The client stopped narrating what it was doing, so the trick that got me through the last four posts was dead. I had to stop watching the game and start reading the machine code underneath it. First disassembler of the project.
The server says WELCOME. The client, which has spent this whole project stuck on a transition screen, reads it, packs up, and tries to load the actual arena map. Then it asks to join the match.
Last post my server could hear the client say HELLO. This post it says something back, and the client, which has been shouting into a dead socket for eighteen years, answers with three messages I didn’t have to ask for.
I started actually writing the server. It’s about a hundred lines so far and it does exactly one thing: it hears the client say HELLO and understands it. But that’s the first time anything I’ve written has been on the other end of that conversation.
I traced the shortest path through Fury’s own code from ‘a player connected’ to ‘a character exists and can move’. The character turns out to exist first.
I pointed a 16-year-old game client at a server that doesn’t exist and listened. It said hello in plain English.
I went looking for an existing Unreal Engine 3 server I could build on top of. Every one I found cheats in a way I can’t.
Phase 2 is done. I’ve read the whole game. Now comes the part where I have to build the thing that’s actually missing.
The shortcut was: get the game to quietly host a match for itself, no server needed. I tried it. The door is welded shut, same as the last three.
I point the dead game’s login at a tiny program I wrote, just to eavesdrop on the very first thing it tries to say to a server that isn’t there anymore.