6 months of ChromieCraft

Nothing lasts forever…

One day, ChromieCraft will die. Just like all other gaming servers and almost everything in life. Many servers last only a few months, some servers last several years, a few for decades.
We, of course, hope this day will be very far in the future. But let’s face the reality; no server lasts forever and one day the ChromieCraft realm will be shut down, becoming just a memory. Sounds sad? Depends who you ask really. One thing will outlive the realm however.

Open-source…

What will live forever, though, is everything we have been building so far. That’s right, we fully embrace the open-source philosophy which we know is at the core of WoW emulation. This means that everything we create, everything we fix, is being released and fully available to the public under the AzerothCore project (AGPL license). So everyone can build upon it.

A lot has happened during the last 6 months and I’m proud to show our key results.

Community

We started ChromieCraft 6 months ago and did not have any population by then. We did not do pre-opening advertisements of any kind, we only had a few volunteers, and reached barely 10-20 players online initially.

Today, we are an active gaming community and, while I’m writing this, there are more than 2000 active accounts logging in and having fun from different parts of the world.

Our contributor’s group has grown a lot: we attracted several new contributors to the AzerothCore project and their impact is shown later on in this post.

Financial investments

Thanks to all people who donated to the project, so far we have been able to invest about 3000$ into the open-source development via Bountysource. This makes ChromieCraft the biggest of the AzerothCore sponsors.

This money is used to get extra help from freelance developers whenever we need an extra hand to work on features that require more time and manpower. For more details about this, read ChromieCraft & Bountysource.

Development

The development activity of AzerothCore is skyrocketing and we are proudly the most active WoW-emulation project in 2021.
It is very interesting to notice how the AzerothCore contribution activity has grown more and more since ChromieCraft exists:

Bug reports: status of ChromieCraft projects on AzerothCore

Hundreds of bugs have been reported thanks to the ChromieCraft players and contributors. Roughly 60% of the reports coming from our players have been valid bugs.

We bring good bug reports to AzerothCore and divide them by „project“, this is the current status of the ChromieCraft projects @ AzerothCore:

– Generic bugs: 75 TODO, 9 in progress, 121 fixed

– 1-19: 36 TODO, 8 in progress, 202 fixed

– 20-29: 30 TODO, 3 in progress, 86 fixed

– 30-39: 38 TODO, 3 in progress, 55 fixed

We are currently at the 30-39 content phase (see progression), some players already reported a few bugs from the higher brackets which we are pleased to see, some of which got fixed:

– 40-49: 25 TODO, 2 in progress, 15 fixed

– 50-59: 16 TODO, 1 in progress, 21 fixed

We expect many more reports to come for 40-49 and 50-59 as the level cap will be increased.

Custom modules and additional features

The AzerothCore framework allows developers to create standalone modules, meant to be generally used for custom features or additional administrative toolings.

We are glad to have contributed to the AzerothCore tooling ecosystem by actively developing or financially supporting more and more open-source modules and tools, such as the Cross-faction BG module, the Character Carbon-Copy, and many others. You can always find the list of modules used by ChromieCraft here.

Tooling

During the last 6 months, we noticed an increase of people using and contributing to Keira3, our development tool which allows people without coding skills to get started with fixing bugs. If you are a Quice.exe, Truice.exe or Discover’s SAI Editor nostalgic, you should try that out.

We keep experimenting and finding new ways to get a better developer experience, creating tools such as ElunaTS which devs to use modern languages such as TypeScript to work on WoW emulation. Furthermore, Docker infrastructure has been further improved and simplified, so more and more people can easily spin up local AC instances and help the community with testing.

Improved documentation

We took this chance to document every important step that we have done so far, starting by fully documenting the way we install, update and maintain our AzerothCore server running in our GNU/Linux production environment. We have also created and documented simpler ways of installing AC for non-expert users like in this tutorial.

Thank you

We do understand that we do things very differently from the usual WoW private server, this is no better reflected than our incredible community we have built up.

For every person who took their time to initially check out the server and decided to login and play, thank you. For those who helped spread the word about us and let the community discover us (both good and bad), thank you. For the hundreds of bug reports, triages and work to fix them, thank you.

For every project that came before us on top of which we laid our foundations, such as important open-source communities like MaNGOS and TrinityCore. Thank you. We could never be where we are today without them.

Lastly, for everyone who gives up their free time for no financial reward, to help with our mission of delivering the best World of Warcraft emulation, free for all to use and enjoy, thank you.

Without a doubt the next 6 months will be full of further challenges and will fly by incredibly quickly, we will continue to march on no matter what!

Thank you for taking your time reading this, have a good day.