[Emulation History] WoW emualtion history 101. Will be updated later.

[Ickybad]

Here is the ancient history of wow emulation its not finished fully but it will be soon.

Ancient History of WOW Emulation It all began with Skull’s wish to get his hands on World of Warcraft Alpha, which was purely internal and wasn’t supposed to get out of Blizzard itself. Skull's main goal was to gather a team to hack Blizzard to get the Alpha client. He tried first and last, and finally at the end of 2003, Skull finally manages to get the Alpha from somebody inside. It was never told how and exactly when, but it was out… 

This message was posted nearly everywhere…

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 this message the Alpha client started to spread thought torrents. People have been getting in great quantities, but there was no server to play on.

Blizzard’s response on leaking Alpha client…

"As many of you know, we are currently conducting an internal Alpha test for World of Warcraft. Our goal for this Alpha test is to provide the best possible experience for players when the Beta launches in early 2004. In order to accelerate the testing process, we recently allowed a small group of external testers to play the game. During this process, a collection of files was leaked to the Internet. While these files contain alpha content from the game, they are not fully playable and therefore do not convey the experience that World of Warcraft will provide when it is released. We are currently investigating this matter and will take serious action against those involved. As always, we appreciate the interest and enthusiasm that players around the world have for World of Warcraft, and we look forward to delivering a massively multiplayer game unlike any you have ever experienced. Until then, we ask that you refrain from sharing any content that doesn't come directly from Blizzard Entertainment.

Lax

At that time Lax started to reverse engineer World of Warcraft client without any clue what the original server looked like. He didn’t have packet logs, and nothing like that, since there was not public Blizzard server for Alpha. He managed to code an Alpha server (in C++) and add several features without the glimpse of official servers. It was named Abyss. Then Lax suddenly left and handed his work to dedicated devs who wanted to continue his code. Generin, _Psycho, TheUndying, TheDamned, Alita, Cain continued Lax’s work and developed emulator based on Abyss. It was named Stormcraft and became most famous emulator of all the time (in positive way, unlike WOWEmu).

Spacey

Once upon a time there was Lax... The father of WoW emulation... ...he said let there be code... ...and then it was created... ...the World of Warcraft emulation scene... ...2 years have passed since the mortal races banded together to emulate World of Warcraft... ...But the alliances have been broken and the drums of flaming thunders sounded once again...

Golden age of WOW emulation

sticker "Welcome to GotWoW.Net everyone, the new home of Skull's Hack Site and Team Stormcraft. Forums will be getting a new template within the next few days, and with the new template for the forums, the frontpage will be also." This was the GotWoW glory days! Everybody tried to help each other to connect to the Stormcraft server and other teams started to showing up… In first few weeks of February Stormcraft managed to release spell database extracted from Alpha client (It had to be taken down 14 days later because of Blizzard's first attack) and launched public server together with releasing nifty program (StormCraftWoW Login/Loader) which helped to connect to the realm. Thanks to web.archive.org for still keeping it online http://web.archive.org/web/20040214105810/http://www.gotwow.net/spelldb.html Time flown and more and more subdomains risen on GotWoW. Some of them was striked hard by Blizzard, others lasted until the very end of GotWoW’s days.

WoW Places (http://wowplaces.gotwow.net)

Owner - wolk The website introducing WOW, it has contained pictures from every place in the World of Warcraft, it contained even MP3’s from alpha client in the beginning. But unlucky, because of so called copyright infringement it was soon attacked by Blizzard, forced to take down pictures and mp3s. Site remained unchanged until the sudden day arrived. It was updated with new locations as the beta went on. Technetium (C++)(http://tech.gotwow.net) Owner - xccmx It was technically targeted website which played around with BLP2 format as long as was up. Release of BLP2 to TGA and TGA to BLP2 converter for manipulation with textures was done in here.

