Support:About Arianne: Difference between revisions

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The [http://arianne.sf.net Arianne] project was established in 1999 and is still thriving today. It is an umbrella project, covering several subprojects. The most important ones today are Marauroa, Stendhal and Marboard.

[http://arianne.sourceforge.net/?arianne_url=servers/server_marauroa Marauroa] is an open source framework and engine to develop turn based and real time games. It provides a simple way of creating games on a portable and robust server architecture. Marauroa manages the client server communication and provides an object orientated view of the world for game developers. It further handles database access in a transparent way to store player accounts, character progress and the state of the world.

[http://arianne.sourceforge.net/?arianne_url=games/game_stendhal Stendhal] is a fully fledged and completely free multiplayer online adventures game (MMORPG). It features a new, rich and expanding world in which players can explore towns, plains, caves and dungeons. Players will meet NPCs (non player characters) and acquire tasks and quests for valuable experience and cold hard cash. The character will develop and grow and with each new level become stronger and more skillful. With the money acquired new items can be bought and armor and weapons improved. And the blood thirsty ones out there can satisfy their killing desires by roaming the world in search of evil monsters.

[http://arianne.sourceforge.net/?arianne_url=tools/tool_marboard Marboard] is an early prototype of an easy to use vector graphics program allowing live collaboration over the Internet. While it is not ready for production use yet, it is a good proof that Marauroa is suitable for serious applications, too.

Arianne was born over ten years ago. In 1999 a posting on Linuxgames about "What I'd like to see in an RPG" was made. When Miguel Angel Blanch Lardin saw the posting he founded the Arianne project, unaware of other games like Nethack which may already fit the criteria. The first version of the website was in Spanish but it was quickly translated to English because of public demand.

Today Stendhal is the subproject most people are interested in. It is interesting to note that it started as a test case for multi zone support in our framework Marauroa, in early 2005.

Arianne in general is targeted at both game developers (including programmers and artists) and players. This leads to a very nice symbiosis which gives us lots of real usage feedback and allows us to incorporate it quickly. The game Stendhal is fully playable and a lot of people are playing it on a daily basis. It is, however, still in heavy development, with about a new release every month.

There are localized versions of Stendhal with local communities in countries all over the world, including Germany, Poland and Japan. Perhaps the most notable ones are KrakowMobile and Player-like world.

[http://www.edragons-krakowmobile.yoyo.pl/infopage.php?id=18 KrakowMobile] is a Stendhal fork featured on the website of the city Krakow. The Stendhal maps are replaced by maps of Krakow with real world images of historically important buildings, and NPCs replaced by famous people from Krakow and Poland.

[http://www.player-like.org Player-like world] is a modified version of Stendhal used for online game research in a Ph.D. study. The study explores if it is possible to differentiate between characters played by humans from characters played by computers, a sort of a Turing test for online games characters.

The Stendhal client just depends on Java Runtime Environment. So once Java is installed you can start to play without having to edit any configuration settings.

The Stendhal server does require a database. We got a lot of support requests from people trying to setup and configure MySQL. While MySQL is part of all common Linux distributions, configuring it on Microsoft Windows is not that easy. So in the last version we added support for the installation-less H2 database.

Marauroa as a game engine is of course targeted at developers. So you will most likely need a Java Development environment and some experience with programming.

It was a number of small indications over a period of time. For example, the Arianne project reached very high scores on the SourceForge activity ranking. Possibly more important is that the number of users and positive feedback has increased steadily. Last but not least the number of people that went from users, to contributors, to core developers has increased over time.

Hendrik: I was very surprised when I learned about the Polish fork KrakowMobile being featured on the official website of Krakow (which is the second largest city in Poland). There are even newspaper articles about the launch event. Oh, and seeing a Japanese fork of Stendhal using Japanese characters was very interesting, too.

Katie: I started playing Stendhal just for fun, and I had little programming experience. Now I can code in Java, script in MySQL, (and got a wonderful day job using these), my German and Spanish have improved enormously and most importantly I've made friends for life.

Stendhal is still under heavy development. This means that we constantly add new interesting features and in rare cases this may dramatically change the RP system.

For example in the past there was the simple rule "the faster the weapon, the better". This had the strange impact that a light knife was more suitable than a heavy sword to fight a huge dragon. So in 2008 we added a new property: "weight". Now heavy weapons are more suitable against huge monsters. Light weapons are still useful to fight small creatures. As usual we put information about "weight" into the release announcement and even added some NPCs in game to explain it. But a number of players totally ignored it, went right into big trouble, and got angry. It took a couple of days until the word was spread and the situation improved.

The challenge we face is to communicate such changes in a way that is noticed by all our users.

