In our next podcast, I spoke with Katie Russell from the Arianne project. Arianne is a long-running project which develops a game server and various multiplayer games. they recently released a new version of the popular Stendhal game, and have even more exciting things planned for the future.
Incidentally, the music used in the intro is from the Stendhal game, and was composed by Storyteller.
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Rich: Hello, and welcome back to the Sourceforge podcast. Thanks for listening. My name is Rich Bowen and I am the Community Growth Hacker for Sourceforge, which means that I try to help Sourceforge projects grow and promote themselves. Today I’m speaking with Katie Russell, who is with the Arianne project on Sourceforge. Thanks for speaking with us today. Could you tell me a little bit about what this project is, and how it got started.
Katie: Hi there. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk. The Arianne project is a bit of an umbrella project. It’s a game framework at its core, for users to create online multiplayer games. As test cases for the game framework, over the years we’ve developed new games to try out new features, and one of the most popular ones of those is Stendhal, which is a RPG.
It started back in 1999. There was a post on a forum asking for “what I’d like to see in an RPG,” and it was in the Linux game forum. The founder saw the posting, and he founded the Arianne project to try to fulfil the needs of this post.
R: How many games have been developed on this platform? Is it just the ones that you’ve done, or are there others?
K: There are other games, by developers who have been looking for a framework to handle some of the internal aspects that they didn’t really want to have to worry about. For example, there’s a wrestling card game that’s been developed using Marauroa. Marauroa is the name of our game server behind Arianne. There’s also been forks of the game Stendhal that we’ve created as well. So I think that over the eleven or so years that the project has been running the Arianne team has created maybe a dozen games or more, and then I know of perhaps a similar number of games that have used the same framework.
It’s always interesting to discover new ones I haven’t come across before.
R: Are the games that you’re aware of listed on the website?
K: The Arianne website is linked to Sourceforge. It just lists the ones we’ve developed. We’re trying to keep it to the projects where we know of all the licensing background. Which is why we haven’t listed them. I think that’s something we could improve on. Also checking all the references to our Stendhal game as well. We try to keep track of all the places on the Internet where you can download the client, which might even be outdated, because people upload really outdated versions. We’re trying to keep track of all these websites that have indexed us, just so that we can keep them up to date as well. It’s an issue for us because we release so often with our games, so quite quickly the development cycle means that older versions can get out of date and obviously we prefer for people to be using the most up to date version.
R: How large is your development team>
K: It grows and shrinks. Perhaps 15 or 20. The core team is perhaps 4 or 5 developers.
R: How do people typically get involved in the project? Is it submitting patches, or they come to you with full games?
K: It’s really varied. Because it’s an umbrella project, and there’s so many different aspects to both the frame work and the various games, there’s a lot of ways people can get involved. So, for example, you may be a user, and you may have been playing Stendhal, the RPG, because you wanted a free game that runs on Linux, as well as Windows. You may not even have realized that it’s Open Source, but when you start to see the regular releases, and read our updates, and you see that you can get involved with what you can do, which may be a piece of art work you want to improve, or add some music to the game, or improve a description even, then they contact the development team from within the game. They find us, and tell us what they want to do. We try to mold those contributions into patches where possible. Or it may be a software developer that wants to use the engine, Marauroa, and he’s got an improvement that he wants to use on his version of the game. He might want, for example, another handling of the zones. And rather than just implement that in his version, he submits that back to us as a patch. There’s also lots of variation of that in between. But mainly the communication goes through our instant relay chat (IRC) channel. We try to take in the patches and analyze them quite promptly, and release often, so that any contributions that are made get seen really quickly by the person that made the contribution, because we’ve found that that helps keep people interested in the project, to see their contributions go in, and on the live version so quickly.
R: What do you have planned for upcoming versions.
K: For the engine, Marauroa … I’ll just explain a little bit about what that is, if that’s ok?
R: Yes, please.
K: The game framework is handling the communication between the game clients, which are running on the user’s own computer, and the game server, which is running on some host. Also, it’s taking care of storing game information to the database, because it’s an online multiplayer game that you want to have running all the time, or closed down, but you expect that when a character returns to the game, he can retrieve his progreess from where he was. So it takes care of client-server communication and database persistence, and defines all of the objects and rules and world in a bland way that you can then extend and make rich for your own game. It doesn’t know about any of the rules. It’s completely agnostic to the game.
At the moment, the clients may be written in Java, and there’s some limited support for Python. A new development is that there will be some support for HTML5 clients.
R: Cool!
K: Yeah! It is cool. They’ll actually be able to run on that same game server, and someone using an HTML5 client will be able to interact with someone using a traditional client. The main work for that has already been done, but it hasn’t been released yet, because we do try to keep the game framework really quite stable, so it needs some more testing. But the motivation for that is that we want something that works without a local Java installation and on mobile devices.
One of our development philosopies is to break big projects down into small steps, partly because we want to be able to release often, but also because big projects can get easily abandoned, especially when it’s a project that you’re working on in your spare time. But if you do break it down into small chunks, then I think it becomes a lot more manageable. Perhaps the big vision is, wow, wouldn’t it be great to be able to run our Stendhal game in a browser, with social integration to other websites like Facebook and so on. The first step of that was to be able to log into Marauroa games like Stendhal using OpenID, so you could use your Google account. We’ve integrated Tweeting from Stendhal and it’s based on events, so we’re connecting to their API. Those were the first steps, but the bigger step is getting all those clients working and interacting on the same server.
R: That’s really cool.
K: I hope so. I’d love to grow the user base for our games and make the game framework more attractive for other people to start using as well, and I think making the game able to run on more devices like mobile devices would be a really good step in that direction.
R: Thanks for speaking with me Katie.
K: You’re more than welcome. Take care.
R: Bye.