VJeux tools (C++) (http://vjeux.gotwow.net)

Owner: VJeux Website of a loader which listed all the alpha and beta servers and allowed connection (since wasn’t that easy to connect to private servers as nowadays (todays wowstatus.net)

Rift (Visual Basic) (http:/ /rift.gotwow.net)

Owner - AlexM One man team AlexM loved Visual Basic and wanted to prove that you can have a fast and stable server coded in it. He managed to get chat working and entering the world and spawning creatures. But people who entered couldn’t see each other. XmD was his secondary host BTW J

Future WoW (Delphi) (http://fwow.gotwow.net)

Owner - Stanz Originally started by Stanz and coded in Delphi. He had quit number of features working. He made a tower of tables making look like the WTC. Then Larael came up and rewrote the whole core making it more stable and even adding more features. Stanz's goal was not to update with client but to get a more functional WOW. It was all the way private and sources weren’t released, that’s why so few things are known about it. In the beginning of 2006 new wave of interest came up to this emulator. Something is on the move, but no one can tell what it really is J

Stanz

In the stages where FWoW was abandoned, it was due for a re-write of the core. Without rewriting the core, it would not be powerful enough to efficiently handle advanced features. FWoW had a lot of potential, but due to me abandoning it at this point, I'm afraid the FWoW source would not be of much use to anyone. ... FWoW for me was an amazing project to work on. I enjoyed working on it, as did my coding partner. What put me off is, that now all emulation seems to be based around "I don't want to buy WOW, let me play free!" which is not the same community that I started with (Alpha/Beta times).

Team Python (C++) (http://www.teampython.com)

Team Members: Addictman, Battyone, DeathCheese, Deten, don, FreXX, Hedos, Jedite, jimmy, Munky, page_420, RandomGuy, tmm`, WantedMan, angelic666, c0mputar They coded it from scratch and had a lot of fun features. They were still in private testing for now, although they allowed their stress test team to play later on (but still private was disliked by some http://www.gotwow.ic.cz/files/WoWBetaUsPhase3.nfo) even later, they released sources and became open-source. Features included: Vendors, Mounts, Items, Combat, Time Changes, Gryphon Flying, Very Few Spells (2 to be exact :p) and many more GM commands. It was continued many times after (WSD, WOWD) as it was one of few open-sourced emulators out there.

Team 0x90 (C#)

Team: Foole and Scar The 0x90 Prototype server is developed solely by Foole. It started out as a testing ground for the main server, but now is the only working server. The main server, coded in C++, has falling behind in updates and is no longer used. Some instances of Foole's prototype server are Hybby's server (Canada), Rewot's server (Bulgaria) and Scar Server. Features were chat, parties, mobs, and combat. There is a bug preventing items from being sold. Foole also had a forum and posted a bunch of packet analysis of beta 1.

Warforge (C++)

Team: Daxxar, Pasn, Trivex, Xetrov`, Archang3l, Warren,[pez] There is not much info, since they were private, remained private all the time, and died private handing sources to Blizzard.

Khaos (???)

Team: DMod, ??? There is even less info than about Warforge. They handed in their sources to Blizzard before going public.

EWoW #1 AKA Great scam (HOAX)

Coder (scammer): Astrobilis (or something like that) It was instant 100% copy of Blizzard’s server. He did stress tests with imaginary or inactive people from forums monthly and people fell for that. Great numbers of people believed him. Then at one point he said if others want him to continue he will need some closed beta accounts. (NOTE: What do you need closed beta accounts for 100% complete Blizz-like server???). People fell for it again. GotWoW community warned everyone and did not support that team but in the end, everyone who gave their closed beta accounts, got stabbed in the face as website got shutdown and great scammer was gone for good with a bunch of beta accounts. So around then only these teams existed until Coldice joined SC and caused a huge clash between team members and ruin the whole team so SC basically died. YES they were announced DEAD (second time after Lax). New Teams formed on the go:

EX3 (C++)

Team: Fr3DBr, Nicoli_s, Republicola, and A9Master, Eggy Fr3DBr talked to Generin to obtain the source code of his project and continue developing it. After some time Nicoli_s decided to give the project a public name "Abyss-X" since we were based in Abyss-X code. But as time elapsed they had to get new Dev's to help with the project. The new Dev's helped to recode the core to get a stable server. They then left the group and Abyss-X was abandoned. The project was revamped by Fr3DBr and the name changed to EX3. EX3 is the continuation of all the previous Abyss-X servers. The features included Mobs, Leveling, Groups, Vendors, PvP, first event system and much more!

