The names that appear are from the developers who have made changes to the source code. The stars/highlights represent file commits made to the subversion repository. The histogram to the bottom left displays activity. Look out for the date displayed in the right bottom corner. Remember to Watch in HD!

Optional: Core only video and Datapack only video.

The long void during 2006 correspond to our server switch from OpenSVN to l2jserver.com and the rest are from the code freeze period that we take before a new release launch. We have even found some lost scrolls containing our old CVS repositories.

Code Swarm is an experiment for organic software visualization, you can find more information and download its source code to create your own swarm from their Google Code Project

In the past, we had these groups: 

• Inner Circle
• Core and DP developers
• Core and DP initiates

but now it goes like this:

• Inner Circle
• Senior Developers
• Junior Core Developers – Junior DP Developers
• L2J initiates

Firstly, we have merged Core initiates and DP initiates to just one group, with the only pourpose to provide a richer environment for our new team members which, in the future, will become new developers with better collaborative skills.

After this (usully short) initiation period, initiates who are ready for the battle, will be promoted to either core or datapack junior developers depending on their skills or personal willing. They will be granted developer rights to public svn so they can start their career with certain autonomy.

Those team members who had spent a  succesfully period as junior developers, highly commited with project,  with excellent team skills, … will have a chance to join Senior Developers group. Despite senior developers represent the most trustable group for active coding, some members of this group are also expected to engage some executive task related to team, such initiates/jr. developers leadership or global leadership for DP or Core projects.

Why have we done this? Main target could be improve old user->initiate->dev process, taking more care of upbringing and formation process(es) so that(those) can be done more efficiently. However, we are trying to increase/improve our coding and project global leadership(s, both for core and DP) so, again, maximize performance of coding getting more organized. In other words, rather than an independent developing process for each developer, a bunch of independent coordinated tasks engaged by each developer.

Finally, Team and me are glad to announce four new skilly Junior Developers, all of them already well-known within community:

Core: _DS_, shansoft and janiii

Datapack: Sandro

I hope you wellcome them as they are worth to and wish best of lucks!

This is all for now, on next days you will probably find new blog post or forum threads with further information abut this and some new topics.

 Best regards!

PD: We hope forum/svn problems will be fixed soon, our apologies for that nasty issue.

Out of critical/security fixes, user contributions will not be committed to the public trunk. However, we hope all of our pending contribs could still be integrated on our final release. So as usual, any help is greatly appreciated.

For more detailed information about l2j/l2jdp progress just use our community forums.

The L2J team!

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.

This talking took my memory to a Moshe Zadka’s article: Idioms and Anti-Idioms in Python. It’s essentially a list of language construct based tips on how to use Python or better said, how not to use it. Once Ahmed wrote a similar list towards optimization too. If we find it appropiate it may accompany the spirit of this post, for the joy and enthrallment of the big audiences.

And I still have plans for the SQL structure , but trust me I’ll manage to make it better. My sincere apologies to those who have experienced issues and thanks to those who tested and reported ’til things were working… gio, bigbro, zhyla et al.

Blessed are they who have made backups and set their servers to SQL strict mode, for they databases will be recovered or -even better- never accept data loss during an ALTER CHANGE.

And blessed are they who read the svn logs before pushing fresh stuff into their production servers, for their players not feeling too pissed after any random changeset.

And tomorrow: more wreckage!

(j/k) \-P

Given the time he has been around, there are varied traces of his participation all over the core. From mere cleanups and fixes to recent Kamael additions, such as S80 items support and skill handling for transformations.

Two valuable coders have been added to the crew during a week. No doubt next months will be exciting times!

While this release should be taken as “latest client support only”, it has many important achievements I wish to mention here:

•  We had the shortest delay time after official release, in comparison with other chronicles/major updates.
• We were able to get the support a bit thus far from “client not crashing”, by adding basic support for the new race in such a short period.
• The contribution flow has been quite active allowing to introduce dialogs and updates quite rapidly.
• We have had the invaluable aid of the L2JOneo Development Team, which constitutes a landmark in our history. By the first time in the whole project life we organized collaboration facilities and distributed research, development and testing tasks between projects.

From a technical perspective, there are details I should mention as well:

• Our scripting engine suffered important changes that allowed a whole new way of script development.
• Java 1.6 is mandatory, the project will no longer compile with 1.5.
• Decided to adopt the GPL v3 as our license.
• More in the TODO side, many rewrites/refactorings will hit the repository in the upcoming changesets.

Finally, we wanted to sync our core release with a new core portal application. This should hopefully allow several improvements in our community interaction and support.

My sincere thanks to all of our development team, to the Oneo guys and to the people that supported our work in any way all this time, whether by reporting a bug, testing a contrib, donating or just posting “thank you guys”. Enjoy.

So, there’s another issue that requires also knowledge and attention, and it is the way we offer our results to the big public. So many times you perhaps argued on IRC or forums about what the GPL license allowed another people to do or not to do. Now, are you so sure you were right? Is the legal neuron-set of you informed enough to provide an educated opinnion about today’s poll?

I hope you’d wish to read before you cast a vote like everytime you sign any legal thingy. You’d be redefining the way your work is contacting the world, so take it seriously and please feel free to discuss and provide further reading resources. I’ll leave just some wiki links as your starting point:

GNU/GPL License.

Version 2 details

Version 3 details

Affero details