I'm not lashing out against Cpp personally, but to J2NSM in general. Keeping all their knowledge "secret" is not constructive. Just put it on a public wiki or something, so everyone can benefit from it.

I don't doubt that most of the weird details can be figured out but there are surely many many corner cases in the engine behavior that none of us have ever given too much thought. I'm skeptical that we would be able to achieve a valid server clone of the game and that the people involved would not become burned out of tracking down all of the details.

Perhaps more openness in reverse engineering the game would help the effort by allowing people to help and to start from the work of others rather than rederive everything. I'm not sure that the history we have of hiding our secrets in closed off hacking communities is for the best for making real progress anymore. (I don't think we'll have a rash of abused hacking tools if we give away information about the game as was the concern ~5/6(?) years ago when we started forming these groups)

Yeah I agree that j2nsm could be a bit more open. It has a good database (wiki) which is currently private, and the IRC channel is also private. But on the other hand, there is actually some stuff that there is a very good reason for keeping under wraps, mostly for securty reasons. The best in my opinion would probably be to make the system more open, but keep the sensitive issues private. I just don't know if the pressure is really there to make things more open. I think the information database at least should be made mostly public (though not to edit). That would at least spur activity a bit, and get more potential members. It's kinda dead at the moment.

It's pretty easy to "join" j2nsm anyway, so in the mean time that's the best option for anyone interested in getting involved. It's a pretty loose collective, and I don't think there is even any real official list of members. If you are smart, trustworthy, and able to make the slightest positive contribution, then you can get in. A lot of people with access don't even have much programming skill, including me.

The sort of things people could do 6 years ago are quite a bit different from what is possible now. Crashing servers, spamming servers with crap without even being in them, and some things that are quite a bit worse (I will not go into more detail here). JJ2+ and other tools blocks a lot of that but some of it is bad enough that there is still a very good reason for letting as few people as possible know about it. The people with access to this knowledge should only be the ones who can be trusted not to put it to bad use or leak it, and I think that is a very reasonable position, albeit somewhat annoying to those left in the dark.

EDIT: Perhaps I overreacted a bit in this post so I'll just edit it out.

Lastly, I'll save myself the typing and agree with everything Mike just said.

While I must still include the big note about having very little free time for such projects, I am interested in helping with the core framework and engine that such a project would require. I know little about reverse engineering or JJ2 formats, but engine design, multithreading, and network programming are things I could do.