Vibe (C++)

Team: McKay34 and Spr4ttel Vibe server was a server in heavy development, with many features. It was known for being very stable. It is currently the only WoW server that interfaces with IRC but im pretty sure Fr3DBr shared some info for that.

OWS (C++)

One man team OloKKM he took his time added feature when he felt like it but he had so many feauteres working and there was a really nice video showing the features.

Soul Asylum (C#)

Coder: Benjou This server was packed with unique features it was really popular but Benjou stopped development. However Soul Asylum continued to host the server privately until smth better came out. They were bunch of *******s not directed to Benjou.

Everything went really well, but people are often changing their minds in what to do (don’t tell me that you’ve never done it before) in this spirit AlexM abandoned Rift and joined FWoW to help Stanz & Larael. But ever since Larael was busy with university he left. Two manned team continued to work on FWoW. With his leaving, AlexM handed Rift down to CMA, Finrael, and yonur. Their progress became unknown.

WoWDaemon (C#)

Team: Codemonkey, Foole, Tharaxis and Benjou WoWDaemon, it was the first open-source project server started by Codemonkey. Its developers were the most talented on the WoW scene. WoWDaemon had great potential as a fully scriptable server. Codemonkey was an individualist and he wanted to do thing his way. Same thing with coding WoWDaemon really fast and the team members were pissed since he wasn’t dividing work with the team. So basically, Codemonkey was working on his own. His team has broken and Codemonkey later decided to leave project. When Codemonkey left WoWDaemon, he released the source code of his older version (he did it even if it didn’t make sense). People in the forum were making their own script addons and stuff like that so they decided to become a team and continue works on WoWDaemon and they named the team WoWCraft. WoWCraft team consisted of AnGrA, Phaze and Afinda. They really advanced a lot, they even had death-world working. Their last release was 0.2e (probably for Beta 3) it had many features and until that day unimaginable, it featured XML DB. it was amazing i still have the videos of wowcraft if you want them ill post them up. In the middle of all this Stormcraft was revived again Generin started to work on the server again. He united a bunch of developers to continue Stormcraft. He got Codemonkey, AlexM, Fr3DBr, and some other devs on his team. Revived Stormcraft went into fast development where they need hosts to host the server Babbaar, Zite and another one who is forgotten. At this point GotWoW had reached to a point of 40k members which was a huge milestone at that time. As that, it was the one of fastest growing communities around the net, and that probably attracted Blizzard’s attention. Wolk a fine contributor to Stormcraft (not a dev) got a chance to test an old version of TP hosted by WantedMan. And he made obscene post about TP about how all the features were fake and they aren’t shit and stuff like that, which was a really huge debate. Suddenly some of the dedicated team members (tmm`, RandomGuy) of TP decided to release the source code and that was the point where TP died, thread which announced it was called The Serpents Dead. WantedMan before started to negotiate with Stormcraft about merge between them and Python, what unlucky never happened. Then the downfall suddenly came. Gotwow was closed down and box taken over by Blizzard. Stormcraft, WoWcraft, Vibe was closed down by Blizzard and codes had been turned over (that’s why their servers can handle sooo many people) J

Sometimes between 16th July 2004 and 26th October, the dream has ended. Blizzard’s lawyers went to sticker's house and scared him to death and since he was 14, he turned over his box to Blizzard. Sad message remains posted till these days.

