While I really want this to succeed I have my doubts. I've been involved with this community for many, many years (since 2005 / 12+ years).
I've seen so many "new RO client", "custom RO client", "client rewrite", "open source client" projects, and absolutely none of them have succeeded. They all get to at least this stage:
Map Viewer
Chat
Character creation / rendering
Then they stop being interested in developing it, get burnt out and then quit. Biggest issue they all have? So far, out of the 5 or 6 projects I've seen pop up since 2005, only one of them ever shared their source code. If you're going to actively pursue this goal, share the code. Open source it and invite in more developers. Having it closed source + paid / donations to get access is going to get you in deep legal shit with Gravity. Do not think "oh they can't" or "they don't know who I am" or "they can't find me", believe me it's not hard. They know who pretty much everyone is irl that has massive contributions within the athena community.
Open source it as an educational project, do not advertise it as an "RO Client". Like with athena, advertise it as an "MMORPG Client". Make a solid core framework that you can then extend with RO specifics to build a client capable of running RO.
There are many old school athena developers who would join this project if you simply opened it up and had some serious noticeable progress on it.
Do not make the same mistake as all those other dead projects.
New life for RO
in Projects
Posted
Is beautiful!
Yep...
so this is dead now?