On the social level Arianne has a very friendly and nice community, which we consider very important. Unlike other "free" games, we publish the complete source code and graphics of the client, server, and website under a free license (GPL/AGPL).

On the more technical level Arianne strongly believes in two principles: "Release early, release often" and "Keep it simple, stupid". This basically means that we try to break complex issues down into a number of small parts. We then tackle them one after the other and share the results as soon as possible. This way we get early feedback and our users can follow our progress.

Last but not least Stendhal is a nice online role playing game with beautiful graphics and a retro feel, and players have commented that it offers something different from other MORPGS.

Have a Vision. And a plan.

The vision is what you want your project to be about. It is the main source of motivation.

The plan helps you to achieve this goal in small steps. Especially at the beginning of a new project it is very easy to get lost in some interesting details. We think it is important to have a working prototype out rather quickly (within a month, better within a week). Don't be afraid to share your work just because some features are not finished. Just openly tell people what works and what does not work, yet, and ask them for feedback.

New open source projects may be very keen for contributors to join the team. Who you add to your project and invest time in, is important to get right. Early in Arianne's history were problems with commitment from developers who joined the project. These were people that joined the project, asked for tasks and vanished after that. It was a pity because they delayed the project a lot and made it much harder to keep adding new features. Since then, we ask new developers who want to contribute, to start by submitting patches to the SourceForge Tracker for review. We counter the possible demotivating effect of this by communicating as much as possible and coordinating new and interesting tasks. New developers are only then added as project members with write access to the repositories after agreement from the rest of the team.

The next major step in Marauroa will be rewriting the database access code to be totally asynchronous. So if the database server is offline for say 2 minutes because of a database server restart the game should be able to continue as if everything was just fine.

The last version of Stendhal introduced huge improvements to the sound and music system. We are currently in the process of improving the ambiance all over the world by adding fitting sound effects and background music. The next major step are changes to encourage more teamwork. There are a couple of ideas surrounding class roles, parties and guilds.

Another ten successful years with our friendly and helpful community. May it continue.

Oh, and we are looking for a new Java Webstart code signing certificate because the one we are using now has expired. Unfortunately many signing companies refuse to deal with Open Source Projects or are way too expensive.

The Arianne project has a very nice and helpful community.

That is a hard question given that Arianne is 10 years old and a lot of things have changed in this time. At the start the main programming language for example was C, now it is Java. We try to break huge features and changes into small parts that we can handle.

We use SourceForge's trackers for bugs, patches, and feature requests. The forum and mailing lists have played an important role in the past and they are still monitored and new postings answered quickly.

Most of our communication, however, has moved to [http://stendhal.game-host.org/development/chat.html #arianne] on the Freenode IRC network. There, we have meetings, discuss plans and support users. The support varies from people wishing to set up their own Stendhal server, to those wanting to create a new game using Marauroa. In the IRC channel is a CIA bot which announces commits to CVS, play-by-play, so everyone is aware of what is happening to the source code.

The project leaders and core developers spend way too much time on it.

Most core developers run Linux. Microsoft Windows, however, is used by many contributors. Eclipse is the most commonly used IDE in the project, although our project leader is sticking resolutely to Emacs. The nice thing about Eclipse is that you can change a couple of lines of code and test them immediately without having to recompile the complete project. We use ant for compiling the code outside the IDE and for creating the distribution.

We also use Hudson for continuous integration and automatic testing. The CIA Bot and the Hudson Bots in our IRC channel keep us informed about what is going on in the code.

Gimp is very popular among the graphic artists, and Tiled is used for mapmaking.

== 18. Milestones: ==

{| class="prettytable"

|-

| 2000 || Arianne's first version to feature a real client-server framework

|-

| 2002 || Python RP system, database backend and xml world definitions, 2D client

|-

| 2003 || Marauroa was born starting the movement from C++ to Java

|-

| 2004 || Games: Mapacman (a multiplayer pacman clone) and Gladiators

|-

| 2005 || Stendhal mutated from a test case for Marauroa to a playable game

|-

| 2006 || Stendhal: Banks, friends list, and an automatic client update

|-

| 2007 || Stendhal: Rated weapons and a complex quest chain surrounding marriage

|-

| 2008 || Marauroa: 2.0 Stendhal: new combat system, grammar parsing, different AI profiles, completely redone artwork

|-

| 2009 || Marauroa: DAO approach to database access. Stendhal: housing, OpenJDK support, instantiated dungeons

|-

| 2010 || Stendhal: Trading Center

|}

In addition to the normal [http://arianne.cvs.sf.net/viewvc/arianne/marauroa/README?view=markup release] [http://arianne.cvs.sf.net/viewvc/arianne/stendhal/doc/CHANGES.txt?view=markup notes], we announce new versions of Stendhal from an [http://arianne.sourceforge.net/?arianne_url=content/news&all=100 in game point of view].

