MMOTOP100.NET

Private Server Guide

Ragnarok Online [Windows]

This HOWTO will cover setting up your very own Ragnarok

Online private server. If you have hands-on experience setting up a server of your own, for this or any other

category on the website, feel free to submit an article. Visit

us on mmotop100.net

C O V E R I N G P R I V A T E S E R V E R S E T - U P

F O R A L L C A T E G O R I E S O F

M M O R P G S .

TABLE OF CONTENTS

System Requirements ................................................................................... 2

To compile or not to compile? ....................................................................... 3

Compiling on Windows ...................................................................... 4

Compiling with Visual Studio Express Edition C++ ......................... 7

Setting up MySQL ......................................................................................... 9

Configuration Files ...................................................................................... 22

First Start! ................................................................................................... 26

2

System Requirements

If you are serious about setting up a server for other players to join, the

requirements vary. Depending on the amount of players and the type of

emulator you are using, you will have to expand your server‟s resources.

Finding out if your server is good enough for your player base is a matter of

trial and error. If you players are experiencing lag or other kinds of glitches, you will have to investigate. I will not discuss hardware requirements here.

You will need a few applications installed on your server if you want to use eAthena.

SVN

Subversion is a version control system that lets you retrieve files for eAthena

(in this case) in a quick and orderly fashion. We will be using TortoiseSVN for our cause of downloading eAthena to our Windows platform.

MySQL

While eAthena covers a txt and MySQL version of its emulator, we will be

using the MySQL version. For the purpose of building our server, we will download WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP). With this application we

have a complete webserver at our disposal. More about this will be explained

later.

Visual Studio Express Edition (only download if you want to compile)

In the next chapter, you will have the choice to either download a .rar file that has everything needed for eAthena, or if you are rather adventurous,

you can compile eAthena from svn yourself. If you want to compile, download VSEE here. (You will need C++).

3

To compile or not to compile?

When using pre compiled eAthena, you don't have to worry about

installing dependencies on your system.

Also, you won‟t have to worry about going through the trouble of

compiling the download, as it is ready out of the box.

The disadvantage of using pre-compiled code is that you cannot customize

the eAthena emulator in the way you would like.

You can find precompiled versions in the following location on the eAthena

forums: http://www.eathena.ws/board/index.php?showforum=146

Under there, you can find precompiled versions for mostly Windows, but

there are some Linux ones as well. They are sorted by revision number,

with the latest revision number being at the top.

Source: eAthena.ws

The next chapter will cover compiling eAthena source code on a Windows

Platform. If you are going to download a pre-compiled version of eAthena,

please skip the following chapter.

4

Compiling on Windows

To compile eAthena on Windows, we will use TortoiseSVN to acquire the

eAthena source files, so we can use these to build our executables for the

different parts of the server.

After installing TortoiseSVN, create a folder on your hard drive (I will

name it eAthena) and right click it.

From the right-click menu, select “SVN Checkout” as displayed in the

following screenshot.

5

After selecting SVN Checkout, a new window will appear. In this window

we will need to enter the URL or Website address to download source code

from. In our case, we need the eAthena source code. We can choose

between 2 different types of source code:

Trunk

The Trunk source code has all the new functions and will be updated on a

regular basis, the Trunk code has not been tested on every platform and

may or may not contain bugs. If you want an up to date version of the

emulator, Trunk is the way to go.

Trunk source url is : http://svn.eathena.ws/svn/ea/trunk

Stable

The Stable source code has been tested fully to check for bug fixes and

problems. The stable code will probably work without any problems, but

this is not guaranteed.

Stable source url is : http://svn.eathena.ws/svn/ea/branches/stable/

You can read more about the differences and uses of the source code at the eAthena forum on

http://eAthena.ws.

6

For the purpose of our tutorial, we will use the Trunk source code. Here‟s

what to do:

In the SVN Checkout window, enter the url for the trunk source code and

click OK.

In the SVN Checkout window, enter the url for the trunk source code and

click OK.

