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
Stendhal changes include major client improvements and a lot of exciting new game features and content.
We launched a sophisticated new sound system for music and sound effects, with a lot of new audio added at the same time. The system supports localised sound, fading, sound on events, and management of sound groups. To simplify the user interface in general, 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. In September 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. Pathfinding has had huge improvements, with players and creatures able to plan routes that dynamically account for moving entities and resistance in objects such a grain and corpses.
Early in the year we introduced a NPC facilitating delayed player-to-player trading. Later, a trading GUI was added for live trading. These long standing feature requests being fulfilled meant that finally the trading table in Semos could be removed and players can trade safely.
We try to add one new quest per release so there is always something new to try. Highlights include the Wizards Circle quest, automatic rat raids with their own Pied Piper, a meta-quest - the Ultimate Collector, and the Semos Mine Town Revival Weeks which had a new game. The Kalavan Orb and Haizen's mazes also provide new experiences.
Marauroa Milestones in 2010
Marauroa is the engine of the Arianne project. It has two main functions:
- Manage the communication between the servers and the clients.
- Store the player progress to a persistent database.
Therefore this section will be very technical.
The most visible change with regard to the database was adding support for the installationless H2 database at the beginning of 2010. H2 requires no download, installation or configuration which is a huge improvement on MySQL. Under the hood games can now update the database structure automatically on first server start after an update.
You may have noticed the Clone Wars in Stendhal on 2010-02-20. As a result, Marauroa now supports configurable limits on account and character creation and number of parallel connections per IP address. This is just a precaution, Marauroa did handle the huge amount of parallel characters very well.
In preparation for the POTM, we overhauled our documentation, integrating and improving JavaDoc, Wiki and Website, so that new developers can easily start using Marauroa. Last but not least, RPEvents now support RPSlots, which allowed the new look shop signs in Stendhal.
The summer was focused on improving performance: database access is now completely handled asynchronously, which greatly reduced lag spikes. Marauroa used to have a huge lock on PlayerEntryContainer which prevented processing of all message during an active turn. However, only placing players into the world and removing them needs to be synchronized. So all other messages are now processed in parallel, which speeds up logins noticeably.
For the developers, we added support of a new datatype for maps. This required a change to the Marauroa protocol and while we worked on it, we added support for multiple protocol versions, so a newer server can now talk to older clients and vice versa.
We concluded the year with adding support for a test server environment which shares some database table with the main server. So players are now able to test the upcoming releases with their own characters. Marauroa is the first sub project that switched from the development coordination tool CVS to git.
All over the year we fixed minor bugs and improved stability.
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? quest log, achievements, groups
stendhal 1.0 - stable at 0.9* for some time before
containers, magic ?