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
[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.
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== 2. Why and how did you get started? What was the date? ==
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.
== 3. What is the software's intended audience? ==
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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
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.
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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
== 8. What has been your biggest challenge? ==
Stendhal is still under heavy development. This means that we constantly add new interesting features and in rare cases this may dramatically change the
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.
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== 14. If you could change something about the project, what would it be? ==
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
== 15. How do you coordinate the project? ==
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
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.
== 16. How many hours a month do you and/or your team devote to the project? ==
The project leaders and
== 17. What is your development environment like? ==
Most core developers run Linux. Microsoft Windows, however, is used by many contributors. Eclipse is the most commonly used IDE in the project
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.
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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.
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.
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; Name : Yuriy Krawtsow aka yoriy
; SourceForge user page URL :
; Occupation : C/C++ coder and system administrator of *nix systems
; Education : Federal Technical University
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; Location: Germany
; Photo : -
== 24. Why did you place the project on SourceForge.net? ==
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
== 25. How has SourceForge.net helped your project succeed? ==
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
== 26. The number one benefit of using SourceForge.net is ==
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== Feedback ==
* I am concerned about those ads asking for personal information when trying to download software. For people with little technical background those input formulas look like something required by us / SourceForge.▼
* 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/
▲*
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