Quote stating GotWOW? is dead

Statement from Blizzard Entertainment to the GotWoW? Community As many of you already know, Blizzard has taken steps recently to stop the development of unauthorized emulator servers for the World of Warcraft™ beta. While we appreciate the devotion and enthusiasm the GotWoW? community has shown for World of Warcraft, the development of emulator servers directly contributes to the illegal copying of the beta game client and creates the opportunity for people to continue to play on unauthorized servers after the completion of the World of Warcraft beta test. Some individuals may have helped develop emulator servers under the belief that Blizzard was not opposed to the existence of illegal copies of the World of Warcraft beta game client. However, this belief was incorrect. Blizzard places a high value on its intellectual property and does not condone illegal copies of the beta game client or software that facilitates or encourages the use of illegal copies of the beta game client. Leaders from various emulator-server development teams, including StormCraft, Vibe, and Khaos, have turned over their code and stopped development of emulator servers. We are asking that those of you who are continuing to operate unauthorized emulator servers for the World of Warcraft beta take this opportunity to voluntarily stop these efforts and turn over your code to Blizzard as well. For a short period of time, Blizzard will grant amnesty to those who comply with this request. Please contact us at [email protected] for more information. Thank you for your understanding and for helping us to ensure the integrity of the betatesting process. We look forward to seeing you in game when World of Warcraft is released!

Story of WOW(D, Daemon, Craft, Quest)

WOWCraft is based on WOWDaemon. First the team WOWDaemon was made consisted Codemonkey and Foole and some others. Since Codemonkey was coding everything himself and wasnt reporting to the team, there was a conflict in the team so it has been halted. Codemonkey went back to code for Stormcraft and released WOWDaemon C# source code so others can pick up from there. AnGrA and a group of people began to make modifications to the source they got from Codemonkey so they decided to become a new team and called themselves WOWCraft and they only released binaries for Phase3 Beta (with a little help from Codemonkey) as they wanted to keep it closed before reach certain level of functionality. Stormcraft got closed down (Generin signed over the Stormcraft source) and Codemonkey disappeared, and said he wants to work on new Stormcraft source in private (but as he hasn’t shown up again, new Stormcraft is probably doomed). WOWCraft was afraid of Blizz so they decided to halt the project and give source to Blizz (I’m not sure about this as somebody says they did it and somebody said they don’t). They wanted to join another team, but could not decide what source to use… At the exactly same time Team Python decided to completely stop working on a WOW emulator and to try making our own MMORPG (that didn't work) but a couple members wanted to keep working on the TP server, so they started a little channel and rewritten the entire core (the base of WOWD). Few other TP members and friends were hanging out in a private channel still messing around TP code. They decided to merge, because it was useless to have two different teams working on the same exact code. And voila, there comes WOWD. They worked on for a quite long time, and there were big possibility of merge with OpenWOW (which just finished netrewrite just before WOWD leak). Shit happens and

OpenWOW was closed down, WOWD got leaked and nothing mentioned earlier never really happened. Anyway back to WOWCraft and their followers. The source code modifications, which WOWCraft made, was leaked. Few months later Yellow started making the code compatible 1.3.x and fixing things up, so he decided he needed a team very soon because it was hard to progress with a 1 man team. It was called WOWQuest. There was a huge conflict within the team between Yellow and Zite so it was a short ending. Back then teams made this to improve their skills or to learn and to let the people who couldn't stand it to wait for the game to enjoy it. Regards, Afinda

