Support:About Arianne: Difference between revisions

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 offical 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.

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

Oh, and if someone has a tip for us where we can get Java Webstart code signing certificate, we are very interested because the one we are using now has expired. Unfortunatally many signing companies refuse to deal with Open Source Projects or are way to expensive.

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 posting 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.

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

* 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.