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

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!

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

For the changelog please check out our forums.

Please remember that this build is a new release of L2j GE, so please don’t try to change protocols to login with a GF client or another things, btw… remember to make a “BACKUP” of your data before updating to L2j GE.

Since this is the first release, “Nightly Builds are still frozen to GF version”, after a month of the public release the “Nightly GE” will be activated, but untill that time the only way to get L2j GE release is using the SVN repository and Eclipse to compile it.

:: Download Sources ::

L2J GE Server: http://www.l2jserver.com/svn/trunk/L2_GameServer
L2J GE Datapack: http://www.l2jdp.com/svn/trunk/datapack_development

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!

L2j Server v2.9 with Gracia Final Support has now been updated into the Core and DP SVN tracs.

HOWEVER!! BE WARNED

Please note that Gracia Final support is still not complete and that updating your server to the latest version on the main trunk branches will not necessarily be the most stable version that you can use it actually its still in a very early BETA stage, so it can cause unexpectable problems on your live server, its mostly for private testing and developing purposes.

If you want to maintain a stable server for public usage then stay on the L2_GameServer_T2.2 branch until the main trunk has become fully stable, we hope that in 2 or 3 weeks obtain a 90% of stability bugs fixed.

The raw release of Gracia Final T2.3 its just for server compatiblity, then please be aware that because of this you do not need to go posting tickets on the trac for every feature of final that is not working and for any bugs that you find to do with gracia final, for example: “This xyz feature isnt working”, “xyz Skill isnt working”, “I cant enter to this xyz area”, “where is xyz stuff?”

It will be better to discuss any bugs or feature requests for Gracia Final T2.3 on the forum at this stage until we get this version more stable in order to prevent clogging up of the trac with tickets about things we are still working on or not-a-bug reports.

We would also ask for the another community trac-log readers to close any duplicated/not-a-bug/fake tickets that you may find, this would help us a lot, but please do it right and not just for fun.

Anyway we hope you enjoy the new release and I’d just like to thank ALL of the dev team that has been working so hard on getting this huge release ready for public use. They have been doing a great job!!!

For a full changelog please click here

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!

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.

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.