Ragnarok Offline - download files

Ragnarok Offline – its more than a topic… Its tragicomedy.

You can download latest available version from here:

RO Offline is my personal (anacondaq) successful attempt to infuse fresh blood into the dying community of rathena/hercules emulator developers. Thanks to me, these emulators are still alive. Literally. It may sound pretentious, but I’m tired of pretending it’s not true.

Discord community, join there if you need help:

Why did I create RO Offline?

In short, I wanted ordinary beginners without experience, like me once upon a time, to have the opportunity to easily start writing NPCs, modifying items, reading documentation, and practically gaining and improving their skills in the gaming sphere without depending on anyone, just diving in and doing what you want.

What was the problem?

The hercules/rathena emulators are a business. Vulgar, cynical, deceitful, predatory, and disgusting.
For many years, newcomers were artificially hindered from creating something of their own.
There was an artificially created high entry threshold into the development environment.
Guides, documentation, or examples were intentionally not published so that you would seek help and buy someone else’s services (usually from administrators of these communities or forum affiliates).

Hidden by rathena admins topic from the forum and marked as abandoned while its not:

So, even if you have technical skills, analytical thinking, and time, you won’t be able to simply rely on your efforts to create and run your own server and emulator. You’ll be deliberately confused, misled, and kept in the dark about many nuances and information. The aim of all these actions is to profit from you.

Unfortunately, this approach disgusted me for many years before I created RO Offline.
Such an approach only repelled new developers, and old ones, due to other technical artificial barriers, left the community. As a result, the entire community was rapidly shrinking and dying.

I gathered, configured, created documentation, and supported RO Offline for several years.
I did all this absolutely for free, giving the ultimate beginner developer the opportunity to immediately start developing their NPCs, learning programming through examples, and so on. I sat in the forum thread of rathena and answered everyone’s questions, helping with scripts, src modifications, and all of this was free of charge.

Unfortunately, I became a thorn in the side of those who used to make tens of thousands of dollars off newcomers.
After all, newcomers no longer need services when there’s RO Offline and someone like me, who has already gone through all the problems for you, configured everything, created videos, described how everything works, and all you have to do is press a couple of buttons and everything will be ready.

I wasn’t immediately pushed out of the developers’ community, but at first, they tried to “softly” bypass me.
They did this through a strategy of destroying backward compatibility through updates aimed at destroying backward compatibility and code for the sake of code.

What does this mean? Imagine 15 years of src and script modifications. This is a huge archive of data that was freely available to everyone. All these modifications worked for years without any problems and allowed the end player to get a quality game server without significant financial investments. Yes, some source codes required minor changes to apply (conflict merge). But overall, the entire customization scope was available to everyone, and all servers were more or less the same in a good sense of the word, based on the principle of fair “sharing” between administrators and developers.

So, starting from 2017, emulator developers switched to a scheme of earning money by artificially destroying backward compatibility so that users would turn to them for modifications to the source code, which previously worked, but now doesn’t due to changes in the latest versions of the emulator.

Imagine the following analogy. You have a house, and you have 210-230V in the socket. This voltage is the source codes and the stable emulator platform.
All your appliances are custom src modifications, NPCs, and extensions designed to work within 200-240V, otherwise, they won’t work.
Now imagine what will happen to you and your appliances if the socket suddenly has 400-500V without any explanations or rational factors. Naturally, all your appliances (custom modifications) will fail and won’t work. You’ll have to stick to very old versions of the emulator or hire someone to modify the modifications. Since all your “equipment” is handmade, and many of the authors have already left the “community” and don’t support their modifications.

So, this is still happening up to 2024 inclusive.
Deliberate destruction of backward compatibility once a year or so.
That is, it can easily happen that a bunch of custom modifications that you wrote last year won’t work fully this year because another emulator “developer” wanted to simply rename functions in the code, which leads only to the destruction of backward compatibility. Or they’ll deliberately restrict access to patchers or the client patcher, or they’ll create and find another thousand ways to restrict access and make it paid.

Why does all this bother me so much and why am I writing this to you?

Because I really love this game, and I admire many talented people I have the honor of knowing.
And I’m extremely upset that my efforts, time, solved problems were nullified, I was smeared, and continue to be smeared with mud and insulted, lied to by everyone, and continue to “make money” and kill the game and the community. They completely robbed everything that I and people like me brought into this emulator, and now they block access and mess around as much as they can.
Unfortunately, there won’t be a second attempt to breathe life into the emulator project. It was a one-time action, and there won’t be a repeat due to a number of complex reasons.

banned on place, where i helped damn a lot of server owners to build their best server by providing/fixing/testing and doing job for others. Cool. Thank you rathena admins for that. Thank you for confirmation that you hate me a lot because of my attempts to make that dirty shit that you organized – better for newbies.

My thread on the rathena forum, where I helped newcomers with RO Offline, is hidden.
I was slandered and banned from that forum. At the same time, I am treated like fire, and problems are constantly created for me.
My thread, where I systematically sat and helped newcomers, is hidden. This thread

has more views than all the threads on this forum combined (in general, from the entire forum). I was accused then of “making money” on that thread, when at that time it wasn’t true, and I started this project only in 2023 when the second year of the war in my country from Russian terrorists who call themselves a “state” forced me to take these actions.

Parasites

And I haven’t even mentioned the vast number of parasites I encountered all the time while developing something for this game, stealing something, passing it off (and continuing to pass it off) as their own, while I remain unaware. God, if you only knew how many projects I contributed to under various pseudonyms and how many custom modifications are on your servers either created by me personally and popularized among private gaming servers, or were commissioned by me and then plagiarized by someone else…

I don’t claim all the credit for myself, but it’s just really upsetting when years of hard work, the agony of birthing ideas, refining prototypes into real models – some parasites claim as their own, and nobody even remembers your work… It’s awful… Truly awful and sickening to the soul from all this that’s happening… It’s a shame that such a wonderful community that was based on principles of “you scratch my back – I scratch yours, and we’re all good, but the strongest wins in fair competition” – is no more and won’t be. Now it’s all about money, lies, connections.