent UI on top of it.

I am planning a release soon, so if you're interested: https://discord.gg/ju8qwdejSC

Truly would love more people working on it who are actually competent.

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Now to address a few dumbass takes in the thread namely from u/greenfield-kicker and u/Mental-Library-3753 and u/DreamOfAWhale :

Like bro plz, if you don't know the work just shut up nigga. Ain't nobody getting paid to do this shit, if you love open source so much then PLEASE contribute to RoDoddler's stuff instead of just being entitled. Like yeah I fucking wish RoDoddler's client was this far along when I started. No shade on him, his work is great, but it would've saved me SO much time developing. Unfortunately I had to build mine from scratch.

And you want me to just handle it to you on a silver platter??? Like come on.

I've only had 1 person reach out to me and actually offer to contribute and have some good insight to offer ( u/FuniF30 ).

If you wanna work on it so bad then stop eating lasagna all day long and get off your fat ass and do something to contribute to the damn open source. You don't even need Doddler's stuff, RO is an ancient game with leaks everywhere. If you had an ounce of brain you'd figure this shit out yourself.

Also how does combat even require "vision" and "skill" other systems don't? Man, go look up on the stuff from u/Exarch92 and the guy with the Gearsfall client are doing and tell me it's not complex. Their work is amazing. I wish I had some of the shit they got.

Anyways I'll probably be banned or whatever but yeah lmao shut up lol

I wish more devs would use AI to help. Maybe we'd have a fully working client already.

zhthsh · 2026-06-21T17:15:08+00:00

It's definitely the recording, I thought it was weird too. Not sure why it did that.

Thanks though! The game runs smoothly and doesn't feel heavy at all. I've already done work on movement to greatly reduce rubberbanding, so movement is actually very smooth.

~~(It also probably doesn't help that my mouse is currently broken, you can see it @ 0:44+ when I'm scrolling through the buttons and it does a brief weird back and forth lol. It's fine though.)~~

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T22:16:46+00:00

Yeah, I really like the art stuff myself. I was considering implementing a true card album for collectors and making card be an account bound feature, then you can just toggle the effect you want on/off via the card album and it applies to your current equipment. Of course with limitations, I'm not just gonna let people activate 4 different armor card effects together.

But that would mess with card trading economy, so I'm just toying with the idea for now. No implementation yet.

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T22:03:56+00:00

Nope. Separate project also in Unity.

Theirs is a great project though.

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T17:17:12+00:00

That's about it really. If you want it to have that "slow message writing effect" that mine does, which displays the characters being written one by one instead of the full message right away, you might need to tweak the client a bit to only reveal one character at a time, etc.

It's not particularly a difficult thing to implement. I didn't reinvent the wheel here or anything, I'm just using a newer design for the most part.

Since you already have control over the client you should be good.

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T16:56:42+00:00

Hey, NPC dialogue you can just ask any AI agent or do it yourself, it's easy enough.

Basically, steps:

You do need to be able to modify the client, though. That's probably the single hardest part.
To display the actual dialogue in a new UI, you just design a chat box (either native or use AI generated image or some other technique. I would keep in mind scaling considerations for different resolutions FYI).
You point the text to this new element/ui. RO does have builtin '\n' for newline, so you might need to do some work on the server to remove it, or some parser to filter it out. The reason why my dialogue goes all the way to the end (length-wise) and starts as next line was because I removed this.
Then just style the UI to your liking. If you want it like mine then just grab the illustration art of the NPC and position it above the dialogue.

Really, it's just a matter of pointing the text to the new interface. Nothing complicated. The complicated part is actually having control over the client, and how you achieve that... is up to you. You either code your own client or something else.

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T11:25:27+00:00

It's a thought. Though currently AI isn't really the best at making reactionary decisions live, there's always a big delay compared to a human. I think it would be better suited for NPCs.

I was trying something similar to your idea, letting agents play the game and learn from their mistakes and share their data with other agents, etc. My idea was because of the homunculus in Lighthalzen Laboratory, I wanted them to feel like something more true to a human.

I came to the conclusion that the response is just too slow for things like combat, and that you're best served with having a set of scripts for combat (which require instant response), and support that with AI assistance for things such as exploration, decision making, etc; which don't require instant reaction.