Dark-ages of blizzhackers.com

As i've never been here in begginings. Let me just shortly summarize it. Servers went on development, Team Python was only public server for a long time, everybody has been fixing, coding and creating database (AFAIK the most completed DB was done by Hav0k team. Other teams derived from Team Python server went underground (WOWD and others), some tried to continue (WSD) but with the retail release of WOW, they stopped, since there was a problem with SRP6 coding (don't ask me technical questions). Last Team Python (WSD was for 0.11.0, 1.2.1 release was fake that was never functional and freezes on connect) and finally WOWEmu arises... in the begining, nobody wanted to believe that russian author named WAD really sells his own creation (with stolen code from Stormcraft and other... is it said it is based on Septimus UO server (this hasn’t been proved) but WAD himself says that WoWEmu was written on c++ and was based on his own DAOC and EQ emus.) and his callbacks were easily removed, so others can play on emu. WAD really thoughened his protection, and last versions taken weeks to get and crack. Luckily he gave up development and handed out his source to MarsWOW (or something like that) guys from china... today's status is unknown. With all these emulators and pirated wow clients, there was big risk of being spotted by Blizz, and exactly that happened. Blizz forced the site owner to close down forum... it was reopened at http://www.theedgeofnowhere.com but it misses WOWEmulation forums and talking about WOWEmus is prohibited. But nothing can stop real blizzhacker from having forum J Kronos started his own WOWhackers, but his hoster (Renee) failed to keep up with high bandwith needs, so Kronos have a deal with Ashel. Ashel provided hosting and probably felt that he needs more money and fame, so put up some ads, removed admin rights from Kronos and his mods, and finally he cracked some passwords of important people. Shit happens, so there were two blizzhackers for a time... blizzhackers.us and blizzhackers.biz. Last few weeks .us has some problem with hosting, and since Ashel left, man, who picked up Ludmilla (mentioned later) runs only today's blizzhackers(.ws). Dunno where to attach RunWOW... completely separated emu, which is developed by ukrainians (they refuse to let out src, they even don't want to let out bins, and they don't posses server able to handle international players, so only ukrainians have they're own private WOW)

NOX and rise of WoWWoW

Guy named Kolie tried to convince public that his emulator called NOX will be the most feature-full emu of all the times, all he did (and of course he helped a lot to community and we are thankful for that) was releasing of WOWSRP6 dll, which helped Dr.Nexus. After Kolie released this library, he went who-knows-where. Farewell NOX and welcome WOWWOW. Dr.Nexus the one of hard working guys out there decompiled the Kolie's dll and

released C# code with WOW-SRP protocol to public. One of ppl using that code was tticapost and releasing EWOW (as new emulator) source to public. Later, the WOWWOW Alpha 1 has been released and it's sucessfully continuing to present days, in december 2005 it hit Beta stages, but playing on WowwoW isn't quite possible (because of bug that shutdowns server after some time)... Looking forward anything J

Rise and fall of OpenWOW

Power2All was the one who wasn't afraid of Blizz and started another project called OpenWOW... he joined the opensource minded coders and started to completely rewrite Team Python's core. Meanwhile there were WOWD coding underground. It was supposed to have these two emus merged, because OpenWOW had excellent core and WOWD was flowing with features. After the rewrite was completed, Blizz started with signing affair again and forced OpenWOW team to stop, it was just before the merge was supposed to happen. Rest well OpenWOW team, hope you had fun and hope you don't suffer from your doings. Thank you. And hoping MaNGOS (mentioned later) guys gonna take from you, as is was known openwow has the best core ;)

With force there comes responsibility (Story of WDDG)

