I have spent many hours the past few days and have resolved all compilation blockers and now the gameserver daemon compiles without error on modern systems, and got as far as attempting to connect to the MariaDB server, which means OpenSSL 1.1 passed it's internal sanity checks. This was by far the biggest blocker, and is now resolved.
And I have just now completed fixing up my hand-optimized SQL schemata, and MariaDB now consumes it and creates a suitable bare database. I should be able to commence basic engine function testing shorty.