A nice thing about the Arianne project is that a number of people with different interests and skills are working together. Lets start with a group of contributions that is easily overlooked but is very important: Feedback, bug reports, feature requests, ideas. Even support requests are helpful because they show us in which places our software is not as easy to use as we want it to be. So we try to make it as convenient as possible for people to provide feedback. The Sourceforge tracker is a good place to open tickets. Or if someone prefers to chat with us, we have a link to our chat room on the project website.

In Stendhal we try to have at least one new quest per release. Most of the work required to add a quest, however, is not related to writing code. It is on a creative level, creating a nice little story that fits into the world. Then the text the NPCs are going to say needs to be written down. Sometimes new items are required which in turn need graphics. After all those parts are thrown together, the new quests needs lots of testing. Especially testing by people not knowing the inner logic of the program code.

On a more technical level patches and code contributions are very welcome. The source code is well documented and we are happy to answer questions. Those with artistic skills are the people who make Stendhal a beautiful place. Stendhal has very nice and original graphics and music.

; Name : Katie Russell

; SourceForge user page URL : http://sourceforge.net/users/kymara

; Occupation : Analyst/Developer

; Education : PhD, Mathematics

; Location : UK

; Photo : http://cia.vc/images/db/a9/e-t128.png

; Name : Hendrik Brummermann

; SourceForge user page URL : http://nhnb.users.sf.net

; Occupation or experience : Developer of University Management Software

; Education : Diploma in Computer Science (FH), Master of Business Process Engineering (M.Eng.)

; Location : Germany

; Photo : http://cia.vc/images/db/3a/3.png

; Name: Kimmo Rundelin

; SourceForge user page URL: http://sourceforge.net/users/kiheru

; Occupation or experience: Student

; Education: BA, Material Chemistry

; Location: Finland

; Photo : -

; Name: Penny Elaine

; SourceForge user page URL: http://sourceforge.net/users/tigertoes

; Occupation or experience: over 30 yrs in computer field

; Education: Florida Tech

; Location: United States

; Photo : -

; Name: Markus Keunecke

; SourceForge user page URL: http://sourceforge.net/users/madmetzger

; Occupation or experience: Software Engineer

; Education: Diplom Wirtschaftsinformatiker (FH), Master of Business Process Engineering (M.Eng.)

; Location: Germany

; Photo : http://cia.vc/images/db/11/7b-t256.png

; Name : Yuriy Krawtsow aka yoriy

; SourceForge user page URL : http://sourceforge.net/users/yoriy

; Occupation : C/C++ coder and system administrator of *nix systems

; Education : Federal Technical University

; Location : Russian Federation, Moskow Region, Kolomna city

; Photo : https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/9fc8dde77377927a8890247684e6b745.png

; Name: Silvio Heinrich

; SourceForge user page URL: http://sourceforge.net/users/plassy

; Occupation or experience: Mechatronic Technician

; Education: General Certificate of Secondary Education, vocational education

; Location: Germany

; Photo : -

The Arianne project was moved to SourceForge 10 years ago in January 2000. There are little records left of the pre SourceForge days. This is proof that moving to SourceForge was a good decision because there has been no data loss ever since. Today we are still very happy with this decision.

SourceForge provides a number of very useful tools for developing and sharing free software: version control systems, a very easy to use bug and feature tracker, web hosting, mailing lists, forums, and the file release system. Just to name the most important ones. All those things work out of the box and are very reliable. If we had to setup and maintain installations of these services ourselves, we would have a lot less time to concentrate on our project. And it is obvious that this communication related infrastructure plays a key role in both coordinating development and getting the word out to our users.

== 26. The number one benefit of using SourceForge.net is ==

SourceForge has a very good reputation and nicely integrates a number of useful tools for developers and users.

* scalex - http://sourceforge.net/projects/scale2x

* Junit - http://sourceforge.net/projects/junit

* Tiled - http://sourceforge.net/projects/tiled

* More support for file releases of umbrella projects like Arianne. Most people are interested in Stendhal. So we like to have the Stendhal related files show up prominently in the green section above the folder structure. This basically means we can only do releases of Marauroa and Marboard exactly one day before a Stendhal release. In the past it was possible to use the "touch" command as workaround to set the file date into the past, but that does not work anymore. There are ideatorrent entries on this already: https://sourceforge.net/apps/ideatorrent/sourceforge/ideatorrent/idea/478/ and perhaps https://sourceforge.net/apps/ideatorrent/sourceforge/ideatorrent/idea/477/

* The software download pages sometimes contain ads which ask for personal information. For people with little technical background those input formulas look like something required by us / SourceForge, and it worries us.