Xentales

I am not sure where he got them from, but archive.org has been archiving old xenimus pages for nearly 20 years now. This includes old installers as well.

Just go here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/xenimus.com

Use the calendar to find a date way in the past and then try to download one of the xenimus installers from that time. Then you can just install it and have access to all the old files.

I managed to aquire them from another project. I might end up replacing them at some point though so I can market the game outside this community and avoid problems from EJ. But that won't be till much further into development, we'll see.




Yeah you can download the old files and the models are available but they are in EJ's custom MDJ format so they would have to be converted.

10 player connections made. My single computer couldn't handle much more. Still working through converting everything to work properly on a network but it's getting there.
https://files.catbox.moe/31zbvx.png

I assume you re-implemented everything to match Xenimus exactly?

I've always wondered, what's the deal with the camera in Xenimus?

Is it an ortographic camera at 45 degrees standard, 90 degrees when you press "v"?

A lot of things will be similar, but a lot of things will be different. I don't care to copy everything exact. The goal is to create a better game.

No the camera uses a perspective projection matrix. Similar to the 2nd example on this page https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReferenc ... atrix.html

You mentioned not knowing what formula EJ used for stats......

https://github.com/MartinMReed/xenimus-calc-cplusplus/blob/master/src/calculator.h

Anyway I can donate?

Oh wow I remember this! Awesome work man. You figured those equations out on your own?. Impressive. Great timing too as I have started reworking player stats with networked play in mind. I'll implement these calculations tonight or tomorrow thank you.




I appreciate wanting to support the project that's really motivating. But no not at this time. While using EJs assets I think it's best to play it safe and see how things unfold first. Once the game is online and I have an idea of servers costs and stuff I will might revisit the idea, we'll see. Thank you

hows life man?

any cool updates in the past month?

Hope this didn't die, I'd love to get to play Old School Xen just one more time, and this seems like the closest we'll ever get.

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WoW classic is close. I'm starting to believe EJ based a lot of things on WoW classic.

From minor/tiron/medius etc progression of spells...

To "adept" and "magus" prevalence...

To death in PVP being really annoying... even costly...

Hats, horses, etc. look like Xenimus

The game is annoyingly hard making successes feel more significant.

Griefing is possible, but not terribly prevalent. That just shows how PVP has an impact on every situation and you're constantly in danger. Unlike Xenimus it's not F12 to revive exactly where you died. You have two choices to get out of your corpse being camped. Respawn several meters away and try to run, or spawn at the ghost at the cost of your durability (and repairing costs your gold so it's tedious).

Dungeons and named mobs remind me of Xenimus.

The timeframe adds up that EJ could have been inspired by vanilla WoW. WoW Classic is based on 2004-2005, and that's the peak of Xenimus before the great downfall (A Cataclysm if you will? The same one that ended WoW lol)

Good vs Evil is such a rip off of Alliance vs Horde too...

Raids in Xenimus are EJ's failed attempt to emulate the dungeons and raids in WoW.

XenimusFP with horses was a lot closer, but ultimately EJ's hybrid of FP/not FP in current Xenimus is another thing that I feel is ripped from WoW.

Nope.


Not a feature of WoW...


Not really a feature of wow except a name of specific mobs


Hats/horses etc are based on medievil/traditional wizard equipment in both Xen and WoW. Neither are original in any way.


A feature of early MUDs, before WoW was even a twinkle in anyones eye.


But ALL of the features you claim are the same were in Xenimus before WoW was released, most by around 6 years...


This is prevalent in practically every piece of fantasy media from Tolkein onwards.


Raids existed in a bunch of games pre-wow.


It's a natural progression of the engine.

Like, I get it, they fill a kinda similar niche, but to say EJ in any way ripped off WoW is just crazy. The only similarity is that they're both based on a tolkein-esque world and the monsters that come along with that etc. It's generic fantasy tropes.

