Why we made it
Soldier Front's servers are gone. Its maps, weapons and soldiers are not, and they deserve a game that runs on today's PCs and a server anyone can run.
Where Soldier Front stood
Special Force, Soldier Front in North America, was made by Dragonfly in Seoul and first released in Korea in July 2004, published by Neowiz. NHN USA opened it in North America on ijji.com on 14 February 2007, and in 2011 NHN sold ijji to Aeria Games, which carried it on. Every official server has since been shut down, and the game is not sold on any storefront today.
What players kept is the client of 2004. It holds itself to 32 frames a second, was made for a mouse and the 4:3 screens of its day, and reaches only the servers it was built for. Dragonfly never released a server program, so the game lived or died with whoever ran its servers.
What we did about it
We reconstructed the game: a new game and a new server, written by us, that play Soldier Front's own data (the maps and their lightmaps, the weapons and their numbers, the soldiers and their motions, the sounds, the radio voices, the lobby's layouts and art) with a renderer, netcode and menus of our own.
Reconstructing it is what made the rest possible: any frame rate, any screen, a controller, a server program for Windows and Linux, and one account that works everywhere.
Anyone can run a server, the game reads one public list of them, and a server can add content that players download as they join. Whatever server a player is on, the account, the rank and the record are the same one, kept by Team Vanilla.
What it does for everyone
Players
- Soldier Front on a PC of today: any frame rate up to 360, any screen shape, DirectX 12, DirectX 11 or OpenGL.
- Made for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android, all on the same servers.
- A controller as well as a mouse, with no aim assist for either.
- One account, one rank and one record on every server. Joining a new server never starts you over.
- Friends, mail and your clan on every server, and an invitation can take you to a friend on another one.
- The recording of any match you played, to watch again.
Server owners
- The server program Team Vanilla runs, for Windows or Linux.
- No accounts to look after and no passwords on your machine: Team Vanilla keeps the accounts.
- Your own staff, channels, rules, message of the day and shop.
- Your own weapons, maps and characters, downloaded by players as they join.
- A place on the list for everyone who opens the game.
Clans and communities
- Clans are the same clan on every server, with Owner, Co-Owner and Lieutenant ranks, applications and a log.
- An emblem of your own, made in the game from shapes and pictures, and drawn sharp at any size.
- Clan War channels for clan battles, and a community server for your own events.
- Events on the calendar, each with its SP and XP bonus, gift boxes and quests of its own.
Soldier Front itself
- All 12 game types played by their own rules: the bomb, the item, the escape, the captains, both Horror modes, Occupy and the Pirate Ship.
- 40 maps, 82 weapons and 12 forces, as the game's data has them.
- The original's kill marks, its radio in English, German, Korean and Spanish, and its lobby, rebuilt from its own layouts and art.
- A server program and its guide, so the game no longer depends on any one operator.
What stays Soldier Front's
One rule decided every option and every server setting: do not ruin what Soldier Front was.
- A map looks the way it was made: its baked light, its hour and its sky. No option touches them. Day or night in a room is the host's choice, for everyone in it.
- What a player sees of the fight is the same for everyone. Smoke grenades and flash-bangs are always drawn in full; the options that once thinned smoke or turned off a map's lightmaps are left out.
- The defaults are the game as it was: the same filtering, every effect on, no anti-aliasing until you turn it on.
- No aim assist, on any device.
- Base weapons, forces and parts keep their official numbers on every server. A server's packs add things; they never change or re-skin anything of the original.
- The options window is the client's own USER SETTING dialog, in its own plates.
Who we are
TeamVanilla is a game development and research & development company. Soldier Front Legacy, its server, Team Vanilla's account service and this site are ours. The rest of our work is on teamvanilla.dev, and we talk on the TeamVanilla Discord. Soldier Front Legacy's own players gather on the Soldier Front Legacy Discord.
Soldier Front and its art belong to Dragonfly and its publishers. The credits name who made what.