Support:About Arianne: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 17:53, 14 February 2010

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.

You can enter notes by starting a line with "*". In the end, however, this should be real sentences.

1. Description of project

(what is it, what does it do, what makes it unique?, project URL?)

The Arianne project was established in 1999 and is still thriving today. It is an umbrella project, covering several subprojects, the core of which is a framework/engine for developing Internet based multiplayer games, called Marauroa. The most successful game developed using Marauroa is a multiplayer online adventures game called Stendhal.

Marauroa is an open source multiplayer online games 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. The server is coded in Java and can use Python for your game description, provides a MySQL backend and uses an TCP transport channel to communicate with the players. Our reference clients are coded using Java in order to achieve maximum portability and use open technologies too. 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.

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 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 better. With the money acquired new items can be bought and armor and weapons improved. And for the blood thirsty ones out there; satisfy your killing desires by roaming the world in search of evil monsters!

Marboard is an early prototype of a 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 not only suitable for games.

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 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?

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 cooperate 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.

4. What are a couple of notable examples of how people are using your software?

There are localized version of Stendhal with local communities in among others Germany, Poland and Japan.

I guess most notable are the following two:

TODO: Krakow Online's domain was grabbed. I think there is another polish city with the game.

5. What are the system requirements for your software, and what do people need to know about getting it set up and running?

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 installationless H2 database.

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.

6. What gave you an indication that your project was becoming successful?

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.

7. What has been your biggest surprise?

  • Krakow Online
  • Japanese version

8. What has been your biggest challenge?

  • UDP and Corporate Firewalls

Profligate camping by players was amongst factors which made us decide to improve the rules of combat in 2008. Although it brought many benefits such as much more interesting game play (choice of weapon depended on opponent, for example, so there was no longer one weapon which was the best to use in all cases) and a much fairer system, players resisted the changes. Those who read the explanations of the new system and how it affected the, adjusted quickly, but those who persisted in using one weapon and the same style of play, found the new system much harder and we received a lot of negative feedback. Gradually, players did adapt, the number of camping players dropped dramatically, but the average number of players online did not fall long term.

9. Why do you think your project has been so well received?

On the social level Arianne has a very friendly and nice community, which I consider very important. Unlike other "free" games, we publish the complete source code as GPL or AGPL for the client, server, and website. The images are released under free licenses, too.

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 and show them as soon as they are ready. That way we get early feedback and our users can follow our progress.

TODO:

  • (for Stendhal: nice graphics and retro pseudo 2d feel, offering something different from other rpgs)

Perhaps see also Differences

10. What advice would you give to a project that's just starting out?

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.

11. Where do you see your project going?

The next major step in Marauroa will be rewriting the database access code to be totally asynchronous. So if the database server is offline for say 2 minutes because of a database server restart the game should be able to continue as if everything was just fine.

The last version of Stendhal introduced huge improvements to the sound and music system. We are currently in the process of improving the atmosphere all over the world by adding fitting sound effects and background music. The next major step are changes to encourage more teamwork. There is a couple of idea surrounding class roles, parties and guilds.

12. What's on your project wish list?

13. What are you most proud of?

  • Community

14. If you could change something about the project, what would it be?

  • More developers?

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 posting answered quickly.

Most of our communication, however, has moved to #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.

We also use Hudson for continuous integration and testing, and another bot in the channel informs us of unstable builds and failing tests.

16. How many hours a month do you and/or your team devote to the project?

  • Way too much

17. What is your development environment like?

Most developers run linux. In fact, the low Windows use has historically been a small problem - we use it so little we find it hard to support windows users wishing to install servers, and are less likely to spot Windows-specific client bugs in the testing stage. Most developers use Eclipse as an IDE, with the odd one sticking resolutely to emacs .... while the binaries for deployment and distribution are built using ant.

18. Milestones:

(Bullet points with past release dates, future plans)

  • see history
  • Marauroa
  • Stendhal
  • creature ai profiles like coward, aggressive, enabled
  • new damage system
  • grammar package
  • parser - January 2008
  • tile redraw?
  • key repeat bug in linux handled
  • website working with live game data from the server - June 2008.
  • rated weapons - May 2007
  • marriage - May 2007
  • buddies - 0.48 April 2006
  • bank - 0.47 March 2006
  • money - 0.39 Oct 2005
  • weapons affect combat - 0.30 July 2005

uncategorised, undated:

  • periodic saves of player database every 10 minutes

19. How can others contribute?

(What tasks can they help with? Is there a talent or resource wish list? How can they to sign up?)

  • Quests and ideas about the world history
  • Graphics and Sound
  • Testing
  • and of course: patches
  • Creating own game using marauroa as engine

20. Project Leaders and Core Developers

Please repeat the following section for each project leader or key developer

Project leader(s)

Name
Katie Russell
SourceForge user page URL
http://sourceforge.net/users/kymara
Occupation
Analyst/Developer
Education
PhD, Mathematics
Location
UK
Photo
http://cia.vc/images/db/a9/e-t128.png


Name
Hendrik Brummermann
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
Location
Germany
Photo
http://cia.vc/images/db/3a/3.png

21. Developers

Please repeat the following section for each key developer:

Key developer(s)

Name
Kimmo Rundelin
SourceForge user page URL
http://sourceforge.net/users/kiheru
Occupation or experience
Student
Education
BA, Material Chemistry
Location
Finland

[Photo of developer - please attach GIF, JPG, or PNG file(s)]


Name
Yuriy Krawtsow aka yoriy
SourceForge user page URL
https://sourceforge.net/users/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


Name
Markus Keunecke
SourceForge user page URL
http://sourceforge.net/users/madmetzger
Occupation or experience
Software Engineer
Education
Diplom Wirtschaftsinformatiker (FH), Master of Business Process Engineering (M.Eng.)
Location
Germany

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


Name
Silvio Heinrich
SourceForge user page URL
http://sourceforge.net/users/plassy
Occupation or experience
Mechatronic Technician
Education
General Certificate of Secondary Education, vocational education
Location
Germany

[Photo of developer - please attach GIF, JPG, or PNG file(s)]

24. Why did you place the project on SourceForge.net?

10 years ago, shortly after Arianne was founded, the hosting company for our (what?) went out of business and all work was lost. We think it was a cheap webspace provider or something like that. The project moved to SF.net and has been happy there ever since.

25. How has SourceForge.net helped your project succeed?

26. The number one benefit of using SourceForge.net is:

27. Name three projects you think deserve to be named POTM.

Feedback

(That's all the POTM questions for you, but there's one more thing we'd like to ask. How are we doing? You've got our ear, so let us know how we can make SourgeForge the best it can be. Go ahead, be honest. We can take it!)

  • 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 recent file 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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