Let's go through that README again... What the heck is this?

A C# NetCore open source server for that other leg-bone game which must not be named, apparently, because it may upset people.

Here's a nice pic (from early dev), because pics are good:

TL;DR What are you looking for?

Run this thing? see how to setup and run it.

Knobs and switches? configuration section.

Just... WHY?.

Status and overview of things implemented? Err... overview / roadmap... sure.

More docs to (probably) come soon!

How is this better than the existing C++ engines?

Well, it's too soon to say, but it sure looks sexy. The main development features right now are:

Top-of-industry standards + clean code = happy devs.

It really grinds my gears how badly TFS is documented overall, and how steep the learning curve for newbies is. Ergo, I strived to make this is a well-documented and clean code project that can actually be maintained.

Check the code reference here, which pulls the XML documentation from the actual code to generate these pages. It doesn't get better than that.

We got them tests.

Slowly growing in the repo, the Fibula project also features testing made super easy by the dotnet core framework.

Dependency Injection:

Dependency injection gives the power to the dev, to quickly switch out the flavor of specific component that they want to run, e.g. the way the map loads:

Notice the OTBM flavor in the image above.

And the same can be done for other assets loading.

Minimal changes between backend version.

By leveraging DI we can support different back-end versions with minimal code changes to make when switching between them.

Take 7.72 for example:

This project (and thus, DLL) contains all the intrinsics of packet parsing and writing, connection and other components specific to that version:

And it is injected with 2 lines at the composition root of the project (bottom 2 lines):

Once we want to support another version, say 7.4, we shall add a single DLL targetting that version, implementing the components needed to be injected, possibly point to the 7.4 map/assets in the config, and re-compile.

For the above example: 7.4 did not have XTEA or RSA encryption for connections, so that would be stripped.

Moreover, for 7.1 for example, the structure would change to not include skulls or shields in the player status packet.