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Illarion - An open source online roleplaying game

What is this all about?
Illarion (http://www.illarion.org) is a free, graphical roleplaying game that focuses on true roleplaying. A persistent fantasy game world, featuring elves, wizards and demons invites players to fulfill glorious deeds and exciting quests every day. Illarion features a complex crafting system, arcane wizardry and countless nasty monsters that wait in dungeons for their Judgement day. Illarion is a well established project, the game is fully playable. It is has been a free alternative to games like Ultima Online, Tibia or Runescape for almost ten years now. During this time, the game was improved and updated regularly - currently 15 volunteers work on it, and around 200 players are playing. These days, the staff works hard on an update to the game that will change all aspects of the game further improving the quality in order to satisfy the demands of players from all around the world. For this task, a helping hand is needed. If you are interested in joining an existing project and have own ideas for a fantasy roleplaying game, we invite you to join the development team of Illarion. Screenshots of the game and further information can be found at http://www.illarion.org.



How can I help?
You can support the development of Illarion in many ways. Everyone who grasps the basics of programming is able to contribute to it. Interest in fantasy roleplaying is preferable, team work is essential. The staff consists of people from all around the world, hence, English is the project language and you should be able to communicate in it. Since Illarion is a free game that is developed for the public domain, no payment is possible. Concerning legal aspects, Illarion is organized as a registered society.

In every aspect of development, you can rely on skilled developers with many years of experience. Illarion specific content is explained in various documentations. In detail, Illarion consists of the following elements:

• Server
  The server is coded in C++. The hardware runs on Debian Linux. To contribute to the development of the server, you need to have good skills in C++, and experience in the implementation of multi-threading. Licence: GPLv3
  
• Client
  The Illarion client is written in Java and makes use of the Slick-2D library for its graphical display. To contribute to the development of the client, you need good skills in Java or C++. Also, you have to grasp the basics of OpenGL. Licence: GPLv3
  
• Server scripts
  Most action a player can invoke are controlled by scripts. These scripts are programmed in the scripting language Lua. Lua is so simple that everyone with enough interest can learn it very quickly. Scripts are also the most influential way to develop game content for Illarion, e.g. quests, magic spells or crafting processes.

In addition to said projects, Illarion also offers opportunities to work in other areas, mainly to improve the game content.

• Homepage and Wiki
  Even the homepage and the wiki of Illarion have room for improvement. The homepage is based on PHP and works with its own, custom framework. Everyone who is interested in coding of websites and has skills in PHP will have an easy start. The wiki, which contains descriptions of the game world, such as gods and myths, is based on Mediawiki. Players may use it to submit own content.
  
• Graphics
  Graphics of buildings, items and characters of Illarion are 2D graphics, derived from 3D models by rendering. The client composes the graphics to scenes on the fly. Thus, a graphics artist needs to have good skills in 3D modeling software. 2D and 3D animations of magic spells and natural events are another field of interest.
  
• Sounds and music
  Illarion uses the free ogg format for background music. Midi music is supported as well. Artists havemany sources in which to exert their creativity. Many things are possible, be it background music for different dungeons and towns or a general theme. Sound effects are embedded as .wav files and are played to illustrate player actions like crafting or fighting.
  
• Authors of game content
  Illarion is a mysterious fantasy world with the technology of Europe in the 11th century. But there are orcs, irascible gods and magical artifacts. For the game content, tales, legends, poems, songs and fairytales are needed. This background of the world may find its place in book in the game or can be read on the walls of a decayed ruin. Tales can also be made quests in the game to entertain players. Illarion offers a custom, very simple NPC scripting language and tools to generate books and other quest elements. These tools require absolutely no programming experience.

If we have sparked your interest for contributing to Illarion as volunteer, we'd welcome to get in contact with you. Illarion has a dense and friendly community of roleplayers that will defiantly reward you with gratitude. Please send us an email to vilarion@illarion.org or join our IRC chat #illarion at quakenet.[/list]

In order to display the progress of Illarion please find the video below. The video shows the state of the game as it should look like after the next update which is currently "work in progress". This development snap shoot does not show a finished game, especially the graphics need some improvement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBParyKVxk

You can watch the video in HD and fullscreen mode.

If we have sparked your interest for contributing to Illarion as volunteer, we'd welcome to get in contact with you. Illarion has a dense and friendly community of roleplayers that will defiantly reward you with gratitude. Please send us an email to vilarion@illarion.org or join our IRC chat #illarion at quakenet: http://illarion.org/community/us_chat.php

Nitram on behalf of the Illarion staff

PS: We also welcome every new player! Just check out the game at http://www.illarion.org!

