Sargerust

Sargerust is an attempt at writing a modern, rust-based client for an MMORPG.

For me, the biggest two goals thereby are:

• learning/getting more acquainted with everything involved: Rust, WebGPU, modern rendering techniques, older file formats, multithreading and networking
• experimenting to see how far one can get when writing a client from scratch and trying not to mirror the original very closely. This especially has the rendering in mind, one can use much more recent rendering tricks (triplanar mapping, VXGI), potentially some upscaling, to make the game look much more recent while keeping the gameplay and appeal the same.

Goals beyond that, as well as completion, are unlikely, because it's a gigantic pile of work to achieve and because the original client really doesn't leave much to be desired (it even runs well under wine!).

Now due to the learning nature of the project, feel free to hit me up with suggestions about design, reviewing my code to suggest more idiomatic rust approaches as well as filling the gaps (I leave a lot of // TODO: comments everywhere I have an idea while coding).

Getting Started

When running the code (through cargo run), you have to specify a few options, especially if the defaults don't fit. Try cargo run -- --help to see them. Essentially there are two modes: standalone, which is rendering the world without a server and "remote", which is the classic mode that connects to an upstream realm- and worldserver.

Roadmap

Things that still need to be implemented (loosely sorted by priority):

• MPQ: Load order of interface MPQs
• Third Person Camera Controller (and sending MOVE_FACING packets / reworking the movement tracker)
• Instanced Rendering of M2s (UnitMaterial is currently created in-place, even if the same texture has already been used.) It remains to be seen if that is enough for rend3 to auto instance, though.
  • TODO: Does Rend3 even have instancing?
• Debug Shader Reloading
• Lights Improvement (especially the SkyLight: Implement a game time that ticks, support ambient color)
• Move WMOs to "UnitsMaterial" (and probably rename/refactor it too.) This requires Unit to support more things ( transparency, albedo colors)
• Configuration
• Cross Platform support (i.e. investigate MBP 2011 failure)
• massive Map Manager rework
• Portals, Water, and other less important render objects
• Anisotropic Filtering, basically setting SamplerDesc#anisotropy_clamp > 1, POT, < 16 (based on the device limits)
• hecs:
  • Add more components and unpack update messages further
  • Implement spline walking (NPCs have predefined splines)
  • Rendering thereof
• Physics:
  • Interpolation of Player Position (otherwise stuttery feel)
  • Verify that the colliders are scaled in the right coordinate system (e.g. scaling along z does the right, expected thing)
  • M2 Colliders could be derived from the full mesh instead of trying to merge it again
  • Character Controller has room for improvements (using the tangent instead of the normals)
  • WMO: BSP tree (MOBN, MOBR) for collision meshes instead of the render meshes.
• Reading of DBC files, especially in preparation for:
  • Game Logic. Casting spells and showing stats (mana, health) mainly.
  • Somehow handle locales. We get MPQs from one locale mostly and that locale is the only one filled in DBC strings
• Audio System, potentially leveraging HRTF and precise reflection and absorption (e.g. SteamAudio)
• UI/Addon System: This will most likely be using mlua and if possible port the entirety of "FrameXML", so that the original UI code can be run, but for that a lot of API surface and especially the related event handling and layout management needs to be handled from scratch.
• Advanced game "logic" (e.g. chat, friend list, guilds, trading, auction house)
• Advanced rendering techniques: AO, TAA, VXGI?