Open Letter To The 3D Tibia guys (the indi devs behind 3DDragons)

Demoncrawler said:

You should update the pics on the homepage. Seems like there are the old pics from 2021 there and seems like since 2024 there are new pics.

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adare said:

Guys! you are Hero's! Tibia's the BEST MMORPG and you have bought it to life in a sleek gorgeous 3D way!

But now that you've put yourself in the spotlight.. It's time to get hit you with the really hard questions..

(Context)
You guys likely have the best graphics of any Tibia project ever. period. (I don't think there is much argument there)
But,
You guys are uncompetitive coding wise eg. game mechanics (some rare OT devs add mechanics at ~1000x your rate)

It feels like your project has an (almost) overload of ART skill at this point!.. but the coders / devs seem to be somewhat less up to the task.
The videos show that server mechanics appear very janky and unpolished with lots of random stutter delays common to old YurOTs servers,
E.g. The sticky tile / floor code mechanics your getting is a known old common bug; You guys do not know how to make an OT server purr.
Also the recent game mechanics update about mobs looking at players - tho very cool! shows just how slow your code changes vs your art.

(Questions)

1. Who is the current coding dev ? are you happy with their current energy/effort? do you have any plans to expand the coding power/potential of your team?
- I have multiple (5+) highly productive C++ OT devs, and most of them have been frothing at the idea of working on an OT with high quality visual assets.

2. How do you guys feel about different kinds of competition? Would you feel upset/used if other OT-Dev teams started stealing / using your 3D artwork ?
- You guys obviously make also make use of other peoples / cipsofts game engine code / assets and presumably feel little to no moral reservations about it.

3. How do you guys feel about others (e.g. me) who really aren't 3D asset artists but who really know how to code and who want to work on a 3D Tibia style game!
- Open honesty: I managed to extract your Dragons 3D game client codes (including all assets animation, textures etc) I've re-associated them with the tibia sprite IDs etc and have a basic login / walk around the map in 3D working, currently working on a simple custom radiosity based lighting engine. (I'd be happy to reference/link to you guys - mention you guys as the asset authors/artists, even agree to share any future revenue etc)

Really appreciate the work!, definitely want to hear about it if there's anything I can offer (eg code/knowledge/tools)

We've gonna keep following and supporting you guys no matter what - Keep it up!

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Hagality Online said:

I don't know who you are, but I hope you will make good use of the content, your description correctly presents the situation with a lack of programmers for the project. Apart from visual changes, not much has changed.
It's hard to find a programmer who knows both Tibia and Unity

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Hagality Online said:

I don't know who you are, but I hope you will make good use of the content, your description correctly presents the situation with a lack of programmers for the project. Apart from visual changes, not much has changed.
It's hard to find a programmer who knows both Tibia and Unity

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adare said:

Hey Hagality!

Thanks for the quick reply! you are a god among men

So glad to learn that your a really nice guy (super talented people sometimes can be mean)

I'll send you a Private message for details on who I am, but rest assured I'm just a guy who wants to play and work on a cool new 3D Tibia game !

Your art skills blew me away btw (and you captured certain aspects Tibia Vibe really well)

Anything I do make which includes your art is ofcoarse getting sent straight to you ;D to play try review, enjoy etc. if there's any sense in which you don't like the look of something your views will be given the top most priority (every time).

We're much more interested in the mechanics and gameplay aspect, I'm only writing a 3D client becase some of our girlfriends prefer WOW's style of wasd+mouse control.

Totally understand what you mean about Tibia and Unity being a hard to find combo! (most unity devs are likely 20 or younger and that would mean Tibia was popular back when they were like 2yo! haha )

Again Really amazing stuff!, you have made a whole ton of fans over here!! (we're from Australia btw!)

I'll let you get back to work! you and I'll send you a demo featuring with your awesome models as soon as it's working

ta!

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Codinablack said:

You do realize hagalty online and 3 dragons are two very separate projects, and developers, right? You seem to be confusing the author of hagalty as the author of 3 dragons...

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Keal Atis said:

No, it is the same thing. The project is being developed by Fedor and Pikus.

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3Dragons

3dragons.games

3Dragons-games

There were a lot of rumors about Tibia 3D in the past. I estimate that approximately the same amount of people heralded potential success to the project as in oppose to the other half, claiming it's going to inevitably kill Tibia's "old-school" climate. We are a group of developers who played...

www.youtube.com

adare said:

Guys! you are Hero's! Tibia's the BEST MMORPG and you have bought it to life in a sleek gorgeous 3D way!

But now that you've put yourself in the spotlight.. It's time to get hit you with the really hard questions..

(Context)
You guys likely have the best graphics of any Tibia project ever. period. (I don't think there is much argument there)
But,
You guys are uncompetitive coding wise eg. game mechanics (some rare OT devs add mechanics at ~1000x your rate)

It feels like your project has an (almost) overload of ART skill at this point!.. but the coders / devs seem to be somewhat less up to the task.
The videos show that server mechanics appear very janky and unpolished with lots of random stutter delays common to old YurOTs servers,
E.g. The sticky tile / floor code mechanics your getting is a known old common bug; You guys do not know how to make an OT server purr.
Also the recent game mechanics update about mobs looking at players - tho very cool! shows just how slow your code changes vs your art.