When you click OK, the SVN software will download all files from the

repository. After the download is finished, you can click “OK”.

Next we will start the compilation process.

7

Compiling with Visual Studio Express Edition C++

We have now downloaded the necessary source code and will start

compiling it to produce the .exe files we have always been used to on a

windows environment.

The executable files we will be producing will be:

Char-server_sql.exe

The character server handles all character selection and loading the

characters for the map server. It also handles the loading and saving of

the character data.

Login-server_sql.exe

The login server handles all login packets from the client. Clients will first

connect to the login server, where it reads its data from the login table in

our sql database. The login server will then connect to the character

server.

Map-server_sql.exe

The map server works hardest of them all. All map functions like npc

loading, processing, mob functions etc. will be done by the map server.

Now that you know what each individual process will do, we can start

compiling.

8

First, open the eAthena map and run the eAthena-9.sln file, this is a

“solution” file that contains all the information necessary to start building

your server files. You can doubleclick the .sln file is you have Visual Studio

installed. After opening, you will see the following screen:

On the left side you can see the projects that can be built with this

solution file. We can build char-server, login and map server in SQL or

TXT form, plus a few other executables like ladmin, mapcache and txt-

converter.

We could right click every individual project in the list and select “Build” to

start creating the executable, but we will create all of them at once for

convenience.

On the left side, right click “Solution „eAthena-9‟ (10 projects)” and

select “Build Solution” from the right-click menu.

The building begins…. (This took approx. 10 minutes on my laptop).

As a result of the build, you will now have a few new executable files in

your eAthena folder.

9

Setting up MySQL

Before even thinking of starting up our new executable files and running

the server, things will need to be configured.

Like I said before, we will be using an SQL version of eAthena, this means

every little detail will get stored inside a database, we can easily retrieve

data from it and insert new data into the tables of the database, but we

won‟t be doing much advanced work on it in this tutorial.

The database will contain all information about player characters, mob

information, login details, command use (@go etc.) and much more.

You can easily edit attributes to make monsters harder to kill, or change

player levels. Anything is possible.

Most servers have a website, and with that website they will mostly use

PHPMyAdmin to configure and maintain the database (or not, it‟s a matter

of preference).

The above mentioned tool is easy to install on your web server and will

allow you to create a new database and edit its contents.

10

Because we want to keep things easy, we will be using WAMP server for

our tutorial. This handy piece of software contains Apache, MySQL and

PHP.

Apache is the probably the most popular web server, we will need it to run

phpmyadmin, as well as PHP itself. If you have not already downloaded

and installed WAMP, we will describe the process now, I have added a

sequence of images that will guide you through the installation process.

11

The above mentioned directory will be used to install wampserver and its

contents. Our website will be placed in c:\wamp\www in this example.

Select “launch WampServer now” and click Finish.

12

Easy, wasn‟t it?

Now, because wampserver is started, we have our own little website on

the computer. You can check it out at http://127.0.0.1 or http://localhost

As you can see in the above example, in the Tools section “phpmyadmin”

is already available.

13

We will now start creating our database with phpmyadmin. If you have

opened your little website at http://localhost , please click the

phpmyadmin link or go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/.

The above picture shows the welcome screen for phpmyadmin.

We will now create a new database within the Actions menu. (see above

picture).

The database name can be anything you want, but its best to make it

descriptive, I would recommend using your server name or just naming it

ragnarok.

14

After you type your database name into the field, you can click the

“create” button to start the process:

After I click create, the following screen pops up. As you can see I have

named my database ro_mmotop, and it has been successfully created.

15

Since our database needs to have a user and a password, we will start

adding “privileges”. (I have added a red rectangle around the option we

need). Now, click the “privileges” tab.

As you can see we already have a „root‟ user with all privileges. This is the

standard account used for mysql within wamp and it does not contain a

password.

16

We will however; create a new user that contains a password. Click the

“Add a new user” link.

