Review Of 2010
2010 marks the Arianne Project's 10th birthday, so what better year to review progress of this open source project?
Arianne comprises a multiplayer online games framework and engine to develop turn based and real time games, called Marauroa, and the various games which use it. Of those games Stendhal, a MORPG, is the most popular and actively developed.
Project of the Month
Arianne was chosen as SourceForge project of the month in March. We were on the front page of http://sourceforge.net throughout March and we have our own permanent feature page at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201003/ - you check out an interview with the project leaders there. We saw downloads double over this time, and saw increased interest in our development too.
Busy Project
Arianne has ranked highly on activity over the year on SourceForge. For some weeks we've been ranked as highly as 2nd place, and are often in the top 25 each week. In 2010 we entered the top 50 all time activity ranks, too.
For another year we welcomed new developers to the project, this year storyteller, Laguz, Bluelads4 and omero, all of whom started as Stendhal players.
In 2010, we announced 13 Stendhal releases and 7 Marauroa releases (with some minor bug fix releases too).
Stendhal Milestones in 2010
Early in the year we introduced a NPC facilitating player-to-player trading, dynamically produced mazes and informative shop signs displaying item information.
We also launched a sophisticated new sound system for music and sound effects, with a lot of new audio added at the same time. The system can supports localised sound, fading, sound on events, and management of sound groups. To simplify the user interface we added a mode where single mouse clicking will walk, attack, look, harvest, loot, or perform some other action based on what is being clicked on. The mouse cursor shows what the action would be. The whole client got a new look and feel, with the GUI rewritten entirely in swing. This enabled us to move floating panels off the gameplay area and onto new, fixed side panels to the client.
We took our first steps towards a magic system, by introducing fire, ice, dark and light attack and defense types for combat for creatures and players. New AI profiles for creatures.
Trade GUI. Find bugs
fun stuff for players: wizards circle quest, rat raids, mazes, kalavan orb, lots of new quests added throughout the year, semos mine town revival with new game, easter bunny, santa
TODO: add the rest
Marauroa Milestones in 2010
Marauroa 3.3 - RPEvents can have RPSlots
For fuss free installation of the game server we added support for the H2 database management system to Marauroa 3.4. This requires no download, installation for configuration which is a huge improvement on MySQL for many users. We also overhauled our documentation at the beginning of the year, integrating and improving javadoc, wiki and website.
Marauroa 3.4 and 3.5, temporary bans, setting accounts inactive, limit number parallel connections and account creation.
3.7 - characters Marauroa 3.8 adds version compatibility between client and server of different protocol versions. Performance is also optimised, with asynchronous login, and 'baking' of RPClasses
TODO: expand
website?
arianne.sf.net and stendhalgame.org both saw a lot of changes. also stendhalgame.org was registered
unsorted
Stendhal webstart and updates are now signed with a verified java code certificate carrying the name of the project! We were happy to discover free of charge certificates for Open Source Projects from http://certum.eu/certum/cert,offer_java_code_signing.xml and we had the opportunity to change our update package so we used the new certificate at t
new test server ?
graph ideas - we have some of these saved already
stats.. ranking, download, findbugs, numbers, cvs activity, tracker age
e.g.
although hang on those dates don't make sense!
community involvement - new developers, events like hunt for the lost cat, spring tournament, quizzes
Outlook
early 2011? achievements, groups
stendhal 1.0 - stable at 0.9* for some time before
containers, magic ?