A very little few of you may wonder what about even older versions of L2J? Well, by the C2-C3 era L2J were hosted using a free service (OpenSVN). Before that there were a CVS, but I’m too young in the project to provide further details about it. In the beginning OpenSVN services were good enough but our increasing traffic and bandwidth usage forced us to setup our own server (which costs us money, tnx for your donations btw ). For some reason beyond my memories, our source code were dumped from the old svn to the new one but changeset/revision numbering were set back to zero on purpose. If you’re really really interested in the code and its authors whose names should not be forgotten, here’s the SVN and its accompanying Trac. There are also some ancient binaries published in our Files section at Sourceforge.

Now switching topic, our latest release (Gracia Epilogue) won’t be added to the nightly build until it’s acceptably tested for a little while, unstable nightlies are still being built on Gracia Final. Wait a little bit for Epilogue nightlies or build GE on your own, and enjoy!

I’m talking about two graphical user interfaces, one for server settings configuration and one for game server registering against a particular Login server. In the past, you were provided with an “ugly” DOS text-based application for the latter task and for the first one, all you had was a text editor of your choice. Please read more for for some screenshots, design and usage talkabouts…

First of all, have a peek to what they look like on windows XP:

L2J GameServer registering and configuration interfaces

And Kubuntu 9.04:

L2J Gameserver configuration interface, in GNU/Linux.

L2J server settings configuration tool

Let’s talk about the way it works. When it was first written, we agreed with KenM to keep it simple and maintenance-free for the most of it. So when you run the server config tool, it goes through the “config” directory looking for *.properties files and creates one tab per file. Any comment preceding a configuration value will become a tooltip in this GUI (as you can see in the Win screenie). A basic interpretation procedure choses whether you should see a checkbox, an IP widget or a plain text input widget. And that’s about all. Whenever a new file is added, this GUI should support it. All you should need for this tool to work (out of a graphical environment, of course) is to have write permissions for the config files and have them (as well as the languages/images directories) in the correct place. Stock L2J build should grant that. There’s a simple .exe wrapper and a bash script that will server as launchers.

L2J GS registering tool

This tool requires a MySQL server running, you should know the username/password to connect with it. Servername.xml file should be in the login folder too. If for any reason there’s no graphical interface available, this tool should gracefully fall back to the old text based system. I didn’t test it, tho

Translation files

I’ve decided to distribute translation files along with the datapack, since the only one that is mandatory for these tools to work are the english ones. The datapack build file should place them accordingly, but if you do not use eclipse for datapack moving the ‘configurator’ and ‘gsregister’ folders out from ‘l2jserver/gameserver/data/lang’ to ‘l2jserver/languages’ would do the trick. You’re encouraged to contribute any fix or missing language in the forums!

What’s missing

I’d like to have optional translations for the tooltips, included in the i18n files. It would be also good to have some more deep checking rules for whatever values are defined by the user. Maybe some xml file could tell the GUI what to validate for a given configuration entry (if no validation is defined, GUI should flawlessly let values go thru), such as “XPRate should be an integer”, etc. I’m optimistic for that you guys will come up with more ideas and functionality.

Credits

All I did out of committing, was to add i18n and some minor improvements. All the glory for this work goes to KenM and the guys at the team who contributed with translations. Enjoy!

You may be wondering how this blog thing is expected to work, so here’s the plan: Developers should have authoring privileges for they may like to announce or comment major changes, upcoming features or simply write or share motivational, inspiring or funny material with our community. Cousin project guests and L2J initiates should have the ability to contribute posts that would be published after a quick review of our editors. Visitors may be able to comment or provide feedback without the need of registering, provided they don’t spam or break our code of conduct. If anybody needed to engage any discussion longer than a few comments, a forum thread should be preferred.

We hope you enjoy and benefit from these changes, and as usual any feedback or suggestion is welcome.

This video tutorial (the second of a series) is meant to show a way to create your own L2J development environment and checkout our source code from our subversion repositories. By following these directions, anybody should be hopefully able to move from downloading L2J in a binary form to compile its own builds.

After my laptop resetup I decided to make a little video tutorial meant to show the setup process of a private L2J server under Windows XP for testing purposes only.  This means I’ve kept steps as easy as possible, and no security/performance considerations were made. Thus, people willing to hold more than a couple of friends trying things out on the resulting server should check forums and wiki more thoroughly. It is the first of a series of videos I’m planning to make around our product. In my next video I’ll show how to use the Subversion source code instead of the nightly builds.

I were to stick with my old 2.3 version of the Pidgin client but rather decided to give the fork a try, and so far results have been acceptable. And I like the resizable input widget instead of the automagic thingy Pidgin devs liked so much.

Many articles and debate were written around this situation, yet there is one I found inspiring and I wanted to share for your consideration here. It’s a remarkable comment Paul Young made at his Product Beautiful blog. It puts into the table aspects that many FOSS products (yeah, L2J included) should consider from the Product Management perspective (yeah, that one we barely think of). A week later or so, he takes the topic back to further ellaborate on his vision of what Product Management shall imply in our  living as Open Source product developers. I can’t stop insisting you take a look at both.

 On the other hand, I’m pleased to welcome three skilled collaborators that have been active members of the L2J community for a while now. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome DrHouse, poltomb and Forsaiken. Now, they who have joined the team during the last days would be passing their initiation rituals; when we manage to get some dancing girls, that is. At least we got a tequila bottle, courtesy of ThePhoenixBird.

On a serious thought, while this post’s title were more of a reading hook and I don’t honestly think we’re doomed or anything, there’s some design and team issues we’re always thinking on improve and get to the higher possible stands. Let’s keep foccussed on them, at any line we type. Carpe Diem.