👋 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.