MADE / Source Code Update

[OSIAS]

MADE / Source Code Update

Please understand MADE is a none profit; they do this as a passion project and do not get paid much for what they do. They work hard to keep the doors open for as many as possible, if you appreciate what they are doing please go to there site and perhaps give a donation.

Today I spoke with someone at MADE regarding the Shadowrun Chronicles Source Code. While I am working to track down a few more leads, I likely won’t have another update for a month or two after today. If I have updates faster than that Woot!

Here are a few asks:

Please don’t spam them with requests, they are limited in their resources and capabilities, doing so only slows the process down.

Please funnel all our asks or information we can provide back to them here. I don’t mind helping coordinate.

Updates:

Covid lockdowns in California was very difficult for all businesses. Even more so for non-profits such as MADE, much of the staff that was present during Shadowrun Chronicles Source code handoff is no longer present.

There is a possibility of inventory being lost, damage or not accounted for.

There could also be some legal concerns they want clarity on.

Right now, I am working to get in touch with Mak from another forum thread to see if he can get me in touch with Jan Wagner. Just to see if he can provide any further information that could be helpful.

If anyone has information, they believe could be relevant to tracking down the source code and breathing life into it again. Please post here and I will send you a friend invite to discuss further.

Thank You

[ScarlxtPink]

Heya, feel free to add & message me I have some information to share about the game and progress that I've made on it. I had also added Ziggy but I'm unsure if they're going to get back to me on that. Twitter is @ScarlxtPink if you prefer that way.

[OSIAS]

ScarlxtPink - Friend invite sent

Mak also helped securing a friend invite to Ziggy. I will work to have a conversation with him everyone's time permitting.

[gordonfreeman01]

Thanks for doing this, I asked a few times spread over years if I could personally assist with these preservation efforts/what was the process to apply etc and never heard back from the MADE. It's great to see someone physically present in the area taking up the cause, wishing you all the best! My own take is that Ziggy has the most knowledge about the game's assets and the work left to bring it back and he had a great direction for it. All legal stuff was already handled previously (that's how MS agreed to this in the first place), so unless something changed, at this point it should be purely technical.

[OSIAS]

I make no promises, I am just seeing what can be done and attempting to put the right people together. I have some updates but awaiting more definitive information before providing so I hopefully don't have to back track anything.

@gordonfreeman01 Do you have some sort of specific insight about the MS legal hand off that you can point me to. You must understand when new personal get involved sometimes certain items must be reconfirmed.

Let me know & Thank You

[gordonfreeman01]

Originally posted by OSIAS:

I make no promises, I am just seeing what can be done and attempting to put the right people together. I have some updates but awaiting more definitive information before providing so I hopefully don't have to back track anything.

@gordonfreeman01 Do you have some sort of specific insight about the MS legal hand off that you can point me to. You must understand when new personal get involved sometimes certain items must be reconfirmed.

Let me know & Thank You

It's in the mega thread but as there's a lot here are some pointers:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/267750/discussions/0/1742227264195100985/?ctp=47

The original post covers the arrangements made with the MADE, which only happened after it was cleared by MS legal since MS owns the IP. The page I pointed to here starts Ziggy's direct interactions with the community and his amazing vision for this project. There's about 10 pages to go through but this page and the next few after it should give a solid understanding of the situation technically. Maybe primetime_dev (the original developer) could help further for the arrangements but the fact anything was handed over at all was because the deal with MS was already finalised.

[Crunch]

Originally posted by ZiggyTheHamster:

Lest y'all think I ghosted everyone, your enthusiasm has made me rethink the blog post I wrote. Given the enthusiasm, I might be able to actually get the resources I need to make this happen. :)

Here's a list of what I'm looking for at the moment:

* Any copy of the non-Steam version of the game
* Any collection of patch installers
* Any source code, private SDK documentation, dev workflow, and/or an overview of the main software components of the game (this is directed at Primetide)
* Old screenshots of the various parts of the game
* Any description of the game going from launching it to getting in a mission (was there a secondary login system? character select screen? how did the lobby work? etc.)
* Software engineers who are familiar with the CLR

I've also done some poking and it appears that I have complete debugging symbols...so I can very likely decompile a lot of things.

