L2j Server Project » Community

[UPDATED] L2j Server Important Changes!

ThePhoenixBird — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:34:49 +0000

Hi there guys, today is a really important day here on L2j, we have been discussing for weeks about the future of L2j, where are we now?, what are we going to do? and where we want to be?

All of this was a joke – Todo fue una broma – все это была шутка – All dies war ein Scherz

Well, well, well… i hope you all had fun like we did we laughed our asses off really hard, this was our April Fools Joke, all the licences stuff is just a small “white lie” that we prepared minuciously to shock you all.

We were going to reveal the truth on 2nd but since the huge impact that it caused and the large amount of rage/funny/emo/suicide comments both on website and forums we held up the joke for a couple of extra days to see you all freaking out for the sake of pure evilness.

Just like someone already said, all the jokes have a bit of truth on them, think about it for a while and then forget it, dont get too serious, but think that all our work we do here is for FREE and it will be FREE FOREVER, and for ALL OF YOU, not for us, since many of the current developers working on the official L2j staff dont run a server, many of them do it just for “fun” and/or “learning” purposes like me.

The entire team thank you all for the comments!

Notes: Just for the curious ones ranting and claiming that selling a paid L2j version violates the GPL, please read. As long we distribute the source code with the compiled binaries, you dont violate the GPL, the issue is that the same GPL let you distribute, modify, and sell the copy that you just bought, so you can’t effectively sell a “license” under the GPL.

IF YOU RAGE YOU LOSE!

On the other side we also discussed about the amount of people that doesnt care a shit about our work, and they keep leeching, stealing, and flaming us, some have the guts to ask on forums how to remove the credits! others come to IRC and spam the ops with messages to get “priority support cuz i donated you $5!”, other ones more silent just come here, read, pick, download, and just stay silent leeching our hard work and yours too, they dont give nothing back to the community.
At the end we got tired to list bad stuff and then we started to brainstorm for solutions to this issue and the future of L2j.

The wonderful idea came when it was suggested to create a “paid” L2j version, with proper priority support and addons, also nBd aggred to share his private custom events for this new version.

Of couse, for the rest of the users they still can get the vanilla L2j version, but future OpenSource Development will be stoped starting on Rev.4100, there will be only security patches from now on for the”free” branch, no new development or features will be added to the vanilla version wich will stay opensource for the rest of you to keep using it or developing it.

From now on the current L2j DevTeam will focus on developing for the ”paid” version of L2j with the new features and addons (we have prepared some awesome ones), you then should consider to buy a L2j License:

Standard License
Price: USD$ 149,99/year

Limited to 1 server with 100 users capacity.
Priority Support via email/irc.
Priority Beta-Releases.
0-Day Bug Fixes.
Free Upgrades

Gold License
Price: USD$ 349,99/year

Limited to 2 servers with 300 users capacity per server.
Priority Support via email/irc.
Priority Beta-Releases.
0-Day Bug Fixes.
Free Upgrades
Builds with Custom MODs.
Priority Support for Custom MODs.

Extreme License
Price: USD$ 749,99/year

Limited to 3 servers with 1000 users capacity per server.
Priority Support via email/irc.
Priority Beta-Releases.
0-Day Bug Fixes.
Free Upgrades
Builds with Custom MODs.
Priority Support for Custom MODs.
nBd’s Premium Custom MODs.
DrHouse’s Admin/GameMaster Custom Panel MOD.
ThePhoenixBird’s Designed 125×125 Banner in L2jServer Homepage.

We consider that those prices are cheap in echange for the amount of work and development that its required to stay competitive on this business.

The money from the licences will be used completely for our new L2j Developer Motivation Program wich will ensure quality work from our group of L2j Developers and for future development of new features.

Regards
L2j Team

Public opening of our blog frontend

DrLecter — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:33:14 +0000

As many of you may know, we’ve been planning a website renewal for quite a while. We eventually started doing it and we’re finally moving away from our static HTML to a more modern artifact. Enter our WordPress based portal. As ThePhoenixBird announced in our forums, there’s a lot of pending changes, which you’ll see in action as time passes.

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.

Will be our product management our fatal flaw?

DrLecter — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:43:48 +0000

As a Pidgin user, I followed up to a certain point a ticket that became so famous it has been slashdotted and have had to become a static page after that. To put the long story short Pidgin devs decided to take a feature away, a certain amount of its community felt it was wrong and a fork were born. The result of the aggro convo that took place there is funpidgin, a fork whose purpose in life is do what the mother project were unable to achieve: keep its users content.

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.

One departure, three arrivals. Natural selection FTW.

DrLecter — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:57:10 +0000

Today Steuf publicly resigned as a member of our team. His stay here have been of benefit for the project, yet he have chosen to leave the crew because of personal/methodological differences. We can’t do much more than say thanks and farewell.

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.

nbd joined the Core Team

DrLecter — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:32:00 +0000

After several months of actively collaborating with the project as a community member, nbd succeded on his Initiation ritual (yeah, that with the dancing girls) and became a fully fledged Core Dev.

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!

Kamael support went live

DrLecter — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:03:37 +0000

Finally, after some delay with our schedule mostly due to our server move we managed to make the public release of the first L2J Kamael Core.

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.

New poll: how about licensing models?

DrLecter — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:59:25 +0000

On a regular basis we add, code and fix stuff in the L2J code and in a not so regular basis we allow the most skilled team workers and programmers from all around the globe to join the team and make the earth tremble with commit and design proposals. But on an hourly basis (to say something) dozens of persons have access to our source code in a way or another.

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:

Welcome Melerix to the Datapack Team

DrLecter — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:22:51 +0000

So after a while of participating, discussing and providing feedback to the datapack project, we’re proud to announce Melerix will be joining the Datapack Team. Have a nice stay mel!

Kamael contributions from PTS just started

DrLecter — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:33:29 +0000

Given the fact that Kamael went to the USA PTS, we’ve just created a datapack forum area for community members to share their first findings with the rest of us. Screenies and details didn’t took much time to start flowing, and we expect an increasing rythm of information incoming for the next couple of weeks. Many exciting features are on sight, and a new struggle is about to commence for the L2J Project in no time. Stay tuned guys!

Demotivation

ThePhoenixBird — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:33:25 +0000