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http://illarion.org

wow! Impressive screenshot!
and a lot of opensource code, can you write few lines to read it? thanks!

edit: https://github.com/mkaring/Illarion-Jav ... ption.java this is fun

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

Thanks

What do you mean a few lines to read?
Interesting things in my opinion are the pathfinder, the cryptography class, the FastMath class, the recycling factory, also the handy base64 decoder/encoder and the crash reporting system.

And yes. OutOfCoffee is always fun. Especially if you actually manage, that one of the utility classes throw it. Its used as indicator that the developer did something utterly stupid. Such as rounding a integer

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

I love how all the code is commented and documented. I applaud the readability and the shear awesomeness of how much code you wrote.

Also the CrashReporter class looks very useful for automated bug finding. May I ask what FastMath and RecycleFactory are used for?

Could you please explain how dynamic clothing is applied to player sprites, how dynamic lighting is performed (like on the trees in the screenshot), and how (if any) networking code is optimised for latency.

Also, could you explain to me what RecycleFactory and FastMath do?

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Liam (liamzebedee) Edwards-Playne
Cryptum

Another comment on Illarion, I love the feature of talking to ingame NPC's and how they can understand keywords such as Yes and No.

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Liam (liamzebedee) Edwards-Playne
Cryptum

FastMath - Basically a addition to the normal Java Math class. It adds the commonly used constants of the math class as float values and implements many functions of the Java Math class is a faster working way.

RecycleFactory - This class is used to reduce the workload of the garbage collection of Java. Its able to store unused instances of classes and upon request of a new instance it either creates a new instance and hands over a old, already created, but currently unused one. Reusing old objects is a lot faster then creating new objects all time.

The light is not what you see in the screenshot I published. The shadow in there is rendered in the picture of the tree and always at the same spot. I got a screenshot of a older version of the client that already uses the lighting: >>> Click me <<<

The clothing uses a naked base sprite of a character, that is colored using the vertex colors and rendered. And after this the pieces of cloth and rendered with a set offset in a specified order on top of the sprite. So a entire character consists of multiple images that get rendered one by one. Each clothing piece is individual colored using the vertex colors.

The networking code (to be found here) is not really optimized for latency. Illarion is all in all a relative "slow" game. So high response times are in general not needed. The client does some prediction in matters if a move is possible or not so movements can be performed seamless even before the server confirms the move. But other then that the networking simply uses the TCP/IP protocol. The speed of UDP is not needed and TCP provides additional security to ensure that the data is transferred correctly.

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

I updated the first post to contain the official intro text that was created by the promotion team of the game.

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

do you have examples of monster's ai or behaviours?
Or monsters "just" attack players?

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

The default behavior of monsters is currently to attack the weakest player character in weapon range. In case there is no player in weapon range, the weakest player within visibility is searched and once the target is selected a path towards the player is plotted and the target player is approached one step.

How ever in case of attacking we have the possibility to overwrite the default behavior with a LUA script allowing to cast spells, fire texts and so on. Those actions are mostly controlled by random.
Also we have the option using Lua to change the way the target character is selected. This way we are able to create monsters only attacking specified player characters or other monsters.

So there is not much of a AI for now.

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

Just another screenshot of the current state of the game.

Also a prove that Slick is not slow! Check out the FPS count. All images are drawn using Graphics.drawImage

Link to the Screenshot

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

Whoa, this looks crazy! Great work! Also, nice to see that the FPS count is high with so many objects!

And... OutOfCoffeeException made me lol

If you use startUse/endUse you will probably get even higher FPS. Things like the repeating floor don't need to be pushed individually to the GPU.

The FPS will barely change I think. I am actually using quite the trick here.

Using Slicks ability easily perform render-to-texture operations I render the entire screen on a texture. My scene graph implementation keeps track of the areas on the screen that are changed from one frame to the next. If the amount of changed areas in sufficient small, only the changed areas are rendered again. So while there is actually a large amount of graphics on the screen, the amount that is really rendered in each loop is rather small. Without this the technique the FPS drop down to about 60FPS. On the screen that is shown in the image the only thing that is rendered from time to time is the area around the well, as this one is animated.

Nitram

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http://illarion.org

This is just amazing [x

Indeed it is. And we are still looking for developers who support our amazing game.

Just saying

Nitram

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http://illarion.org