WCell (http://www.wcell.org)

Above the drama and apart from the fray, stands an emulator built from the ground up in C#. WCell started when WOWD was already 3 years in development, a significant hurdle to overcome. Developers have come and gone, but WCell has been worked on actively without interruptions.

The core development team consisted of mgX, Craigen and biceps (who dragged tobz in, kicking and screaming ). As time went by, IronMala came along, as did Ralek, who became an essential member of team. His work on dissassembling the WOW Client is nothing short of god-like. Later, Domi joined up and has been an indispensable project leader and prolific contributor. Others have joined forces in recent months as well, namely Meshok and fubeca. Mokrago developed an IRC addon for the project and Timmeh has been gracious enough to provide hosting.

Unfortunately, most of the people actively working on the project were pro coders, so they burned out, or were lost to the demands of real life with no time left to work on the project. WCell 0.5 was the last major release, then the project switched to continuous improvement without releasing minor revisions. It requires different knowledge from WOWD and it’s derivatives, given that it’s the newest of the open source emulators that’s been around for more than a few weeks. Version 0.5 was barely playable, with just the basics being implemented.

Since then, there has been a constant flow of WOW patches and changes making development work difficult. However, when WoW released Live v3.0, WCell was the first emulator to support 3.0 client connection and continuous improvements have been made by the development team to support many of the newest client features.

A major disaster befell the WCell team around the start of 2009, when catastrophic hardware failure at the hosting facility destroyed the team’s wiki and forums. This set back development as the site was restored from transaction logs and threw the WCell community into disarray. Despite all of this, it won’t be long now before WCell overtakes and surpasses the competition, with a major release planned in the not-too-distant future (as of June 2009).

One of the many advantages that WCell has is in its design. The clean codebase and customized tools makes code patching a breeze. One great tool, which has been largely overlooked by the community is the Packet Analyzer, which allows sniffed retail packet logs to be parsed to human readable form. With further community cooperation, all packets could be rapidly documented, but it’s currently left in hands of WCell developers. Another great feature of WCell is its Add-on system. Its modular nature allows third parties to plug in customizeable addons which are developed completely separately from the core code. The result of which is a 100% customizeable server.

WCell is utilizing NHibernate as its DB layer and with planned release of C# 4.0 it’s going to support many scripting languages. At the moment, it only supports .NET ones (C#, VB.NET, Managed C++). The only disadvantage is that it doesn’t work on Linux as of yet, but there are plans which include making it work with alternative implementation of .NET called Mono.

You can support the WCell by adding this userbar to your signature at forums you are using.