Announcing eolib-rs!

I mentioned last March that @cirras had ported the eo protocol to XML and that I might switch reoserv over to a library based on it.

Well over the Christmas break I finally got around to it.

eolib-rs

I'm happy to announce eolib-rs. It has a lot of improvements over my old eo crate (now archived).

Improvements

• Based on the same XML protocol as the other eolib projects
• Data reader and writer structs now do data validation and require the user to handle errors
• Data reader struct now supports chunked reading mode
• Slightly improved packet encoding methods
• Simplified packet sequencer
• Data reader and writer now use u8 or i32 rather than exotic integer types (u8, u16, u32)
  • This is more accurate to the original game server and client
• NodeJS is no longer required to build the crate (RIP my disgusting code generator)

The great reoserv migration

Migrating reoserv was no simple task.

• All of the imports were broken (e.g use eo::foo::bar)
• It was littered with my exotic integer types (EOByte, EOChar, EOShort, EOThree, EOInt)
• All packet structs were renamed
• Lots of fields were renamed or had their type changed

I was able to do a simple find and replace for a lot of things:

• StreamBuilder -> EoWriter
• StreamReader -> EoReader
• EOByte -> u8
• EOChar, EOShort, EOThree, EOInt -> i32

But beyond that it was hours and hours of pain. I won't bore you with the details but I finally got everything working with eolib-rs a couple of days ago.

Some reoserv refactoring

As I was going through the entire code base making everything work with eolib-rs I saw a ton of old code that I hadn't revisited for a year or more. It wasn't pretty.

There were a lot of packet handlers being routed into the World actor rather than the Player when they really didn't need to at all.

• Request account creation
• Create account
• Change password
• Login
• Request character creation
• Create character
• Request character deletion
• Delete character
• Select character
• Enter game
• Download file

These were all being routed into World for whatever reason I had at the time with lots of data going back and forth between the World and Player actors.

I've now moved all of these into Player which removed the need for most of the data marshalling between Player and World.

The other huge benefit is for any of these slow methods (e.g password hashing, database queries) these now only make the individual Player task lag rather than the entire World actor.

Thanks for reading! Get ready for many more updates in 2024!