Review Of 2010: Difference between revisions

==Project Meeting==

We celebrated Arianne's 10 year birthday and Stendhal's 5th year with a 4 day [[Arianne_Project_Meeting_2010|conference]] in Hannover, Germany.

==Busy Project==

Arianne has ranked highly on activity over the year on SourceForge. For some weeks we've been ranked as highly as 2nd place, and are often in the top 25 each week. In 2010 we entered the top 50 all time activity ranks, too.

Community involvement has been high over the year, with players organising some really nice [[Stendhal Events]] such as quizzes, games and a special Tournament in the Spring. Players have also contributed by making bug reports and suggesting ideas for improvement, and of course just by playing and being part of the world :)

[[File:Party20100327.jpg|thumb|Spring Tournament March 2010]]

We launched a sophisticated new ''sound system'' for music and sound effects, with a lot of new audio added at the same time. The system supports localised sound, fading, sound on events, and management of sound groups. To simplify the user interface in general, we added a mode where single mouse clicking will walk, attack, look, harvest, loot, or perform some other action based on what is being clicked on. The mouse cursor shows what the action would be. In September the whole client got a ''new look and feel'', with the GUI rewritten entirely in swing. This enabled us to move floating panels off the gameplay area and onto new, fixed side panels to the client.

[[File:Client87.png|300px|left]]

We took our first steps towards a magic system, by introducing ''fire, ice, dark and light'' attack and defense types for combat for creatures and players.

''Pathfinding'' has had huge improvements, with players and creatures able to plan routes that dynamically account for moving entities and ''resistance'' in objects such a grain and corpses.

Early in the year we introduced a [[NPC Harold|NPC]] facilitating delayed player-to-player trading. Later, a ''trade GUI'' was added for live trading. These long standing feature requests being fulfilled meant that finally the trading table in Semos could be removed and players can trade safely.

We try to add one new quest per release so there is always something new for players to try. Highlights include the Wizards Circle quest, automatic rat raids with their own Pied Piper, a meta-quest - the Ultimate Collector, and the Semos Mine Town Revival Weeks which had a new game. The Kalavan Orb and Haizen's mazes also provide new experiences.

==Marauroa Milestones in 2010==

Marauroa is the engine of the Arianne project. It has two main functions:

* Manage the communication between the servers and the clients.

* Store the player progress to a persistent database.

Therefore this section will be very technical.

The most visible change with regard to the database was adding support for the ''installationless H2 database'' at the beginning of 2010. H2 requires no download, installation or configuration which is a huge improvement on ''MySQL''. Under the hood games can now ''update the database structure'' automatically on first server start after an update.

You may have noticed the [[Stendhal_Events#Clone_Wars_2010-02-20|Clone Wars]] in Stendhal on 2010-02-20. As a result, Marauroa now ''supports configurable limits'' on account and character creation and number of parallel connections per IP address. This is just a precaution, Marauroa did handle the huge amount of parallel characters very well.

In preparation for the POTM, we overhauled our ''documentation'', integrating and improving JavaDoc, Wiki and Website, so that new developers can easily start using Marauroa. Last but not least, ''RPEvents'' now support RPSlots, which allowed the new look shop signs in Stendhal.

The summer was focused on improving performance: ''database access'' is now completely handled ''asynchronously'', which greatly reduced lag spikes. Marauroa used to have a huge lock on PlayerEntryContainer which prevented processing of all message during an active turn. However, only placing players into the world and removing them needs to be synchronized. So all other ''messages are now processed in parallel'', which speeds up logins noticeably.

For the developers, we added support of a new datatype for ''maps''. This required a change to the Marauroa protocol and while we worked on it, we added support for ''multiple protocol versions'', so a newer server can now talk to older clients and vice versa.

We concluded the year with adding support for a ''test server environment'' which shares some database table with the main server. So players are now able to test the upcoming releases with their own characters. Marauroa is the first sub project that switched from the development coordination tool CVS to ''git''.

All over the year we fixed minor bugs and improved stability.

Our websites [http://arianne.sf.net arianne.sf.net] and [http://stendhalgame.org stendhalgame.org] both saw a lot of improvements. A lot of information for example about the different [StendhalAtlas|regions] and [Stendhal Dungeons|dungeons] has been added. It is now possible to link multiple character together into one account with one password. A login history makes it easy to spot unauthorized access. We improved the character pages by adding details on equipped items and you can filter the hall of fame for your friends. Last but not least postman messages are now available on the website for all the characters of your account.

==unsorted==

Stendhal webstart and updates are now signed with a verified java code certificate carrying the name of the project! We were happy to discover free of charge certificates for Open Source Projects from http://certum.eu/certum/cert,offer_java_code_signing.xml and we had the opportunity to change our update package so we used the new certificate at t

We had 90,332 downloads in 2010, with a spike in March due to the Project of the Month. Project web traffic has been steady, again with an increase in March

[[File:Downloads2010.jpg]]

[[File:Projectwebtraffic2010.jpg]]

[[File:Findbugs20101207.png]]

Martinf did significant work on reducing the number of findbugs warnings in Stendhal's code.

Later in 2011 or beyond, we'd hope to implement containers (which also needs cooperation with Marauroa) and a magic system, starting with simple spells.

More Stendhal ideas which we have mapped out in some detail include a [[continuous world]] and [[Cluster Support|cluster support]].

{{TODO|Marauroa outlook? [[Meta object model for relational data storage]], [[Refactoring Delta^2]], stuff to support Stendhal}}