About
LEGO Universe was an MMO developed by NetDevil and The LEGO Group that launched in October 2010 and was shut down in January 2012. Darkflame Universe (DLU) is an open-source server emulator for LEGO Universe, under active development since 2013 and now providing what the project describes as a near-perfect emulation of the original game server. It's licensed under AGPLv3, does not distribute any LEGO Universe client files itself, and requires a separately obtained game client to connect. It supports both SQLite (for single-player/small setups) and MariaDB databases, and includes a companion web application (Nexus Dashboard) for account creation and moderation.
How it differs from the original
Unlike the original commercial LEGO Universe service, the project's authors explicitly recommend against hosting large public servers with it, since it has only been tested for small-scale deployment (e.g. among a group of friends) and carries additional untested security risks at larger scale.
Getting started
Setting up a single-player server no longer requires building from source: a prebuilt release is extracted into the same folder as the game client executable, a config file is pointed at the client location, and the server starts by running its master server program, which prompts for account creation on first run. A full development setup (for multiplayer, MariaDB, or contributing code) additionally requires installing a C++ toolchain and MariaDB, building from source, and editing several server config files; a Docker Compose setup is also provided as an alternative that bundles the database, server, and the Nexus Dashboard account-management web app.
History
Development of Darkflame Universe started in 2013, going through multiple iterations into what the project describes as a near-perfect emulation of the original LEGO Universe game server.
Known limitations
- platform: WSL version 1 does NOT support using sqlite as a database due to filesystem synchronization issues; WSL2 is required to avoid save data loss.
Media
Additional notes
- Technical note
- Running the server under WSL requires WSL version 2 — WSL 1 doesn't handle filesystem synchronization correctly for the SQLite database and can cause save-data loss.
- License
- Under the project's AGPLv3 license, hosting a server for others counts as distribution, which requires disclosing any code changes made.