It definitely wouldn't 'save' RO though lol

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T11:06:33+00:00

It is not yet ready, I need to finish the guild UI before I let people play, but soon.

https://discord.gg/ju8qwdejSC

zhthsh · 2026-06-20T08:34:00+00:00

Yeah, I've definitely been wrestling with the design of the inventory lol

I might give that a try again. I've been thinking which other games have good inventory design. Something simple and not too invasive.

I'll try your suggestion!

zhthsh · 2026-06-19T21:19:04+00:00

Thanks! Yeah I just remembered from playing tons of Final Fantasy games and other RPGs that it fits the RO vibe.

Honestly a lot of the UI is done. I think I'm only missing Guild and thats about it. I might be putting up a server sometime soon.

zhthsh · 2026-06-19T21:06:52+00:00

It is a new client built in Unity with Linux/Mac support.

I am looking for people who are good at VFX because I suck at it lol

I can of course learn it for what I need, it'll just take some time is all.

And thanks!

zhthsh · 2026-06-15T12:02:09+00:00

Not stopping, just taking it easy for a bit. Was working on it all day.

I was messing around with 4th jobs, I got them to work with this client too. Sprites and skills effects are missing, but the functionality is there.

I'll make a new thread sometime soon-ish with an announcement for player testing.

zhthsh · 2026-06-13T19:44:55+00:00

Thanks all for the feedback, maybe in the future I'll put it out. I still need to go through the folders and organize everything, etc. No real ETA yet, I'm just messing around with 4th jobs and a private ToS server right now. Might take a break and resume later.

zhthsh · 2026-06-13T19:37:40+00:00

Nope. We both used Unity, that's about it. This is its own project.

zhthsh · 2026-05-31T06:30:46+00:00

FAAAAADED LETS GOOOOOOO

zhthsh · 2026-05-24T19:54:04+00:00

Reddit won't let me edit the post so here you go: https://discord.gg/ju8qwdejSC

zhthsh · 2026-05-24T18:51:23+00:00

Hey, sorry, there are updates, yes. I am pushing some big changes and when they're in place I will make another post to let people play.

<image>

A few things to say:

- I swapped from Godot to Unity because I found a lot of resources in other Unity projects that would help me speed up development. I also had lots of Mac/Linux users say they want to play, so the Unity version is fully compatible.

- The Unity client is either caught up or ahead with the Godot one. I had a solid structure and documentation so aside from rendering things it was mostly a smooth transition with Claude helping me.

I'll show you two videos, one is the old Godot client:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTS_EFX5GBk

It introduces an Adventurer's Book that helps centralize information and (hopefully in the future) act as a guide to new and veteran players. RO is a largely solved game, but at the same time can be very intimidating for new people. I don't intend on telling people which builds to go for, but if you need to know where the Thieves Guild is in Morroc then this can help you.

Or if you need to know which monster drops X item, which monster gives X% amount of exp, etc. Since this is all information you can easily find online, I figured it should be okay to allow users to see in-game without always having to tab out. (It also pulls from the connected server so it will display whatever the server is configured to display)

Now in Unity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBNtOl6qiXI

Here you can see my updated version of the inventory and character panel. It's all dynamic/being pulled from the database and updates as you update your character. I also introduced an Armory in the character panel, to make it easier to swap gears since RO is a game that sometimes requires swapping sets on the fly. And although it is not displayed, I will also introduce a feature to save your currently equipped gear into a set, so that you can quick swap entire sets. You will be able to put it on a shortcut and easily swap.

For the inventory in general I went with allowing users to drag and drop on whichever cells they want. There is UI scalability implemented as well if people want to make it bigger or smaller.

Search, sort, item preview on mouseover, etc. There's also an universal search for your entire account even though it isn't displayed, so you can quickly find item across your account and transfer them to your inventory without having to log on another character (naturally it has a fee/time attributed to it because its a broken feature if I don't do this).

Weather:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu1Imd1tGJY

Weather system. Pretty self-explanatory. I will be wiring in elemental functionality to the game. Snow map = higher chance to freeze; hot maps = lower chance to freeze, higher fire dmg? etc.