[Crunch]

Originally posted by Crunch:

Originally posted by ZiggyTheHamster:

A disc image would also be helpful - maybe this includes the Linux/MacOS clients as well. Since the game is .NET, it's probably possible to shove the latest .dll's and whatnot into these clients to get working "Cliffhanger" clients on every platform. You should upload your disc image to archive.org if you can (I use ImgBurn to make disc images).

Done and done!

https://archive.org/details/shadowrun-chronic

(that is the name that was imprinted on the disk- Didn't change anything just in case) The box gives the requirements for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so I imagine it covers those platforms!!

I also appreciate all of the description of gameplay. Basically, I want to make sure that I can get the game to a state where it's playable and background events are working correctly, and I have no idea what that would look like if not for everyone's descriptions :).

Just ask, I'm sure many of us will be willing to describe stuff, and those videos above that Luke linked should be a big help as well!

Also, it's been a hell of a week or two at the day job, so I have not followed up until now. I doubt I'll be able to get anything going this week, but I am going to start with dropping the decompiled server-side code into our GitHub, whenever I can get around to it.

My goals:
* Get the server to compile in VS2022.
* Figure out all of the areas that the server has to connect to some external service and determine how we might internalize that (e.g., use SQLite instead of SQL Server and MongoDB). This means that running a single server somewhere becomes less scalable, but there's a whole lot of static data like items and drops and whatnot that could become static files on disk / SQLite databases, and it means that spinning up a peer-to-peer game becomes possible (otherwise you have to be a sysadmin to actually run it, and while we could run one server, I don't want to have to do this, and plus you should all be able to "DM" your own games).
* Get clients that can connect to this "stub" server. Preferably non-Steam, because this gives us greater control.

I think most of us understand the 'day job' problems, just happy to hear there's hope!

I hope my upload serves you well!

Crunch~

[Crunch]

I was about to link a post where he showed a video on his progress later in the thread, but Steam is being dumb at the moment.

Anyway, those are some of the most recent recaps of his progress. There's quite a bit of chit-chat to get through on that other thread, so I tried to condense it down to the more important parts.

Crunch~

[Crunch]

Here we go!

Originally posted by ZiggyTheHamster:

This looks like zero progress, but it's actually substantial progress:

https://twitter.com/ZiggyTheHamster/status/1567034291431047168

Last big update he was actually able to access the character select screen

[Crunch]

This was his last post (at least on these forums for Shadowrun) March of last year

Originally posted by ZiggyTheHamster:

As a few of you have determined, I'm the only one working on this, and only when I have free time from both my day job and my family... so progress has been quite slow. The biggest problem with open sourcing anything is that there is no game source - it must all be decompiled from .NET debugging data which doesn't always exist and isn't always decompileable. On top of that, it depends on several commercial products which have long stopped being supported by their vendors (and the updated versions are not compatible), and the Shadowrun intellectual property makes it difficult to just drop the server binaries on the Internet Archive or something (I'm not concerned at all that Cliffhanger is going to be mad if I did that, FWIW).

I should also mention that the architecture is a bit bizarre (and I say this as someone who designed and currently works on software that regularly gets 100-1000x the traffic that Shadowrun peaked at). Currently, the state I'm at is that I can get the game to load up and try to make characters, but the way the character APIs work is that it goes through two layers of encapsulation which are both commercial products (and one is defunct, though thankfully they supplied debugging symbols and I was able to decompile it). The game would be undistributable if it depended on the other library, because it relies on a license key which I have but is not currently legally licensed (nor would it be, because of the aforementioned being ancient).

The basic design is that the game state/game server goes through APlay, which I've decompiled, and both chat messages and API calls go through Photon (which is the commercial product that still exists but is way newer now and incompatible). I'm not sure if games these days would send critical game requests like creating or selecting characters and stuff via the chat service, but this one does, and this either needs stubbed out or it needs to be replaced. Both of these are not terribly simple to do, whereas getting the game where it loads up and runs was pretty easy once I decided to stop making the existing architecture work when it basically cannot.

As far as the financial side of this goes - you should see if Steam will refund your gifted games, because whatever we release will not require Steam (nor can it really). The game does not actually even implement any DRM as far as I can tell, so nothing would stop you from running it without owning a copy other than that the server checks if you have a valid Steam ticket (except I am lying to the server and saying everyone has a Steam ticket). Also, I am flattered about the suggestion to find a way to pay me to exclusively work on this, but if you look me up on LinkedIn, you would find why I don't think that would work :). I'm hoping to be able to take a few days off where I can secure childcare and all that and then try to see how much of the game can be patched out while it still works. I'm not sure when that is, but that's definitely on my mind all the time.

