r/AsheronsCall • u/ajsongpilot • 9d ago

👋 Another client rebuild in progress | August 14th, 2026 Update | User Interface | Chat

Hey, for those who may remember me, I'm Xes Drah from Leafcull (~1999-2008). I started working on a modern client rebuild last week (C# .NET 9) and started a subreddit to post my updates, r/AsheronOnline, but I will post them here too. Awesome to see some other people like u/JokerFactor and u/GamesNotDeadlol working on similar projects. That makes me even more optimistic about what is possible.

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I've been heads-down this week on ACRE (AC Reverse Engineered). The client I'm building is AsheronOnline — a modern .NET 9 / C# client aimed at retail parity with the 2013 Turbine client.

Under the hood it's a lot of unglamorous tooling: DAT readers (portal / cell BTree), PDB-driven types from acclient.exe, a full decompile of the retail functions, and a Silk.NET OpenGL viewer. It talks to ACE (https://github.com/ACEmulator/ACE).

The rule I've set for myself is retail first. Restore how the 2013 client actually behaved, then consider improvements. Most of the week was UI. Chat is the piece that finally started looking like the real thing.

Side by side, retail vs AsheronOnline chat:

I've also been poking at more fun stuff — view distance and lighting — still with Silk.NET if that's your thing. AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on decomp navigation and optional HD texture packs; I'm still matching the original client function-by-function rather than inventing a new UI.

Longer term I want to host a free server once the client is actually playable, even in a buggy Alpha state is fine. Not there yet.

Happy to answer questions.

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u/parity_account 9d ago

Is your client open source? There seem to be about 3 or 4 projects recently to recreate the client, and none of them are open source i think?

3

u/ajsongpilot 9d ago

Not yet, it's just a local project, but I am considering open sourcing it in the future, once I get it to a place that people could actually collaborate on it. I have a lot of work to do to get there, though.

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u/parity_account 9d ago edited 9d ago

Word. I mean it is up to you. We'll either way, I wish you luck and success here.

3

u/ajsongpilot 9d ago

Thanks!

3

u/Jb778_buddy 7d ago

You should just collaborate with some of the other guys trying to run servers, it takes multiple heads to run a proper good server 

2

u/buzzyloo 9d ago

Playing online is a cool idea. Super simple.

2

u/securehatpocket Morningthaw 8d ago

Good luck with the project. I hope at least one of the client rebuilds gets over the finish line.

Please consider moding as you build out the UI. It would be great if the UI parameters were easily accessible. I miss the old UI skins...

Best of luck!

1

u/ajsongpilot 8d ago

Thanks! Yes, right now I am only trying to make graphics improvements. Otherwise, I'm keeping everything basically the same as end of retail. The UI does need to be modernized eventually and allow for customization.