Hey guys. I've done a lot of work on the game recently. I redid the combat and it's now a lot more smooth and reliable. Combat between
enemies, NPCs, and other players is now possible. Only sqs will be safe. I like the old alignment system of xen before jeloc. I will probably put it something like that but
make it better. Maybe a harsh penalty for the worst of gankers. Mechanically things are starting to feel good. I need to add more spells
to create unique classes. Also at this point world design needs a lot of focus. I'll keep you guys posted. Let me know of any questions or cool features you'd like to see in the game.

Never used the words "ripped off", put down your pitchfork. It was a simple comparison.


You start with Lesser then increment. Or other skills have rank1, rank2, etc. progressions. It's the same spell, but you get new versions of it and can cast old versions of it. Not many games do this. It's pretty unique to Xenimus and WoW.


Regarding GvE... very few games pull this off the way Xen and WoW do with separate continents, shared quest lines, etc.

Xenimus FP even had a ship to take you between good an evil. It's the most blatantly cloned WoW feature and also lines up with being not in vanilla Xenimus, but added years later.

• GvE was not in Xenimus on release.
• Minor, Tiron was not.
• Xenimus FP was not a thing in 1999 ("6 years before Wow").
• Horses in Xenimus was not a thing on release.
• Magus were not in Xenimus until much later than release.

Most of what I talk about was not in Xenimus on release and did not predate WoW.

I never once said EJ "Ripped" this stuff off. Every game is inspired by others.

Added bubble https://files.catbox.moe/ckz9hv.png

nice, keep up the good work.

Spent a lot of time getting things working right between multiple players. Here's how it's looking currently.

https://streamable.com/4fqyk

Looks great! Now that you've got portals working, have you done insta port as well? Also that dungeon you were showing off looks pretty hard lol.

Yeah port is in the game. Took some time to recreate the xen portal effect but it's nearly identical. No fast port yet but that will come. Now that I can port around I've started expanding and shaping the world. I'm making an original map but inspired by xen of course. Yeah I made that area pretty difficult for testing purposes. Mainly to test enemy caster AI. Stay tuned !

There's evil afoot

https://files.catbox.moe/5q681t.png

Already way cooler effects than anything EJ's pulled off in X1 or X2.

This is absolutely incredible...

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So can't wait to try this

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This looks good. Curious what engine you are using and what language?
If you are looking for help or just want to chat in general i'd be happy to contribute. been writing in C# now for about 6-7 years F# for 2 and have a good understanding of game design, 3D virtual environments and unity and I have a good understanding of the Xenimus client. I played with UE4 briefly but my C++ isn't as strong and i dn't like the blueprints. I think looking at the particle effects you are using unity? I think i could really be of help. I have myself done something similar before though never got the networking as i liked it. Probably didn't help that i attempted to create my own TCP back-end server to handle the communications. Though I did succeed but it was buggy as hell and i just kinda got bored and never continued. I probably should of just used some out-of the box solution.

Do you have a git repository for this project? I think you should start your own website and facebook page to update on this. You will get alot more attention than here...

Hey guys thank you for your all your comments. They encourage me more than you know.




Thank you. I am using Unity 2018.4. A website and forum will come in time. I consider the game in it's infancy right now so it's not top priority. I want it to progress more before I "go public" so right now this dark corner of the web works. I appreciate your offer to help out. Currently I'm not seeking help with anything programming related. If anyone here is an artist/3d modeler and would like to help that would be fantastic. I'd love to keep using EJs models but If I want this game to be successful I will have to replace them at some point, or else we'd be stuck on this dark corner of the web just to avoid any chance of legal threat. I'd aim for a similar art style. I do need help though. I started working on in game tools to make creating the world easier and I've thought about making a map maker. This sprung up an idea to allow base building in the game, non-instanced player housing located on the game map. This sprung up another idea to allow raids on player bases where players could infiltrate other player's bases and storage vaults and steal items (maybe have a storage merch with limited space to store your most valued items). Which sprung up another idea of each city having a castle that could be taken over, which would give you some control of the city and it's guards/merchants (so finding a storage merchant isn't always a sure thing, they could be hostile towards you. That would be the trade off of storing in your base vs a storage merch). I want this game to be different and focus heavily of pvp. Not for the faint of heart. I need ideas to accomplish that and to set it apart from anything else on the market (which isnt hard and why I started this project. Tired of cookie-cutter games afraid to try something different. This is EJs main problem, he aspires to be cookie cutter). None of the previous ideas are set in stone, but I do like the idea of players being able to build things in the world space. I also need ideas on classes and spells and other mechanics. Let me know what you guys think.