There was big need of somebody completing DB for WOWEmu, the two teams have arisen. WDDG started as small group with few spawners and scripters and grown to giant mastodont with ambitions to create it's own emulator. Blackstorm ran their own server and got tired of WDDG so they privately started developing their own db, later they decided to release it to the public. They left wowemuscene because of Blizz threated them when they tried to mod client and recently returned with new versions of their DB. But let's concentrate on WDDG. They were lead by ambitious and self-confident man "raymerjacques". He sounded like lifesaver to most at the beginning. DB evolved and whole WOWEmu scene broken into two parts. One part hated WDDG and another loved them. Loving people believed everything what raymer said, once he said there is emulator being worked on WDDG, everybody known that it can be true (MaddoxX promised help when he joined wow-emulation with promises of 100000 ppl server). One day something went wrong and link to ludmilla bins v0.0.1 were posted in non-dev section of WDDG forum. Phaser grabbed it and later shown it to whole world, raymer as revenge leaked wowd's sources updated in underground by shouji (WantedMan and others, dunno who, since it was private), that was followed. And real war begun. Raymer started to act like low-minded everytime when the words ludmilla was written, he declined that Ludmilla uses wowd sources leaked few months ago. There was peace for a while, it lasted about a month. The flamewars begun again, when WDDG started to accept donations for upcoming 100% Blizz-like emulator (betatesting and access into donors section), which had to be done for Christmas. He flamed, other flamed, he flamed, other flamed, and round and round... It everything ended up with IRPG team leaving WDDG and releasing sources to public (i'm not using word: "leaking" cause raymer based it on GPL'd source of WOWD which was based on Team Python, don't agree with me if you don't want, maybe i don't understand what's going on, but anyway... i'm not a pro-developer, so maybe my opinions are stupid) ;) WDDG got a great hit and refused to continue publicly, shutdown it's forum and went underground again. Who knows what's going on with them right now.

WOW: China strikes back

Something have changed when post on BH announced new emu... RunWOW (not to mix it up with RunWOW developed by ukraine), promising chinese project for (oversea) ppl accessible only by translators. Time shown that RunWOW is nothing more than decompiled WoWWoW with few added features, still possesing good possibility of playing WOW. Recently there is another emu called WOWDragon (i personally call it... **** unicode, viva-la chinese) that is WOWDaemon (WOWQuest) updated to current versions something fixed and so on... This is the way how china strikes back ;)

World of Tomorrow? :)

Many emulators went around and left. Let me name some... Thanatos (Stormcraft continued, well known hoax), eWOW updated (ewow with support of 1.8.0), Simpleserv (Czech guy who made a bet for 2000€ that he can complete Java-based emulator until 1.1.2006), DelphiEmu which come out of nowhere with basic functionality (done by user456) and lots of forgotten ones. Three main emus left: Pandora (follower of WDDG's Ludmilla, being totally rewritten, uses another core (looks like being Java-based), looks promising, hoping it won't die soon, it already died once, maybe twice, but now they started to work with DOL core), MaNGOS (not really WOW server, but multi server which supports WOW, steady progress in here, open source, anyone can join and help, looks organised, has the best presentation), WowwoW (ideal small-business server with really scriptable everything outside the core, state unknown as Dr.Nexus is working in the privacy). Let's hope players (me) will get a really good emu soon and wish devs enough of patience with coding, flaming and complaining and WOW itself.

World of Miracles

Something happened once more again. New year 2006 passed on and people was still hopin for a miracle… such a miracle shown up once nice day on Blizzhackers stating the Expansion was leaked and will be released sometimes on IRC… I personally joined that session with lot of hopes, the biggest star in channel was original WOW’s leaker ‘Skull (unluckily, that ‘ was thing that cleared it up all later. Everybody was talking about that and that and that, old friends met, old legends shown up again and everybody enjoyed the day. But the main thing why everybody came remained unseen. ‘Skull (mostly |afk) held trivia for so-called private FTP and wonderful thing was told. It’ll be provided with sandbox to explore new continents. Wonderful you might see, but next day arrived, evening and release time came and unlucky no leak happened. And it all ended up like this… J Jimbo: We have been working hard to bring you this... Jimbo: ROFL NOOBS THIS IS A SCAM DIE!!! snowflake: HAHAHAAH snowflake: PWNED snowflake: ROFL Jimbo: LOL Jimbo: nice one

This is open for discussion and what you think should be added . Remember the story continues with you guys.

Credit:

All authors of the wiki
And Nivelo

[Clain]

Nivelo has been updating that story aswell as adding new parts. GotWOW? Thanks for sharing though!

[Ickybad]

Aight I googled emu history i knew most of this stuff just didn't feel like typeing it there is a wiki just no author i will hand credit to him.

[volitle]

nice theres a few bits in here i didnt even know lol anyway nice shar scyther +rep for you.