The History of WoW Emulation

[Dr. Livingstone]

I hope you guys enjoy this. I've been working on it for awhile. After the history I posted a lot of the emus that are or were circulating. If you have a link to an SVN for one of those emus please post it and I will update the post. Thank you.

Chapter 1: The Big Bang
Everything we work on today is brought to us by one man. Skull. Without Skull's drive to get his hands on a World of Warcraft Alpha client we wouldn't be working on the emus we have today. Originally Skull planned to hack into Blizzard with a good team, but this plan had some major flaws in it. No one is 100% sure of how Skull did it, but it is believed that he made contact with Blizzard and actually got the client from them. Shortly after the Alpha copy fell into Skull's hands, this was posted in many places.

Open-source proponents, crackers, and anarchists alike rejoice as an alpha version of World of Warcraft has allegedly been secured and is now supposedly making its way around warez circles. This news comes from Skull’s Hack Site who says WarForge (infamous for their work in battle.net emulation for the War3 and TFT betas) is already working on server software for the WoW leak.

Availability for those outside of cracking groups is limited at best and the situation has just now grown past rumor, but details and screenshots can be found here and here if you wish to judge for yourself.

After the client was out it couldn't be stopped. It was found in torrents for the next couple of months and forced Blizzard to announce that it was working on a new MMORPG called World of Warcraft. This announcement was quickly followed by the interest of an emulation legend, Lax.

Lax began reverse engineering WoW with just a couple of packet logs. Not everything in WoW was able to be packet logged as there was no server up for the Alpha at the time. Lax created an unnamed sandbox which would later be released by Coldice as Stormcraft Sandbox. This sandbox laid the groundwork for all emulators to follow. The sandbox had created a world that allowed people to explore the different unique places in World of Warcraft. It was a break through which will forever be remembered.

After Lax released his sandbox, he began work on Stormcraft "Town Hall". He spent a few weeks working on the structure of the core itself, and in those weeks created an architecture which allowed WoW to be truly emulated for the first time. During the time when Lax was starting "Town Hall," he hired other developers to script things like spells and pathfinding. These breakthroughs allowed almost 200 people to be on just one server. These numbers were unprecedented in emulation at that time.

Lax's team soon grew to hold some of the most famous names of emulation including; Generin, _Psycho, TheUndying, TheDamned, Alita, and Cain. These developers worked with Lax to create the first real WoW emulators. They named it StormCraft. Codemonkey also became a valuable member of the team as he had extensive knowledge of the .exe itself. And his contributions include the development of taxi nodes. Sadly Lax returned to work on MacroQuest 2, leaving emulation behind. Some dedicated developers continued on his work, but he was sorely missed.

Chapter 2: The Rise of Emulation
Emulators began to enter the scene en mass just after the release of Stormcraft. These emulators were being kept alive largely by the work of Skull and Lax, but many also started from scratch. These emulators listed below are the large part of the Rise of Emulation, and in many different ways assisted the community in reaching the point it is at today.

Rift
Owner: AlexM
Programming Language: Visual Basic
Scripting Languages: Unknown
Description:
Rift was developed by a one man team. AlexM worked hard to prove that Visual Basic could be a viable language for the creation of a WoW emulator. He got chat working and people were able to enter the world, but no one could see each other.
Status: DEAD
SVN/Website: Unknown

Future WoW
Owner: Stanz
Programming Language: Delphi
Scripting Languages: Unknown
Description:
Future WoW, or FWoW, was kept closed source for its entire lifespan. Stanz was the original creator of FWoW, and was the one who chose to code it in Delphi. FWoW led to the death of Rift as AlexM eventually left his project to join Future WoW. The project was abandoned by Stanz in 2006 after it was realized that the core would need to be entirely reworked. FWoW had no intentions of updating with the client, but worked to produce the best WoW possible with the client that already existed.
Status: DEAD
SVN/Website: Unknown

Team Python
The Team: Addictman, Battyone, DeathCheese, Deten, don, FreXX, Hedos, Jedite, jimmy, Munky, page_420, RandomGuy, tmm`, WantedMan, angelic666, c0mputar
Programming Language: C++
Scripting Languages: Unknown
Description:
Team Python scripted everything from the ground up. They did their own packet sniffing and worked up from square one. One of the few open source emulators out at the time. Had working vendors, mounts, items, combat, time changes, and gryphons, along with a whopping TWO spells. Team Python really pioneered the large amount of GM commands we see in emulators today.
Status: DEAD
SVN/Website: Unknown

Khaos
The Team: DMod, forbidden, DesIrae
Programming Language: C#
Scripting Languages: Unknown
Description:
Khaos was one of the first emulators to feature multi-core servers. These cores were the login, realmlist, and world servers which we see in many emulators today. Khaos supported movement, creatures, custom item dbs, flight paths, world where you go when you die in-game, quests and a combat system. Khaos remained private through its lifespan, and was brought down by big bad Blizzard.
Status: DEAD
SVN/Website: Unknown

Vibe
The Team: McKay34 and Spr4ttel
Programming Language: C++
Scripting Languages: Unknown
Description:
Vibe was a relatively small emulator that gained stardom for its being taken down by Blizzard, and handing over its source code to the Big Bad Wolf while dying. Vibe was known to hold a record number of people and was incredibly stable. Some say that some features from Vibe are actually found in Blizzard servers today.
Status: DEAD
SVN/Website: Unknown

WoWDaemon
The Team: Codemonkey, Foole, Tharaxis, and Benjou
Programming Language: C#
Scripting Languages: Unknown
Description:
WoWDaemon is sort of the Holy Grail of emulation. The best and brightest emulation gods came together to work on Codemonkey's first open source project. The project eventually died out, and Codemonkey released an older version of the source just before he left the team. WoWDaemon had reached a level which had not been seen previously in the WoW emulation world.
Status: DEAD
SVN/Website: Unknown

Just as everything was reaching its peak, Stormcraft returned. Generin brought a new group of developers together including; Codemonkey, AlexM, Fr3dBr. Stormcraft had moderate success, but never really reached a level equal to that of WoWDaemon at this point.