All that said - if any of you have experience with C# decompilation and do have a ton of free time, contact the MADE and mention that. It's pretty easy for me to share what I've got, but what I've got includes every public and private message ever sent on the set of servers I've got images of, so you can imagine that they'd have to do the whole background check thing and then whatever legal needs these days.

[OSIAS]

Crunch can you send me a friend invite please. I am hoping to catch up on everything over the weekend and provide a mini update on several topics. Wish I could just edit my top thread.

Crunch is that everything of relevance from Ziggy in the other thread? I was intending to read through it with a fine comb this weekend, but if this is everything I won't.

Favor, lets not turn this into a scrawl dump but an up to date on point of where we stand.

If you have information, were apart of, know something, have time to dedicate, want to help etc. Please make a quick post about it here and send me a friend invite.

Currently I am identifying all parties involved, what they got, progress, legalities etc as there are multiple avenues to success still on the table.

Then I will move into planning and putting the correct people together. Glad to hear people would like to see standalone fan servers.

I will work to be around some tonight,
Cheers

[gordonfreeman01]

Originally posted by OSIAS:

Crunch can you send me a friend invite please. I am hoping to catch up on everything over the weekend and provide a mini update on several topics. Wish I could just edit my top thread.

Crunch is that everything of relevance from Ziggy in the other thread? I was intending to read through it with a fine comb this weekend, but if this is everything I won't.

Favor, lets not turn this into a scrawl dump but an up to date on point of where we stand.

If you have information, were apart of, know something, have time to dedicate, want to help etc. Please make a quick post about it here and send me a friend invite.

Currently I am identifying all parties involved, what they got, progress, legalities etc as there are multiple avenues to success still on the table.

Then I will move into planning and putting the correct people together. Glad to hear people would like to see standalone fan servers.

I will work to be around some tonight,
Cheers

I think Crunch put up everything but it may still be worth going over the pages of the thread after Ziggy's first post just to be sure. I'd be happy to help with this project, sent you a friend request. If that helps, my own summary of events is as follows:
1. The source code and user data is with the MADE. This was only done after full sign-off from MS.

2. Upon analysis by Ziggy, it was discovered that some of the important middleware in use was out of support and some source code was potentially missing. When Ziggy posted on the thread (which I linked to earlier), a discussion with primetime_dev happened and they figured out some symbols they could use to help reverse engineer some of the missing stuff. Ziggy had gotten to the point of getting sign in to at least partially work.

3. Ziggy's post detail his designs and challenges already but overall:
a) The game data currently has lots of sensitive user data so it can't be released as is to the public. Some players don't care, my own suggestion was to use the Steam SSO so players can return to their old save once the server is back.
b) Some quest data may be missing from the data - Crunch very helpfully has extensive playthroughs which he shared on the thread so if needed the data can be recovered.
c) The code may be messy and getting the server to run on a single client machine requires some re-engineering which Ziggy had started. Don't know current status but he might have reached further than his previous update.
d) Ideally, having an open source server hostable on any user's system where others could connect would ensure the game is always available to players and can be maintained even if abandoned by whoever first re-releases it.
e) The community for this game is eager to get the game back online.

[Crunch]

Friend invite sent!

Those are the biggest points, but it might be worth scrolling through (at least pages 55-62? if you're looking at 15 messages per page) as I didn't just infodump the whole conversation, and I may have missed a finer point or two he had said about the structure, etc.. There's definitely some software notes he mentioned (as gordonfreeman01 pointed out).

He did also mention anyone involved would need to get approved by The MADE for legal reasons (the server data had private information from back on retail, so a security check of some kind would be required).

Sadly, while I'm an avid fan of Shadowrun, I am not of the programming/Decking variety, so my contributions (outside of the physical disk I scanned, my moral support, and my charting of all the dialogue and popup options in a manuscript before shutdown) is limited. I DO appreciate that someone is willing to pick up the reins and "project manage" this into something that may bear fruit sooner than later, however!!

Crunch~

[Crunch]

Oh, and while Jan (Primetide) wasn't as much a programmer on the project as a lead that I'm aware of, he could probably get you in touch with some of the folks that were.

In any case, g'luck chummer!

Crunch~

[OSIAS]

Crunch thanks for the conversation and information.