We will need a name for our user, in the above example I have called

mine mmodbusr.

I have chosen to allow mmodbusr to connect through any host, that

means not only from this computer, but from any computer on the

internet, given the password is provided of course.

My password will be mmodbpass, you will have to come up with

something more complex if you want security. Best way to do this is have

phpmyadmin generate a password, but obviously it wouldn‟t be easy to

remember.

Under the “database for user” section I have selected (default) “grant all

privileges on database “ro_mmotop”. This means the user I create now,

will have full privileges on the database, as needed.

We do not have to select any other privileges under the “global privileges”

section, so you can click “Go” in the lower right corner.

17

If all went well, you can see that “You have added a new user”.

Now that we have a user that can communicate with the database, we

need to fill it up with some data. On the left menu, select your database

(ro_mmotop in this case).

We will now insert all sql tables needed to run the server (char info, log

info, mob info, item info, etc.) We will do this by selecting “IMPORT” as

shown below.

18

The developers of eAthena have blessed us with the necessary files to fill

the database. These can be found in your eAthena folder, which we downloaded earlier. To import files into the database, click the “Browse”

button, as shown below. Browse to the eAthena folder, and look for the

“sql-files” map.

First, select main.sql and click Open. You will now see the file path next to

the Browse button. To start importing, click the “Go” button. Importing

might take some time.

19

If the import is successful, you will see a few tables appearing on the left

side menu.

Now, import the rest of the sql files: item_db, item_db2, logs.sql,

mob_db2, mob_db

Now we have a full Ragnarok Online private server database, filled with

mobs, items and the entire splendor we will need to run our server.

In order for the different parts of the server to communicate with

eachother, we will need to set a communication password. The default

communication username is s1 and its password is p1. This MUST be

changed.

20

Here‟s how we do this. Inside phpmyadmin, open your database

(ro_mmotop in my case). And select the login table.

Since we do not have any registered users at this point, we can see that

the account id (1) has s1 and p1 inserted into the table.

We will need to change the userid and user_pass fields in the database.

Next to the account_id, you can see a small pencil icon, to edit the row,

click it.

21

Clicking the pencil will result in the following page.

You need to change userid (s1) and user_pass (p1). Use a complex name

and password here. If you do not change these parameters, you‟re server

will have a big security risk, so do not forget.

The next chapter will cover the configuration files, here we will set

everything up, resulting in our very first start-up. Yaay!

22

Configuration Files

eAthena contains a configuration file for almost everything. We will

discuss the most important changes in this tutorial.

Conf/char_athena.conf

The character configuration file covers the server name, the way

characters are created, maximum users allowed to connect and more.

First we will need to set the server communication password.

Change

// Server Communication username and password.

userid: s1

passwd: p1

To

// Server Communication username and password.

userid: <ENTER YOUR USERID HERE>

passwd: <ENTER YOUR PASSWORD HERE>

Just insert the same information we put inside the login table in the

previous chapter.

You can now change the server name to anything you wish. The rest of

the file is pretty self-explanatory.

We need not forget to change the IP section; this is where we set how the

servers will interact.

Usually, eAthena will auto-detect your external and internal IP if the IP

fields are commented out, but let's go ahead and remove the two slashes

(//) from login_ip and char_ip. The login_ip will point to the IP address

where the login server will be running. Usually this is the localhost, or

127.0.0.1. Sometimes this is not always the case. If the login-server is to

be located on the same network as the char-server, use the LAN IP or the

login server's machine. If you are running a dedicated machine in a

datacenter, or you know your IP is not going to change, you can set this

to your WAN IP. The char_ip paramter is the same way. The char_ip

parameter will ALWAYS be your WAN IP, no exceptions. This is the IP

that the char-server will accept connections with.

