Well firstly, a massive congratulations from me and many others here for having the bravery and intelligence to attempt such a huge project. I have mates deploying AI agents and custom harnesses to rapidly reverse-engineer dead RTS servers from scratch and a sibling researching these at a FAANG company. This PES 2021 project is just another moment with these tools that is blowing my mind. We're perhaps seeing this with PES 2013 at the moment on the forum too (
https://evoweb.uk/threads/pes-2013-private-server.106472/) and a group has announced the same thing with a couple of FIFAs this week (
https://x.com/wonderfulpie_?t=c3ncZFdwWpUEId8Eh3THcA - FIFA 14, 13, and 17 have had their online services restored like PES 2021).
The LLM and agent tools are going to lead to a golden age now for the modding communities of old games. And thank god, because AAA game studios and new games are terrible right now. It is fantastic timing. It used to take someone like Juce and Reddwarf months of grueling, manual coding and now a big project can be spun up by a team of AI agents and one really smart guy directing them to do the work. You literally tell them "Make this server for me, here are some requirements I want" and iteratively work like that if you have the money for API tokens and are smart enough to work through the problems with them. The custom harness gives the AI agent access to the terminal. Instead of the Wireshark GUI, an agent runs tshark, can launch the game, look at the network traffic through the command line and just work away on its own like a software engineer. Anyone here if they are intelligent and have enough money can pick another game like PES 2012 and attempt to get in on the action.
Looking at the FIFA Discord although I haven't joined, they seem to already have 50,000 members. PESBul could become just as massive. I'd really like to see him keep the source code private and everyone using one server, but to share his AI agents and custom harness and maybe even a recording of how he goes about his workflow with them, what were the limitations and main problems he faced. While all the details are fresh in his mind. I think many employers and companies would try to employ him if theres content like that put on youtube. It would also make it so much easier for others to tackle the other PES games, although there are plenty of great YouTube tutorials available already for those interested.
Anyone hating on AI, I think now needs to open their eyes with this amazing PESBul project and especially his posts showing the agents huge, comprehensive reports and outputs sometimes only 1 day apart which no human could do in that time. We need to start learning and sharing more information about agents and harnesses as a community , getting those with the intelligence and know how with agents together with those who have the money for tokens and would like to fund development on their favorite pes game. If others work on the older servers using agents, we could have a situation where all the classic PES games have active online communities again. This is something that would have seemed impossible a few years ago and who knows what is possible in the future.