All your ideas sound gd and its great to keep coming up with them though personally my priority would be ironing out those physics and particle effects. It's getting there but it all looks a bit flimsy if you get me. Furthermore i'm fairly certain EJ doesn't have any copywrite claims to those models as they were purchased from a 3rd party. Meaning the 3rd party has copywrite claims to them (not EJ). Furthermore its not illegal to create a game in xenimus's likeness (otherwise every WoW rip-off woulda been sued by now). What Andy did was completely different, he hacked and reversed engineered the game and redirected the client to his own server then released it. That's like copying someones book and changing a few words vs Writing your own book using the first as inspiration(what you are doing). You are fully in your rights to publish and create this game even with the models unless presented with proof of copy-write breach (which i'm fairly positive EJ doesn't have) of the models. I own a good number of assets from the time I worked on untiy for about a year and a half as part a freelancer project with a small team.

Also i wouldn't create a forum. Just a website and then give people the ability to comment.
A forum can actually kill a game.

Also i'm sure the old XPS volucris models are around..... I'll have a look.

Yeah a lot of things need polish or reworks. My goal is just to get everything working first, and I am pretty much there which is why I am starting focus more on world design. Making everything look better will come in time. At the moment graphics are at the bottom of my priority list and if I have to launch the game using EJs models I will. Working with these models is difficult though because I am limited to using and animating them inside unity. We'll see what happens.

Shitty message boards kill games. Voicing your opinion and getting deleted kills games (looking at you EJ). A free and open message board is vital imo.

EJ didn't even copyright Xenimus until after 2008/2009. He officially did it to put an end to one of the sex offenders register iterations.

I would bet any of the original models he's probably lost any information regarding whether he owns them or not. The original models/music/etc. Though the original credits seemed to imply he had a 3d modeler help him?

I wouldn't try to use the modern versions of models (And who would want to anyway? They don't mix with Xenimus and look ugly).

AFAIK he bought them as a "pack" from a 3d designer. they were also available on his website for a fee..

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your mom goes to college

looks awesome, let me know if i can help test

I really hope you stick with the old models and classic xen feel, atleast for a little while. I've been longing to scratch that itch of playing the OG Xen for years.

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Sorry I never saw this post until now but thought I would give a quick explanation since the trick EJ uses had to be reversed and recreated for the xenlua sniffer.

The camera is a typical perspective camera, but you might notice it looks wierd, the perspective warps incorrectly the further away from centre you are when in "45 degree mode".

The reason for this is this 45 degree mode isn't a camera movement, but it's a vertex transform. When you're in "45 degree camera mode" what it's actually doing is working using the top down camera, but every vertex position has a transform of y -= z applied to it. This causes all the models to stretch upwards giving an illusion of the camera moving, and would 100% look correct on an orthographic camera, but xenimus doesn't use one.

Thanks a ton, I'll give that a try.

Hey guys, quick update. The game now runs like BUTTER. So smooth. I ironed out most of the known bugs and I've been working on optimizing everything. It's paying off and I'm very happy with the results.

I've finally added rings and neck pieces to the game. I only created 4 ring slots though. I like the idea of using those 2 other slots for other items like current xen does, but I'd like input from you guys. Do you prefer 4 rings and 2 other items like cape and boots? Hell I could do 6 rings with cape and boots. Or just 6 rings. It's up to you guys.

Right now the game has 3 continents, and a vast ocean. Only 1 continent has content. Designing everything has been the hard part for me, I thought it would be the easy part! I've made some really helpful tools to make this process easier so I expect the actual world to start coming together a lot quicker in the next few months or so.

I am going to start logging changes and additions that I make in the game. I'll post them here periodically.

Red beam, or at least the precursor to red beam added

https://streamable.com/45mru

Dude that looks awesome. I can’t wait to play this.

Yeah it looks pretty cool. Coming along nicely.