The Horizon Project

[Sephus 203]

Hey guys,

 

Over the last couple of years I've been at work thinking of a new emulation project to expand our wings as RO emulation developers and create a genre of game server design that intends to be more concrete in terms of scalability of the processing load on the server. I now have a project called Horizon and it caters to those developers who wish to expand their knowledge in terms of development and concept architecture, scalability of software and maintainability of code, as well as server owners who are with the intention of having a great involvement in the customization of the game design or gameplay.

 

Horizon is created on a multithreaded architecture to cater to multiple thousands of players at once. This can be utilized by the biggest and baddest of servers who have a large userbase (10k+ online at once) where server scalability can be availed. Having multiple threads each of the kind of load that is carried by the server allows a mass population to be split amongst them for work and therefore giving the server time to think about how to not only deal with volumes of information pouring in at once, but also keep the all clients updated at a rapid pace. This is not a system that is available on any of the emulators as currently standing and will not be an option in the near future as well since it involves restructuring the Athena architecture that was designed since the beginning and re-evaluating all of the work that has been done up and till recent times. redesigning Athena from the start to provide a multithreaded capability is just out of question at this point - this is the primary reason Horizon is being worked on.

 

Horizon today stands as the scalable and maintainable server option for those looking to provide 10x the times of users that Athena provides. Horizon is the future option of servers for large player online loads and seamless catering to thousands at a single time. I wish to invite you to the project site Project Horizon Board. This project requires a large amount of support in terms of money and constraints put on developer availability in the present day of RO private server emulators so please consider sponsoring horizon.

 

Here are videos that showcase horizon's current state -

 

1. Horizon Skill System Test 
2. Horizon Premium Storage Test
3. Horizon Item Drop Test
4. Horizon Combat Damage Test / Damage Delay Test / Walk Delay Test

 

Best,

Smoke / Sephus.

 

[bWolfie 138]

good luck but honestly would have preferred you finished your control panel project. that was rather disappointing.

[Sephus 203]

@Myriad It is in a good state to be usable. It will be out soon as well.

[Inzanity 6]

Its cool stuff. I definitely wish for this to be completed to the point where it is as usable as hercules or rA.
I do think herc or rA are poorly handled and a lot of the code is a hot mess where most developers dont know where is what anymore.
There are also a lot of restrictions on server side, which is a shame. I do hope you can solve all of those and make a great Server Emulation Software, I would definitely be in on this if I knew C in any form or shape!

 

But in the end we are limited by the client and our limited access to modifying it. There is so much potential in the game, but we cannot access it due to client limitations and a lot of nonsense being hard coded instead of LUA handled.

[Relzz 32]

Seems nice, lets hope that its not a dead project, I kinda not support the proyect going lua, but.. I guess its okay, that is a big-down if you know what I mean, most people are used to the simple *Athena style

[Senos 54]

Good luck! 

[Sephus 203]

I've been updating this casually, for any discussions we have a discord channel - https://discord.gg/TeKwuAZn

If you wish to join the team, contact me on discord I would love to have some developers both core(c++) and script (lua).

When we have a good community of individuals and more activity, I will create a forums for us to manage important communications.

[Sephus 203]

Hey all,

 

I just came back to Hercules again and I have a great new post for everyone. The topic's original post has been updated with what I have planned in writing and telling the community. Have a good enjoyable read and make sure you join us.

[Sephus 203]

Here is a topic that describes how Horizon stands out as an emulator and how it really works internally, giving it the wings it needs to provide a large player base. Have a read on it - 

https://projecthorizon.xyz/index.php?/topic/580-how-horizon-works-under-the-hood/#comment-583

[Sephus 203]

On 2/21/2019 at 4:01 PM, Sephus said:

This is not a system that is available on any of the emulators as currently standing and will not be an option in the near future as well since it involves restructuring the Athena architecture that was designed since the beginning and re-evaluating all of the work that has been done up and till recent times. redesigning Athena from the start to provide a multithreaded capability is just out of question at this point - this is the primary reason Horizon is being worked on.

 

Update post and iterating on this primary reason why Horizon was created. It will be not possible to recreate the emulator of Athena from the start because of a multithreading possibility that can be installed deep within the codebase. The project really requires something like this because it handles thousands of players at once. This is not possible because of the way Athena has been coded and architected. If the code was changed, millions of other smaller variables and functions will need to be edited for the change that this will cause in the deeper code base. The place where multithreading should be installed is at the core of the program. It is impossible to edit or change the core for now because of the sandbox effect it will cause on all other hierarchies of the code. So for the possibility of having the option to scale the processing resources of the computer, this project has been created. In easier language -

 

1. We require CPU to process information inside a computer.

2. Athena uses only 1 Core of the CPU

3. We want to use more Cores of the CPU or as many available as possible.

4. We want to be able to configure the amount of cores our software uses.

 

Athena will continue to survive but we are changing the game at with the new emulator of Horizon.

[Sephus 203]

Hey guys,

I've started a debate regarding Horizon and Hercules, would you like to participate? - Single Threaded (Hercules/rAthena) Vs Multithreaded Design (Horizon) · horizonxyz · Discussion #191 (github.com)

[Sephus 203]

Hey guys, I want to inform you all that Horizon is now a private software. I am very confident that this will be one of the more powerful emulators out there and something like this shouldn't be kept "free" or "public" software because of a few reasons -

• We can't depend on open source developers for competent software. As an industry developer I find that open source work is way below the software quality of an enterprise or leader in the industry. The software needs to resemble leadership in many ways and I vouch for it.
• Keeping up with industry professionals so that I can continue to develop and contribute to the project for all its life.
• Issues with licensing and legality of software in reference to Gravity and their copyrights. We can't deal with the legal issues, so we want to keep things private.
• The community needs to start giving back to the contributors so I think this would be one method of doing so.

I hope that you agree and continue to support me. If you want access to Horizon visit the sponsors page. Upon sponsoring the project with $1000 per month or more you will directly receive access to the repository.

[Sephus 203]

We've reinstalled our project website and have setup a new server running all our infrastructure on a new network. Check out our site and come register to our community!