[Arianne-general] What is arianne doc

[Miguel A. B. L. <mig...@ho...>]

Hi all,
Someone asked a few weeks on IRC what is Arianne... and I did find that 
website is really bad at that. It doesn't say what is arianne... and well... 
I have started to work on it.
Please read it. Do you think I have forgot something? and more important, 
did you find something that is not true?

Regards,
Miguel

---

Arianne is a multiplayer online games framework and engine to develop turn 
based and real time style games.
It features a simple way of creating your games on our portable, robust 
server architecture, that runs on Java using Python for writting your games, 
that is powered by a mySQL backend to communicate with dozens of players 
using an UDP transport channel. Our reference clients are coded using Java 
and C language in order to achieve maximum portability.

Arianne has been in development since 1999 and it has evolved from a tiny 
application written in pseudo-C++ to a powerful, expandible server framework 
running on the Java platform and a portable client framework written in bare 
C to allow total portability of arianne's clients. Arianne's server is 
totally client agnostic. But since 1999, the key concept at Arianne has been 
KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. Our achieved goals are: simple, small, fast

Arianne has been since the begin an Open source project, written and release 
on each version as GNU GPL software. We do believe the right way is to give 
you the power to change, edit and configure whatever you want, both on 
clients and server. Arianne always welcome your contributions and 
modifications to the code to make this the open source reference platform 
for game content providers.

Arianne is playable.
Arianne now supports three games, a TicTacToe game, a multiplayer Gladiators 
fighting game and a multiplayer Pacman game.
You can read more about them on our main page http://arianne.sourceforge.net

All our efforts are supported by arianne's server: Marauroa.
Marauroa is completly written in Java using a multithreaded server 
architecture with a UDP oriented network protocol, a mySQL based persistence 
engine and a flexible game system based on open systems totally expandible 
and modifiable by developers and that is able to run scripts on Python for 
the game's rules.
Marauroa is based on a philosophy we called Action/Perception, on each turn 
a perception is send to clients explaining them what they percieve and 
clients can ask server to do any action in their names using actions.
Marauroa is totally game agnostic and makes very little assumptions about 
what are you trying to do, allowing a great freedom to create whatever type 
of game you want.
Bugs are facts of life, they just happen. But Arianne is fully tested using 
Test Units with JUnit and cppunit, so all modules are tested for most common 
cases, allowing a better quality software to be deployed. Your cooperation 
reporting problems is simply invaluable: You are our best developer and we 
want to read from you.


Marauroa is based on a very simple principles that describe its way of 
working:
- Client communicate with server and viceversa using an UDP portable network 
protocol with reliability in mind to allow a stabler experience on online 
game when lag happens. You can develop an arianne client on anything that is 
able to compile C code using arianne client framework.
- In order to play a game everyone needs an account on the server that is 
identified by an username and a password.
- Players uses that account to login into the server and choose a player to 
play the game from the one they have available in their accounts. Server 
check that login information using the mySQL backend and load the player 
into the game using the persistence engine.
- Players cast actions to server in order to play. Action system  is totally 
open and has nothing hardcoded, fit it totally to your game style. Server 
sends on a timely manner, called turn, a perception to players to inform 
them about the state of the game and any relevant state modifications. 
Marauroa's perception system is based on Delta^2: simply send what have 
changed.
- Server execute on each turn a piece of code in order to move game status 
from one turn to the next. Using this hook it is simple to code triggers, 
timeouts, conditions and whatever kind of behaviour you need.
- Server transparently and automatically store players and game status 
modifications on the persistence engine, and what is stored is also decided 
by developers using the script language.
- Server games rules can be written in Python to allow simple and rapid 
development of the game rules engine without recompiling and having to know 
anything about Marauroa internals beyond what you are reading here. Games 
rules can also be coded in Java.
- Server features zero administration feature, but in case you want, a 
webserver is running inside server to provide an HTML interface on server so 
you can access to it remotely to change, edit and configure as you need.(1)
- Server generate statistics of usage, and they are stored on a mySQL 
database so you can later generate fancy statistics from it. Or in case you 
don't care, they can be disabled so you don't waste CPU and disk space on 
it. Marauroa features a builtin style using modules that can be changed and 
disabled without affecting others.
- Both server and client is fully and wisely documented, with documentation 
about specification and design and not just an API documentation.


Are you excited?
Take a look at our example of how to create an online game on a few simple 
steps.(2)


(1) As if 2004/04/25 this feature is still to be implemented.
(2) I am going to use mapacman for this, so it is on the way.

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