HowToWriteAdventureGamesUsingArianne

Introduction

This document is a tutorial that will help you develop multiplayer online games using the Arianne system and Java2D.

Writing a game is a process that involves several stages:

• Specification
• Design
• Implementation
• Evaluation
• Deployment

Arianne is a 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. Marauroa, the server, is coded in Java and uses Python for your game description. It also provides a MySQL backend and uses a UDP transport channel to communicate with dozens of players. Our reference clients are coded using Java and the C language in order to achieve maximum portability.

The Arianne engine is designed so that you can concentrate on designing the actual game and ignore all the detailed implementation aspects of a complex system, such as those in the multiplayer online game content server. You therefore need not be concerned with issues of Thread, Database and Network handling.

Arianne has been in development since 1999 and has evolved from a tiny application written in pseudo-C++ to a powerful, expandable but simple server framework, running on the Java platform, and a client framework, written in bare C to allow total portability of arianne's clients. Arianne's server is totally client agnostic for maximum flexibility.

Since the beginning, the key concept at the heart of Arianne's development has been KISS: Keep it simple, stupid!

Arianne has always been an Open source project, written and released under the GNU GPL license. We believe the right way is the Open Source way and we want you to have the power to change, edit and configure whatever you want, both in the clients and server. Arianne always welcomes your contributions and modifications to the code to create the best possible open source reference platform for game content providers.

All our efforts are supported by Arianne's server: Marauroa. Marauroa is written completely in Java using a multithreaded server architecture with a UDP oriented network protocol, a MySQL based persistence engine and a flexible game system. Marauroa is totally game agnostic and makes very little assumptions about what you are trying to make thus allowing great freedom when creating games. The game system is totally expandable and modifiable to suit your game's needs. It is able to run Python scripts defining the game's rules hence providing a simple way of specifying your games behavior.

Marauroa is based on a design philosophy we called Action/Perception. A Perception is a collection of data sent each turn to the clients explaining to them what they currently perceive in the game environment. Actions are sent from clients to the server and are used to ask the server to perform an action for them.

You should always grab the latest release of Arianne from http://arianne.sourceforge.net as we are constantly fixing bugs and improving features.