Welcome to Maplestory Developers!

This is a community for those who are interested or are already creating private servers of their own. There are many different ways one can go about creating a private server we aim to be an informational educational place to help others get started in the right direction. As such is our mission it will require a community effort in order to accomplish the goals needed to help others be able to accelerate development.

History

Maplestory is a mmorpg created in 2003 which has gone throughout many changes over the years including revamps of mechanics which the community of players liked & didn't like which caused the private server development which accelerated on forums like ragezone & many others that existed back then. But as time went on people got older other community forums shutdown, people who developed sources abandoned project where others have picked up those sources & continued development publically or privately. Throughout that time there was people who would try to sell privately better sources with more fixes & functionality restored to the game for profit.

The buyers would either host their own server with it to create an economy or make those private sources public to improve development which of course ruined sellers attempting to sell. While this went on for some time eventually it all ended with people moving on to other things in life as we all do. The game continues on today & newer generations pick up today sources they can find to continue where private server development dropped off.

The Problems That Must Be Faced!

They don't communicate in public or free open source locations most of those inspired used the proprietary spyware software discord a chat application advertised towards gamers & teens. As the world has become divided in choice of preferences of software for community development this fragments & hinders progression towards better developments. While we do have some options to work around which is something for few who may not care but for other's this is trying to in metaphor put a bandaid on a wound that needs surgery.

1. Bridges

While people may use bots to bridge across platforms chat applications you are still feeding information to the proprietary network. FOSS users won't stay in places that do that because it's prison chains to spyware the whole point of being on another platform is to get away not be chained from afar.

2. Scattered Information

Information is scattered across many websites for different versions of the game. Sources come from different versions of the game people worked on different versions because of all the drastic changes & expansions to the game. When the game began there was only 4 classes to choose from Warrior, Magician, Bowman, & Thief all the versions before they added the fifth class Pirate & others when it was only 4 classes is known online as before the big bang Pre-BB. Versions later then that with all the newer classes, the extra worlds, raids, bosses, revamp of leveling & zone guides are known as after the big bang Post-BB.

This information is scattered & not organized in the appropriate manner that someone could follow along to understand. Many of these guides are old with missing pictures that are suppose to show important steps leaving you in the trenches to test & hope for the best. This is only the inital problem with the information being mixed across places & unorganized the second problem we must face is the access to where one who contributes reside.

For those who are interested & probably working on it now as you read this is probably on discord the worst place to be for community development. This leaves foss people out of luck because people are getting smarter everyone's not just going to sign up to every place because it's where people or the hype is at. More people are reading terms of services & privacy policies before considering registering the ethical standards of operators also providers is becoming more a questionable concern.

People do not want to have to allow spyware into their lives to turn their devices into tracking & recording beacons for providers & their partners of their entire livelyhood in order to gain access to one community to be apart of something!

3. One Way Or No Way!

Newer generations are familiar with a heavily commerical advertised software known as docker which is for operating images & container's of bundled software to run a website or game server. Docker is not the first software to create containers & images this has actually existed long before docker existed the first software was called Jails which is still used today by many in the linux community. There is even a superior software which can do everything docker does & more called Podman which uniquely featured can run images & containers without requiring root access on your pc unlike docker which requires root & a schedule task to run a container or image.

Before these existed private servers were hosted on peoples pcs or hosting servers with all the software installed & running simultaniously like MySQL Workbench, IDE of preference, cmd prompts open with .bats. The image container system saves time by bundling it all together so you don't have to configure it all manually, constantly apply certain changes, start things in certain order. IntelliJ is an IDE software which you can use to edit server files & establish Maven path. There are many other IDE software applications that can do the same thing so you don't have to only use this one if you don't want to.

The problem we must face is how we act with guiding & advising most people as far as i've seen act like if it's not docker & intellij it cannot be done. Please make it a point to not be that person private servers have been made since the 90s MapleStory, World of Warcraft, Gunz, Mu Online & many others had private servers long before docker & intellij existed so none of that it cannot be done theres more then one way to do everything. We must be adaptable in learning so we can help everyone for fair usage.

Some people may want to host for example a pre-bb v0.83 server on a vm running windows xp because of how lightweight it is or have everything for it. Others for example may just want to play solo a specific version like a post-bb server on their old machine for example a v149 server on their windows 7 machine. Maybe someone who refused to update to windows 8, 8.1, 10, or 11 wants to play the later versions which Nexon dropped windows 7 in coding support on their pc like a v206 server so they could experience the new featuress like the fith & sixth job advancements, the arcana rivers & etc.

The games graphics hasn't changed just certain parts of what it's written in. Which together as a foss community we can fix for those who can no longer play & access their characters on gms. Together only then will we as a community be able to begin to tackle those issues as we build the foundations of an educational place.

4. Unity

People are fickle & thinking with AI & what they know alone is good enough to just work on their own developing their server with their own intentions. It's great you have plans & you want to host your own server online but competitions going to always exist & there would be more help to cause if people were unified. Together if more people taught others in an organized place united for the acceleration of development people who have their own plans would have an easier time customizing their servers to either create the vanilla experience or customize it to their heart's intent with ease.

When people are united towards a goal things happen faster & with better results then expected lets strive to become that united for acceleration & ease of development.

Preparing the Solution

There is a plan to create the appropriate context & solve all the problems I mentioned above it will unfold in stages as the community grows. I can do much on my own but I cannot do it alone I need you the community to unite with effort for all maplers who want to self-host their own servers for their purposes. If you wish to get involved being here apart of this community is the first step on lemmy just showing your interest proves you want to be apart of something.

To be apart of that something is to get in touch as there's a url to a coding forum left for you to check out which there we may coordinate the stages & steps involved as we go forward in building the foundations of an all in one maplestory server informational center https://codings.zulipchat.com/. I recommend the forums only to those who truly comprehend what we are building here & want to be apart of it for the long haul what we do is voluntary work & if you've got talent it's appreciated what you teach the more everyone learns the better. What I build together here with other maplers I will ensure the information for server development is contexted, publicly accessible to everyone in multiple places, & backed up so it may not be forever lost.

I thank everyone for taking the time to read this & hope you all may want to become apart of the community!