What exactly will it take to re-create TAO?

[UnitOfTime]

Hi, I'm actively-ish developing my own little spinoff of TAO. I Chose to start from scratch, from what I've read it would be illegal/frowned upon to copy TAO's code, art or sounds. I assume someone decompiled the flash binary (Not familiar with flash) to get all the data included in the game (I'm guessing that no server code was included with the client binary, so you'd have to write that yourself). The biggest headache I've had so far was making the game look good. I'm not very artistic so that's been the difficult task for me - especially the effects. Other than art, you'd need to code the user interface, the networking interface, the game logic, the server-side database stuff (unless you didn't want those features).

I think that BrutalRage has a game (HTML5 I think), Hulky has a game (Unity), AllFatherGray has a game (Unity), and I have a game (HTML5/WebGL).

I think that the holdup from just using the old binary is that someone would have to reverse-engineer the network interactions and then code the server-side (network interactions, game logic, and database) - so still a sizeable effort, and fairly unguided.

Hope that helps!

[CPC]

Hi, I'm actively-ish developing my own little spinoff of TAO. I Chose to start from scratch, from what I've read it would be illegal/frowned upon to copy TAO's code, art or sounds. I assume someone decompiled the flash binary (Not familiar with flash) to get all the data included in the game (I'm guessing that no server code was included with the client binary, so you'd have to write that yourself). The biggest headache I've had so far was making the game look good. I'm not very artistic so that's been the difficult task for me - especially the effects. Other than art, you'd need to code the user interface, the networking interface, the game logic, the server-side database stuff (unless you didn't want those features).

I think that BrutalRage has a game (HTML5 I think), Hulky has a game (Unity), AllFatherGray has a game (Unity), and I have a game (HTML5/WebGL).

I think that the holdup from just using the old binary is that someone would have to reverse-engineer the network interactions and then code the server-side (network interactions, game logic, and database) - so still a sizeable effort, and fairly unguided.

Hope that helps!

Yes that helps a lot actually...Thanks for clarifying all of that. So its something that can be done with a lot of effort and / or probably quite a bit of funding it seems like ($150,000 to pay a couple programmers?). As far as the copyright goes, while I don't expect anyone else to take the risk, I know I sure as hell would. If I had the programming skills to do this tedious replication I for sure would bring it back and collect those membership fees. I seriously doubt the original creators are even on the face of this earth anymore. In fact, if someone is serious about replication but doesn't want the legal implications of possible copyright infringement, I would happily register all assets under my name and take full responsibility while whoever does internal operations and we can split the profits.