Support:About Arianne: Difference between revisions

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.

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.

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.

Hendrik: I was very surprised when I learned about the Polish fork KrakowmobileKrakowMobile which isbeing featured on the officalofficial 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.

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.

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

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 ambienceambiance 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. ShallMay it be growingcontinue.

Oh, and ifwe someoneare has a tiplooking for usa where we can getnew Java Webstart code signing certificate, we are very interested because the one we are using now has expired. UnfortunatallyUnfortunately many signing companies refuse to deal with Open Source Projects or are way totoo expensive.

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 featurefeatures and changes into small parts that we can handle.

We use SourceforgeSourceForge'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 postingpostings answered quickly.

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.

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 needs 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 logic of the program code.

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

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

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 a proveproof that moving to SourceForge was a good decision because there has been no datalossdata 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 just 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.