Support:About Arianne: Difference between revisions
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<div style="padding: 2em; border: 5px solid red; background-color: #FCC; text-weight: bold">We are applying for the SourceForge Project of the Month in March. We need to answer the following questions until 18 February 2010. In case we become POTM, SourceForge will publish our answers. Please keep this application under the cover and don't tell it around.</div>
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== 1. Description of project ==
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:
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[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 more skillful. With the money acquired new items can be bought and armor and weapons improved. And the blood thirsty ones out there can satisfy their 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
== 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 Blanch 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.
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There are localized versions of Stendhal with local communities in countries all over the world, including Germany, Poland and Japan. Perhaps the most notable ones are KrakowMobile and Player-like world.
[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
[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 humans from characters played by computers, a sort of a Turing test for online games characters.
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== 7. What has been your biggest surprise? ==
Hendrik: I was very surprised when I learned about the Polish fork Krakowmobile which is 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.
== 8. What has been your biggest challenge? ==
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Stendhal is still under heavy development. This means that we constantly add new interesting features and in rare cases this may dramatically change the rp 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
The challenge we face is to communicate such changes in a way that is noticed by all our users.
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On the more technical level Arianne strongly believes in two principles: "Release early, release often" and "Keep it simple, stupid". This basically means that we try to break complex issues down into a number of small parts. We then tackle them one after the other and share the results as soon as possible. This way we get early feedback and our users can follow our progress.
▲* (for Stendhal: nice graphics and retro pseudo 2d feel, offering something different from other rpgs)
== 10. What advice would you give to a project that's just starting out? ==
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== 12. What's on your project wish list? ==
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.
== 13. What are you most proud of? ==
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== 18. Milestones: ==
{| class="prettytable"
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| 2000 || Arianne's first version to feature a real client-server framework
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| 2002 || Python RP system, database backend and xml world definitions, 2D client
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| 2003 || Marauroa was born starting the movement from C++ to Java
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| 2004 || Games: Mapacman (a multiplyer pacman clone) and Gladiators
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| 2005 || Stendhal mutated from a test case for Marauroa to a playable game
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| 2006 || Stendhal: Support for Banks and friends list was added to Stendhal
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| 2007 || Stendhal: Rated weappons and a complex quest change surrounding marriage
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| 2008 || Marauroa: 2.0 Stendhal: new compat system, grammar parsing, different AI profiles, completely redone artwork
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| 2009 || Marauroa: DAO approach to database access. Stendhal: housing, OpenJDK support, instantiated dungeons
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| 2010 || Stendhal: Traiding Center
|}
In addition to the normal [http://arianne.cvs.sf.net/viewvc/arianne/marauroa/README?view=markup release] [http://arianne.cvs.sf.net/viewvc/arianne/stendhal/doc/CHANGES.txt?view=markup notes], we announce new versions of Stendhal from an [[http://arianne.sourceforge.net/?arianne_url=content/news&all=100 in game point of view].
== 19. How can others contribute? ==
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
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 it 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. Sometime new items are required which in turn need graphic images. 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.
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== 20. Project Leaders and Core Developers ==
▲Project leader(s)
; Name : Katie Russell
; SourceForge user page URL : http://sourceforge.net/users/kymara
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; SourceForge user page URL : http://nhnb.users.sf.net
; Occupation or experience : Developer of University Management Software
; Education : Diplom Informatiker (FH), Master of Business Process Engineering (M.Eng.)
; Location : Germany
; Photo : http://cia.vc/images/db/3a/3.png
== 21. Developers ==
Key developer(s)
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; Education: BA, Material Chemistry
; Location: Finland
; Photo : -
; Name
; SourceForge user page URL
; Occupation or experience:
; Education
; Location
; Photo : -
; Photo : https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/9fc8dde77377927a8890247684e6b745.png▼
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; Education: Diplom Wirtschaftsinformatiker (FH), Master of Business Process Engineering (M.Eng.)
; Location: Germany
; Photo : http://cia.vc/images/db/11/7b-t256.png
; Name : Yuriy Krawtsow aka yoriy
; Occupation : C/C++ coder and system administrator of *nix systems
; Education : Federal Technical University
; Location : Russian Federation, Moskow Region, Kolomna city
▲; Photo : https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/9fc8dde77377927a8890247684e6b745.png
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; Education: General Certificate of Secondary Education, vocational education
; Location: Germany
; Photo : -
▲; SourceForge user page URL: http://sourceforge.net/users/tigertoes
== 24. Why did you place the project on SourceForge.net? ==
The Arianne project was moved to SourceForge 10 years ago in January 2000. There
== 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 just work out of the box and are very reliable.
== 26. The number one benefit of using SourceForge.net is ==
SourceForge has a very good reputation and nicely integrates a number of useful tools
== 27. Name three projects you think deserve to be named POTM. ==
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* 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
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