Re-applying the decal

Some of you might know this, others might not even care, but one of my private passions is a MMORPG game called "Asheron's Call" that Microsoft originally published with Turbine games.

Valorie started playing it first (she was an early playtester for it), and I got hooked when I put out my back several years ago.

It's been a long strange trip, AC is no longer published by Microsoft, it's now being published by Turbine directly, but the game's still pretty fun to play.

One of the reasons that AC is compelling (IMHO) is that Turbine has not discouraged 3rd parties from writing tools that enhance the gameplay experience of AC - there's an extremely rich infrastructure of tools that enable all sorts of interactions with the game beyond those that the designers anticpated (automating crafting interactions, auto-salvaging of loot, monster detection, etc).  These plugins all run in a framework known as "decal".

Turbine recently released an expansion pack which rolled out an entirely new client (based on Turbines AC2/D&DO/LOTRO client).  This has broken all the 3rd party applications that were built for AC, because of the massive infrastructure changes that were introduced.

Adam Wright (Asriel), one of the decal developers has been posting a fascinating series of articles that describe the process that the decal developers are going through to re-create the decal functionality on top of this new client.  It's well worth reading, even if you don't care about playing AC.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  Auto-looting and especially auto-fighting are just like auto-aim in FPS - they ruin the game because it no longer requires any skill. To a certain degree that's true of all the trackers as well, not just mobs but resources as well.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  Seems like that "decal" is not an official framework and looks like some kind of scriptable memory cheat.
  
  But IMHO it is not fair to use such scripts or FWs in MMORPG's as it is a clear unfair advantage against players that don't use macros or scripts.
  
  

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
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• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  "like self-buffing (and buffing of others)"
  
  And they let children play this game? For shame! :D

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  Wow, that's a ego boost. I come back from London to find a trackback from one of the first blogs I put on my roll, from a developer who's work and opinion I've come to greatly respect through his writing.
  
  Rather than get into a moralistic debate that's more a blog post and to prevent degeneration into gushing epithets, I'll just say many thanks for the kind words Larry, and then I’ll get back to work.
  
  So, many thanks!

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
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• Anonymous
  August 11, 2005
  Since MS didn't supply any tools or SDKs to work with Freelancer, it would be great if that would be opened up for community since there's still very lot of modding activity around it. Just look at the thousands of mods at lancersreactor.

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2007
  As has been mentioned elsewhere , when we're threat modeling at Microsoft we classify threats using the

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2007
  As has been mentioned elsewhere , when we're threat modeling at Microsoft we classify threats using

• Anonymous
  June 01, 2009
  PingBack from http://woodtvstand.info/story.php?id=13925