A server for the part of GunZ that was actually good

Why

GunZ has been dead in an official sense for a long time, and alive in an unofficial sense the entire time. Private servers come and go. Most of them fail the same way: they launch with a good population, monetise the item shop to cover hosting, and eighteen months later the fights are decided by whoever spent more.

The other failure is technical. The original netcode applies damage between clients, so a competitive match is partly a contest of who has the better route to whom. Servers that try to fix this usually rewrite too much and lose the movement system in the process.

This server exists to be the version that does neither: server-authoritative damage, untouched movement, and an item economy where nothing you can acquire changes a fight.

What it will not do

• No paid advantage, in any form. No donor stats, no custom weapons with numbers on them, no shop item that affects a match. If money can change a fight, the ladder means nothing.
• No stat advantage, ever. Weapon and armour values are tuned — at the original numbers casual was a spray game — but every weapon in a class carries the same stat block, so two shotguns differ only in the mesh. A cosmetic can never be an edge.
• No movement changes. Animation cancel timings, dash physics, weapon switch delays and jump behaviour are treated as specification, not as bugs to be cleaned up.
• No cosmetic arms race. Glowing weapons, particle-trail wings and rainbow nametags are not coming. The visual language of the game stays where it was.

Scope

Duel and clan war are the point. Quest mode and the other legacy game types exist and work, but they are not what the development effort goes into, and they do not get to influence balance decisions.

How it is paid for

There is a cosmetic shop, and it is the only thing on the server that takes money. It sells recoloured vanilla sets and nothing else. The line a cosmetic is not allowed to cross is fixed: vanilla stats, vanilla silhouette, no glow, and no visibility advantage.

That last one is measured rather than judged. Every recolour is checked against the source texture for mean luma, the fraction of texels above luma 150, and luma standard deviation, and a set that reads as easier or harder to see than the vanilla original does not ship. Two finished sets have already been thrown away for failing it.

Nothing in that shop touches a fight, and no subscription, battle pass or donation tier grants anything in game. The reason the shop exists at all is that a server which cannot pay its own hosting bill closes, and every server that closed took its ladder with it.

How the art is made

Some of the art on this server is AI-generated, and it is easier to say which than to leave people guessing. The profile icons, the profile banners, and the key art on the cash shop packages are generated with Google's Gemini 3 Pro Image. Nothing else is.

Everything you actually play in — maps, character models, weapons, animations, sounds, the interface — is MAIET's, unchanged. The clothing sets in the shop are recolours of MAIET's own textures, done by a script that moves the palette, not by a model inventing a garment. Where a set's shop art shows the outfit, it was painted from a render of the real in-game item rather than from a description of it, so what you see is what you get.

This art is paid for. Not free, not scraped off a site, not the output of a public tool somebody ran once for nothing. Every image is commissioned the way art has always been commissioned here: a written brief, a fee per image, a look at what came back, and a rejection when it is wrong. The bill is real and it is paid every time.

The difference from hiring an illustrator is who is on the other end of the brief, and the working relationship is otherwise the same one. The profile icon set went through four full style passes before a single one was kept. Two finished clothing sets were scrapped for failing the visibility rule above. The banners were re-exposed twice in one day because they read too dark next to the house one, and a set of shop banners was thrown out entirely because the locations in them were invented instead of being this game's own maps.

Which is the honest case for doing it this way at all: a one-person project can have this kind of art or have none of it. The alternative here was never a hired illustrator. The alternative was an empty profile screen.

Where this stops: nothing generated ever affects a fight, and no generated asset replaces an original one. If that ever changes, this section changes with it.

Where it is

Closed beta. The client is playable, the server runs, and the Clan War system that was the release blocker is built: a Glicko-2 rating that decides both the pairing and the standings, rosters bound to the machines that queued, and automatic forfeit penalties for disconnects and rage-quits.

What it has not had is players. Until real matches have been played, the ladder pages on this site show placeholder data and say so — there is no reason to publish standings for a competition that has not started.

Credit

GunZ: The Duel was made by MAIET Entertainment. This is a non-commercial fan project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to MAIET or any current rights holder.

The codebase descends from the Open GunZ and Refined GunZ lineage, which in turn descends from the leaked original source. Everything usable here rests on years of unpaid work by people in that lineage.