So far, all of the assets recovered came from a single person which now happens to be our main developer.Įven in Raise the Empires, we are lacking thousands of assets that we may never be able to recover, meaning some parts of the game might never become fully functional again. However, even in this case, this had to be enabled manually. This is what happened with Empires & Allies. If not yet deleted, these can be recovered. Some games could store many of these assets on a dedicated directory of the user's computer as a way to save bandwidth. Now, if this is the case, you may ask, then how did Raise the Empires manage to get off the ground? Well, there is a very small sliver of hope for some of these games, the Flash shared object cache (SOL). This would include things like assets and game interactions (if these were sent over HTTP). These apps have the capability of exporting HTTP archives which would contain any HTTP requests exchanged between the game and the server. This is pretty discouraging, especially considering that cheating using applications like Fiddler and Charles Proxy was fairly popular back in the day. If something like a packet dump or HTTP archive surfaced for these games then you could potentially extract many of the required assets from it, but to date, I've never seen this happen. These would have been requested by the Flash game as needed so unless someone went out of their way to back them up, they're gone. As these games shut down, these files were made inaccessible. These games made use of many external files that contain the resources (textures, music, sound effects, flash libraries) that are required for the game to work.
However, contrary to what you'd think, emulating the server isn't what's stopping preservation. These games were made in Flash and require a constant connection to a game server. This is one of the few projects of this kind I'm aware of, other than Club Penguin private servers. I'm part of a preservation project named Raise the Empires which aims to rebuild Empires & Allies, an old Zynga Facebook game from 2011.
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