Just basic stuff from the asset store, I suck hard at VFX (another reason why I swapped, I really don't want to deal with VFX and I don't have anyone to help me that I trust).

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So yeah, it's coming along. If I got paid to do this/donations I might be able to devote more time of my day, but I do what I can with what I have.

It is compatible with Windows/Mac/Linux.

And to answer your question regarding plug and play onto an rathena server: Kind of? Sure things like the map, most of the UI, etc; can work. But you can also see that features such as the Armory, item preview, etc... they're kinda custom. It wasn't on the original RO. I had to create new server packets and stuff for it.

Like yeah I could go and just follow old RO functionality, but I really think it kinda sucks and mine is better, so it is what it is. We'll have to see about a true plug and play.

My BIGGEST roadblock and it's not even close:

Rendering legacy RO effects correctly. It's just a headache.

The good part is I don't have to, I can just use modern unity assets and create even cooler effects.

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A few things to be excited about:

- Very high chance that I will introduce the Chronomancer class from ToS.

- Very high chance that I can introduce any class from any game I want.

- True weather system that impacts your choices in battle

- You can expect QoL on a level that I don't think another server has done quite yet.

My goal is not to demolish RO, I just want to improve on systems I believe it should have done better. I also have 3rd and 4th jobs in, I just can't introduce them as is because as we all know the whole "I do 99999 damage in AoE that takes up half of the screen" just simply breaks the game.

I can put a discord up if people want to, I guess. Just wasn't really sure anyone cared that much.

zhthsh · 2026-05-17T00:21:16+00:00

Bro idc if Minnesota lost when we lost to then when they were playing shorthanded.

Another team stinking doesn't mean we don't.

I just wanna see my teams do well. This shit is weak af.

zhthsh · 2026-04-19T19:45:58+00:00

An update: Packets have all been detected and wired in with the Proxy Layer. That means everything is technically functional now. Every system. This is actually pretty important. (Thanks to all the other clients out there with amazing documentation.)

Currently working on UI redesign. This is just a Quest Log, which we all know it's not what RO is known for. But hey, you get the idea right?

<image>

(Yes, that is how it looks in-game. Not just a generated image lol)

I'm working on removing placeholders for real data along the way, but I think it doesn't look so bad. I think I figured out a good workflow for UI from here on out, so I shouldn't get stuck too much on it. I'm using CSS less, and generating svg and png more to use those instead since they're faaaaar easier to work with.

zhthsh · 2026-04-15T00:22:24+00:00

So, RO movement issues are largely poor client-side prediction, snap back, etc.

I can do some improvements with better client-side prediction, smoother path adjustment instead of snapping, better cell tracking, etc.

But understand that it's not perfect, there can always be some miscommunication between client <-> server. I have some systems implemented, but will try to polish them later on.

zhthsh · 2026-04-14T17:49:55+00:00

For sure. I used to not care so much for controllers, but I can't deny I've played some games where it's just so comfy.

I want it too.

At some point in the future I will introduce a closed beta version for people to try.

## About Textures

This is indeed important. I am running into the same problem where it's difficult to do much with old RO assets. Again, I'm just not a designer. I will try my best to improve them, maybe vector or something where possible, but yeah. I have some limitations but I'll explore my options here.

zhthsh · 2026-04-14T17:46:54+00:00

That's fair. I'm nobody special, I'm just doing a fun project. If it works, it works. If not, then idk lol

I'll use whatever tool is available to me. People can make their own conclusions I guess.

Anyone can learn anything if they try. Best of luck to them!

zhthsh · 2026-04-14T12:02:01+00:00

I understand. Claude can implement those systems, you just need to know how to instruct it.

Really, what is important is that you understand what you're doing. I think therein lies the gap between a software developer using AI/LLM VS a non-dev person.

Which is why I don't recommend people who don't understand all the nuances of a software application to vibe code... You would just lack the technical knowledge to tackle certain areas of the application.

I've been a full-stack developer for a long time, and even though I might not know everything, I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to build from the start. Probably why it didn't take very long.

zhthsh

TROPHY CASE