(Questions)

1. Who is the current coding dev ? are you happy with their current energy/effort? do you have any plans to expand the coding power/potential of your team?
- I have multiple (5+) highly productive C++ OT devs, and most of them have been frothing at the idea of working on an OT with high quality visual assets.

2. How do you guys feel about different kinds of competition? Would you feel upset/used if other OT-Dev teams started stealing / using your 3D artwork ?
- You guys obviously make also make use of other peoples / cipsofts game engine code / assets and presumably feel little to no moral reservations about it.

3. How do you guys feel about others (e.g. me) who really aren't 3D asset artists but who really know how to code and who want to work on a 3D Tibia style game!
- Open honesty: I managed to extract your Dragons 3D game client codes (including all assets animation, textures etc) I've re-associated them with the tibia sprite IDs etc and have a basic login / walk around the map in 3D working, currently working on a simple custom radiosity based lighting engine. (I'd be happy to reference/link to you guys - mention you guys as the asset authors/artists, even agree to share any future revenue etc)

Really appreciate the work!, definitely want to hear about it if there's anything I can offer (eg code/knowledge/tools)

We've gonna keep following and supporting you guys no matter what - Keep it up!

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RonIT said:

A quick story of Tibia 3D aka Hagality and then 3Dragons:

In 2021, me (Ron), my brother (Nakeib) and czarnowidz after years of absence in OT world, decided to go back and do something we always thought about -> Tibia 3D. We did a quick research, posted few posts about the idea itself and on the way met Pikus (who was already engaged in Hagality effort). Hagality was non-functional at a time and the client itself was far away from being "working". We decided that: 1. we're going to fork from slavidodo codebase and are going to start from "scratch", 2. we're going to reuse RonOTS server codebase (as it was already stable, although not very performant, but in the end we knew that codebase really well) and we're going to launch 3Dragons. If it's going to go well, we're going to migrate to TFS at some point. We did it. The problem was: it was more time consuming than we thought. When we initially launched first Beta server, we had more than 7000 players registered within first 30 days. It was going well, but we were not monetizing this traffic and soon enough we stumbled upon another issue: no one could dedicate enough time for this project to roll, having families. real jobs we had to "preserve" and no money from this project. We started Beta2 and Beta3 and started to finally collect some money, but it was just enough to pay the bills for assets and other resources. In late 2023 we put it on hold. We winded back in 2024 with the idea of finally moving to TFS and launching RealMap project. I got sick on the way and everything was postponed again.

At the beginning of 2025 Pikus decided to leave and since he he did awesome work and put a lot of effort into it, we allowed him to make use of the client to create, yet, another fork of 3Dragons. Me, Nakeib and czarnowidz are still holding rights to 3Dragons and Shattered Kingdoms (Steam version, not yet released) and are planning to move to TFS engine.

I hope that clarifies the things up a little bit.

Post automatically merged: Feb 6, 2025

It's nice to read you appreciate the work we did (although more on the art side of things than the dev side and I get it, but believe me, there were quite a few technical difficulties for us to overcome too).

Let's talk over DC (#ron1431) / Messenger / WhatsApp, but in short: you can reuse assets, however, there are copyrights for most of them (we bought the vast majority from Unity Asset Store) - so we're not going to be the ones filing a lawsuit. Moreover, if you have a reliable and well-tested server, we could potentially ally

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Codinablack said:

Just curious, but which TFS version were you guys trying to utilize? I only ask, because if it's 10.98, then I would suggest using BlackTek Server as it's a much more updated version with a TON of bugs I have fixed already and it's like 97 percent backwards compatible with TFS 1.4.2, literally the only thing that BlackTek changed that "breaks backwards compatibility" is the removal of "absorb" properties in the items.xml, in favor of my "augments" instead (having both would just have bogged down the combat code even more excessively than TFS already has it).

BlackTek Server also offers a variety of performance enhancing commits as well, and if you decided to use it and keep up to date with the releases, then there are even more great things coming, including more performance enhancements and custom features, I'm actually wrapping up the conversion to shared pointers from raw pointers for the thing class and all its derived classes right now.

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czarnowidz said:

We were actually working in TFS 1.4.2. Recently got similar suggestion to use BlackTek, so if we continue working on engine switch - it's something we'll need to reassess.

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Codinablack said:

The good thing is that there is really nothing needing changed in the datapack if you do, just the removal of the absorbs from the items.xml and your own implementation for their replacements (you have lua and augments at your disposal, so should be a quick and easy to do)... there was at least two people who said they would put in a PR for such a replacement if they ever get around to doing it themselves.

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samco said:

BTW I contacted Ron in discord in 2023 but no answer. I did contact again but still no answer

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RonIT said:

What is your DC ID?

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