Hello <DarkStar Administrator>:

First, I would like to apologize beforehand for my French and unfortunately I do not speak any Russian. French is not my mother tougne; I do speak a little and so I will try my best to communicate with you in French. I will also translate my message into Russian as well for you and the rest of the DarkStar Development Team.

My pseudonym is Kyousousha and I am the Project Administrator for DLX, a FINAL FANTASY XI server emulator based on ProjectXI revision 1430. My project was contacted earlier today by Yayulaky, a Developer for DarkStar, on our old thread on the elitepvpers forums. xworndownx, our Lead Developer, and myself spoke to Yayulaky directly in the Tunngle chat client as well. During our discussion, we had come to agree that it would be beneficial for both DarkStar and DLX to merge our projects together; however, before contacting you I wanted to make sure the rest of the DLX Development Team was in unanimous agreement. So far everyone involved with DLX has in fact agreed with the exception of our person responsible for Digital Asset Management because I have not been in contact with him today. With this in mind, I would like to express the concerns of the DLX Development Team:

As you are aware, SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. is very protective of their intellectual property and shut down ProjectXI as well as other projects not related to FINAL FANTASY XI. In order to protect DLX, we have adopted the same position as the original ProjectXI team in that we only support a legally-purchased copy of FINAL FANTASY XI and its expansion packs and require an active Content ID with PLAYONLINE. We are aware this is not the case as it is possible to launch FFXiMain.dll using the COM interface with another client such as MeteorXI or ffxiboot, but this is to help keep SQUARE ENIX from issuing us a cease and desist order to us for two reasons: 1. SQUARE ENIX should not be losing revenue because of our project; 2. Our project does not directly compete with the content provided by the retail servers run by SQUARE ENIX. DLX does not support anyone trying to connect to our Alpha Server using these methods, although it is possible.

Next, it has been our objective to add content in a bottom-up approach. At this time, DLX is only focusing on the content from FINAL FANTASY XI and Rise of the Zilart. Once this content has been added, we will consider adding the content from subsequent expansion packs in the order of their release. We believe server stability and Game Mechanics should be in place first before any content. We were informed that you have Game Mechanics such as Fishing, Bazaar, and the Delivery Box working, which we do not. I will assume this means that you also have the Auction House working as well, while ours is partially functional at this time. However, we have been able to implement monster Special Attacks.

Yayulaky had asked if we have a copy of FFXImon. Unfortunately, it no longer works as of the last FINAL FANTASY XI version update, and I do not have the source code for it so I deleted it. However, I have been able to fix all Npcs in the database with the correct Id, position, animation, model, etc. This will be added to our Alpha Server very soon. Also, I am the only person affiliated with the original ProjectXI team that knew how to locate Event Ids in the .DAT, which means that all of the dialog and cutscenes in the Lua scripts can be fixed as well. However, this is a massive undertaking in itself as all of the Event Ids need to be checked. While I have the Ids, positions, animations, models, etc. for monsters, the ProjectXI-0.6.4 database is poorly designed and is something that I have refrained from working on at this time. DLX has discussed redesigning the database in 3NF, which will take some time as well.