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

Actually the answer is “it’s easy to learn” and if you dont want to learn it Google Translator can turn it to your native language in most of cases with just two clicks (or even just one).

But now we have developed a new language: L2jmeh

It is a parody of l2jglish english with some l2jpanish spanish ad dons, but don’t don’t freak out! It’s ISO8859-1 y UTF-8 compatible, so you don’t need to change your browser to Firefox or any other advanced one like Opera, Safari or even the new Chrome but seriously you should forget about the damm Internet Explorer and you dont need to install any additional cornficker software in your computer to read it.

L2jmeh will be avaliable in the next releases of L2j, enjoy it!