Source: eathena.ws

23

Here‟s an example for char_athena.conf:

login_ip: 127.0.0.1

//bind_ip: 127.0.0.1

login_port: 6900

char_ip: x.x.x.x (we need to add our external ip here, if you need to know

what your external ip is, find out on http://whatismyipaddress.com/ ).

char_port: 6121

Conf/map_athena.conf

The map config sets parameters for the map server to read. We will again

need to change the server communication password (s1 and p1).

Change

// Server Communication username and password.

userid: s1

passwd: p1

To

// Server Communication username and password.

userid: <ENTER YOUR USERID HERE>

passwd: <ENTER YOUR PASSWORD HERE>

We need to set the char_ip parameter to the internal IP that the char-

server is using (127.0.0.1 in our case). If you find that using the internal

IP is not working correctly for you, you can also use the external ip here.

The map_ip will require the external ip.

An example:

// Character Server IP

// The map server connects to the character server using this IP address.

// NOTE: This is useful when you are running behind a firewall or are on

// a machine with multiple interfaces.

char_ip: 127.0.0.1

// The map server listens on the interface with this IP address.

// NOTE: This allows you to run multiple servers on multiple interfaces

// while using the same ports for each server.

//bind_ip: 127.0.0.1

// Character Server Port

char_port: 6121

// Map Server IP

// The IP address which clients will use to connect.

// Set this to what your server's public IP address is.

map_ip: x.x.x.x (external ip here)

// Map Server Port

map_port: 5121

24

Conf/inter_athena.conf

This file will contain your SQL settings. We need to set these accordingly.

Here‟s our example:

sql.db_hostname: 127.0.0.1

sql.db_port: 3306

sql.db_username: mmodbuser

sql.db_password: mmodbpass <- change these lines to match your settings

sql.db_database: ro_mmotop

sql.codepage:

// MySQL Character SQL server

char_server_ip: 127.0.0.1

char_server_port: 3306

char_server_id: mmodbuser

char_server_pw: mmodbpass <- change these lines to match your settings

char_server_db: ro_mmotop

// MySQL Map SQL Server

map_server_ip: 127.0.0.1

map_server_port: 3306

map_server_id: mmodbuser

map_server_pw: mmodbpass <- change these lines to match your settings

map_server_db: ro_mmotop

// MySQL Log SQL Database

log_db_ip: 127.0.0.1

log_db_port: 3306

log_db_id: mmodbuser

log_db_pw: mmodbpass <- change these lines to match your settings

log_db_db: ro_mmotop

25

Conf/grf-files.txt

This file contains information about your grf files, these files contain all

game data, player sprites, hair colors, mob looks etc. We will not discuss

customization in this tutorial.

The txt file looks like this:

//-----------------------------------------

// GRF List

//-----------------------------------------

// grf: C:\path\to\RO\data.grf

// You may add more in this format

// grf: <data file path>

//------ Others ---------------------------

// Data Directory (without the actual data\ though)

// the below example would use C:\path\to\RO\data\

//data_dir: C:\path\to\RO\

I have changed it to:

//-----------------------------------------

// GRF List

//-----------------------------------------

// grf: C:\path\to\RO\data.grf

// You may add more in this format

// grf: <data file path>

grf: C:\eAthena\data.grf

grf: C:\eAthena\sdata.grf

You can get the grf files from any Ragnarok Online installation. If you do

not have one, please check out http://ragray.net

26

First Start!

Now, all of our hard work has paid off and we are ready to test if we can

start the server without errors.

U can start login-server_sql.exe, char-server_sql.exe and map-

server_sql.exe or use runserver-sql.bat which will do previous

mentioned starting for you.

The result will be something like this:

Above picture shows login, char and map server within command screens.

That‟s all there is to it to start a default Ragnarok Online private server.

Next, I will be creating a new article that covers setting up your Ragnarok

Online client, this will cover creating an installer you can give to your

players, and so they can easily install and run it, and eventually play on

your server.

Feel free to comment, mail, write etc. if you think something needs to be

changed, added or removed.

If you have any questions about setting up your server by using this

document, you can add a comment to the article on the howto section or

write in our forums.

Thank you for reading .