Support:About Arianne: Difference between revisions

[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 bettermore skillful. With the money acquired new items can be bought and armor and weapons improved. And for the blood thirsty ones out there; can satisfy yourtheir 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 aan 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 in cooperateincorporate 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.

[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 featurewith 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 humanhumans from characters played by computercomputers, a sort of a Turing test for online games characters.

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 installationlessinstallation-less H2 database.

It was a number of small indications over a period of time. For example, the Arianne project reached very high scores on the SourceforgeSourceForge 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.

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

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 SourceforgeSourceForge 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 last version of Stendhal introduced huge improvements to the sound and music system. We are currently in the process of improving the atmosphereambiance 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.

The project leaders and some of the 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., Althoughalthough 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.

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 asit as simpleconvenient 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. But itIt is on a creative level, creating a nice little story that fits into the world. Then the text the NPCs are going to say needneeds to be written down. SometimeSometimes new items are required which in turn need graphic imagesgraphics. After all those parts are thrown together, the new quests needs lots of testing. Especially testing by people not knowing the inner workslogic of the program code.

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

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

The Arianne project was moved to SourceForge 10 years ago in January 2000. There wasare somelittle majorrecords dataleft lossof 10the yearspre ago,SourceForge shortlydays. afterThis theis projectproof wasthat founded.moving Itto seemsSourceForge likelywas thata thisgood eventdecision wasbecause thethere motivationhas tobeen moveno todata SourceForgeloss 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 just work out of the box and are very reliable. WeIf wouldwe neverhad beto ablesetup toand hostmaintain thoseinstallations of these services ourselves, we would have a lot less time to concentrate on our ownproject. And it is obvious that thosethis communication related infrastructure plays a key role in both coordinating development and getting the word out to our users.

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

:* Junitscalex - http://sourceforge.net/projects/junit/ scale2x

:* PageJunit layout- http://sourceforge.net/projects/pagelayout/ we use it in parts of the client but last file release over 600 days agojunit

:* Tiled - http://sourceforge.net/projects/tiled/ but they recently dropped dev on the java version :/