Question about fixing bugs inside emulators.

[Bainshie]

Hey.

I've been trying a few private servers, and even though they are filled with cool features and the such, often basic things such as simple spells not working entirely, or <, > errors.

Often these servers feel like my first attempts at game designing. Create the cool boss first without making a engine. Most of these are like the owners have tried to decorate a house before the foundations are put in. Looking through the history I get a feeling of people going over the same things over and over again with the same special features, without moving forwards on the core.

This thread isn't about slamming private server emulators/owners though. (I appreciate that these are free). Instead being the code monkey I am, I'm looking for a place to start helping fix these bugs.

I can code in c++ Lua, PHP Mysql Java etc etc, so none of that is a problem. However since I've only just recently started looking at private servers and would rather not go through any more threads of flame wars of which emulator is better and thousands of mini emulators that die in a day.

So my question is simple, is there a emulator that is:

Open source.

Updated. (I don't want to do a load of work to never have it incorporated.)

Has a list of bugs to fix.

Popular enough that people know its exists.

Actually has something to show.

[Henkke]

Well first of all you are on way wrong forums if you are seriously looking into developing the emulators. But heres a list of the 4 real ones kept up with people who actually know something, and have been going on for years for some.

First current ascent based emulators;

ArcEmu
Coded in C++ , has relatively active forums but documentation for the emulator and code doesnt exist much.

http://www.aspiredev.net/
Heartstones development forums
Coded in C++, did on merge at summit leak + current aspire of that time and continued from there. Documentation is not that active either in this one.

Then there is MaNGOS and Trinity Core (MaNGOS Fork)
Both are coded in c++.
MaNGOS's site is located here;
getmangos.com > Home / english one - Russian Mangos DC / russian one.
Both forums are highly active and there is constant development threads going on, also the wiki is helpfull and MaNGOS with TC are documented moderately good.

Trinitys site is located here;
Trinity Core MMo Server Framework - Powered by vBulletin
As it's a fork of MaNGOS they are not that much different, the development way just differs, whereas trinity is more prone to include code by easier requirements, MaNGOS takes a more steady approach. The pros / cons you can decide yourself.

Then the last one is WCell, which is coded in C#.
WCell
It is documented very good, and is also using the latest stuff in their implentation, but feature-wise it is not as far as the 4 other are. The main reason being that its just a little over year old or so, and was started from scratch, whereas other emulators have been developed over 2 years mininum (counting their versions before working to the current ones)

ArcEmu, Heartstone, WCell use the SVN distribution system.
MaNGOS uses GIT.
TrinityCore uses Mercurial.

Hope this gave you some insight.

[Performer]

aspire is: AspireDev Forums - Powered by vBulletin not org, they changed a while back.

[Henkke]

aspire is: AspireDev Forums - Powered by vBulletin not org, they changed a while back.

Thanks, changed it