What is Helbreath ?

Helbreath is MMO games created back in 1999 by a korean studio – Siementech, seems that they are dead 🙁

At the same time there was a group of people who created open source code for this game, both server and client side.

This is very important, to understand that those sources were developed in 1999 / 2000 so some approaches were really good at that time. Now some of these approaches can be obsoleted.

What am I doing ?

I took sources developed ages ago by the community, and I put them on Github, and start fixing issues, refactoring some code and adjusting to standards. You can expect series of blog post on this topic.

Why am I doing this ?

Well, it is quite personal, because I have started my programming journey from this game, back when I was 13 or 14, that was my first MMO game and then I decided that I want to make my own server (this is an archived website of the server back 2006).

Well, at that time I didn’t know that I have to learn programming to even start my own server. I downloaded sources and yeah…I had to learn C++.

I read few C++ tutorials and it was a painful journey, like really painful as far I can remember most painful part was to understand classes, objects, reference, pointers.

It took me like two weeks to setup Visual C++ 6.0 (yeah something like that exists), and then I immerse into C++, even to that point that I haven’t been learning at my school (almost didn’t pass to next class) because every second I was thinking about programming and my “server”.

What is my goal ?

First of all, I want to clean up and refactor current sources, fix all critical and major issues/bugs.

This series of blog posts can be somehow a guide for juniors developers because I will show you few things that you shouldn’t do when you are writing your applications.
Then, I want to run a server for people to play, and check performance, and give back something to community of HB, and of course I am big fan of this game so I will play 🙂

My very, very end goal it to have at least one component of the server, rewritten in any language so that it can be run on Linux. Moreover, the domain of whole game is not clear and I want to write down documentation and get more readable code.

Conclusion

Stay tuned because a lot of content is coming! I spent last month to make it happen, I did few snap-storms on my snapchat about that. It’s ging to be amazing to see this transition.