As everything seemed to be going great for emulation, Blizzard got involved. They started shutting down emulators and sites which supported them. GotWoW? itself was shut down by Blizzard. This dealt a major blow to the emulation community as it removed their home. After the death of GotWoW? Blizzard moved against emulators like Vibe, Stormcraft, and WoWCraft. They forced the emulators to provide their source codes to Blizzard, and it is often assumed that many of the code used by these emulators inspired Blizzard in its scripting of their own servers. After the fall of GotWoW? and the big emulators things came to a near halt in emulation.


Chapter 3: The Dark Ages of Emulation - Blizzhackers to WoWEmu
WoWEmu rose to be the only real emulator around. It had a monopoly on the emulation world, and this monopoly would throw the emulation community into a very rough time after its collapse. As WoWEmu worked hard to improve its emulator. Blizzhackers worked hard to crack everything WoWEmu did and to release it to the public. The war between Blizzhackers and WoWEmu eventually led to the collapse of WoWEmu and the death of Blizzhackers to the hands of Blizzard.

As Blizzhackers worked to crack the WoWEmu cores which were constantly being updated, WoWEmu itself worked hard to stop Blizzhackers from gaining access to the core itself. Blizzhackers continued to win out, and Wad continued to grow even more frustrated. Blizzhackers eventually pushed just a little too far, and Wad shut down WoWEmu. The massive monopoly fell, and all those little scripts/repacks which people had been releasing were useless. There wasn't an emulator left on the scene that could do anything close to what WoWEmu could do.

Sources/Credits:
GotWOW?
People who made these emus
People who I've interviewed for more info
An assortment of other sources including Sourceforge and other SVN's which helped give me some info about this stuff.

More coming soon. Just need to post it and get back to work. Hope you enjoy. If you want to update something just post here and I will update it in the main post. If you have a link to an SVN/website/download for any of these emulators please post here.

[Clain]

I used to have an old archive of old emulators, wiped off my hard drive and emupedia went down so google is your best luck.

[Dr. Livingstone]

>.< Alright. Thanks mate. I'll keep looking then. Been trying to find these damn things for awhile now.

[Henkke]

Why are you copy pasting columns off from GotWOW? ? Provide link to the original source if your going to c&p.

[Dr. Livingstone]

Please look at the sources I posted before you say anything. And I didn't once copy and paste info from GotWoW? It is just a great source for emu history stuff. So I used a lot of their info. I'm working on the next stuff right now. Hope this can be helpful to some people. And I'm currently collecting more info on emulators that are out right now which I will add in shortly. Thanks for reading.

[Gastricpenguin]

http://www.mmowned.com/forums/emulat...ted-later.html

A thread I can think of off the top of my head. There's like, 3 of these now.

[Dr. Livingstone]

The only reason I posted this was because there are a lot of errors in these history posts, and I intend to work on it for awhile, and keep it up to date. Hoping to get info on a lot of the cores out there now. Even cores like eWoW and CrystalCore.

[Nivelo]

How about telling me where are those errors so i could fix it on my site ;-) EDIT: Actually, rather look here Got anything to say? Say it here! - GotWOW?

[Vvdarknessvv]

Wow I enjoyed this quite a bit, really helps give you details about where all of this started. I plan on looking at the other post mentioned by the people posting on the topic to see what is similar and stuff, but this a good start as a source of information to help further ones knowledge.

[Aretsukusu]

really does give some good information

[LJN]

Emulation will not be as big as it was today or yesterday in a short time. Day by day there are less developers, more teams and droping out, and World of warcraft keeps creating new patches. It is to blame on the communities fault. We dystroyed Ascent, we left NCDB behind, and we constantly flame Arcemu, Hearthstone or try to hack them. It's a dying community. If the Ascent based emulators drop out then Mangos will be the only one left and if we do the same things we do today it wont be around either, all out of greed and envy.

[Vindicated]

^^ Tbh some of them dead are WAY better for the emulation community. Only one of those above though.

[Nonenone]

The only reason I posted this was because there are a lot of errors in these history posts, and I intend to work on it for awhile, and keep it up to date. Hoping to get info on a lot of the cores out there now. Even cores like eWoW and CrystalCore.

Ewow as in the guy who claimed to have a 100% beta core finished and then ran away after taking a hand full of WoW beta accounts?

[Sounddead]

Ewow as in the guy who claimed to have a 100% beta core finished and then ran away after taking a hand full of WoW beta accounts?

eWoW as in the new emu built in C# that you can read about like 4 threads down.

[advertiser103]

Wow, great topic!