Skip to content

Envision

Envision is a clean-room private-server project for Shin Megami Tensei: IMAGINE — Atlus and Cave's defunct Japanese MMO, sunset worldwide in 2016. The goal is preservation and research: rebuild a working server stack from first principles so the game remains playable and its design legible to people who care about it.

This site is the long-form home for Envision. It collects everything that doesn't belong in the source tree itself: project goals, architecture notes, operator guides, client setup instructions, and a complete wire-protocol reference generated directly from the server's packet definitions.

What's here

  • Protocol reference

    Every packet the server speaks, grouped by direction. Generated from the YAML source of truth on every build, so it never drifts from what's actually on the wire.

    Browse packets

  • Running a server (coming soon)

    How to bring up the lobby, channel, and control-plane processes locally, configure ports and databases, and tail logs while debugging.

  • Client setup (coming soon)

    Getting the retail 1.666 client talking to a local Envision instance — Wine prefix prerequisites, theme stub fixes, and the Frida harness that patches the hardcoded auth URL.

  • Architecture (coming soon)

    A tour of the pieces: HTTP web-auth, encrypted TCP lobby, channel server, NetMQ control plane, persistent store, and the runtime world-state cache with its write-behind flush.

Status

Envision is under active development.

About this project

Envision is a clean-room reimplementation: the wire protocol is documented from observed traffic and runtime reverse engineering of the retail client, not copied from any prior server codebase. The rebuild is written from scratch in C# (.NET 10), with a small Python/TypeScript harness on the side for driving the client under Wine and collecting RE findings.

IMAGINE is no longer a live service, and Envision is a research and preservation effort — not a live rehost and not a commercial product. Content on this site reflects what we've learned about how the game works; it is not advice for operating a public server.