arianne 0.12

Arianne is a multiplayer online games framework and engine to develop turn based and real time games.

It provides a simple way of creating games on a portable and robust server architecture. The server is coded in Java and uses Python for your game description, provides a MySQL backend and uses an UDP transport channel to communicate with dozens of players.

Our reference client engines are coded using Java and the C language in order to achieve maximum portability.

Arianne has been in development since 1999 and has evolved from a tiny application written in pseudo-C++ to a powerful, expandable but simple server framework, running on the Java platform, and a portable client framework, written in bare C to allow total portability of ariannes clients. Ariannes server is totally client agnostic.

Since the beginning, the key concept at the heart of Ariannes development has been KISS: Keep it simple, stupid!

Arianne games are playable. It now hosts several games:

* a multiplayer Gladiators fighting game
* a multiplayer Pacman game

All our efforts are supported by ariannes server: Marauroa.

Marauroa is completely written in Java using a multithreaded server architecture with a UDP oriented network protocol, a MySQL based persistence engine and a flexible game system. The game system is totally expandable and modifiable by game developers and is able to run Python scripts defining the games rules.

Marauroa is based on a design philosophy we called Action/Perception. Each turn a perception is send to the clients explaining what they currently perceive. Clients can ask the server to perform any action in their name using actions. Marauroa is totally game agnostic and makes very little assumptions about what are you trying to do, allowing a great freedom to create any game type.

Bugs are facts of life, they just happen.

On Arianne we care about code quality so code is fully tested using Test Units with JUnit and cppunit, so all modules are tested for most common cases, allowing a better quality software to be deployed.

The name originated from the Greek name Ariadne. (Latin; Arianna and from French; Arianne). Ariadne is a famous character in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Minos of Crete and she was in love with Theseus, the Athenian hero who killed the Minotaur ( a half human, half bull creature).

Theseus married her, however, then later left her alone on the island of Naxos. Ariadne later married Dionisos the God of Wine. The name Ariadne originates from the ancient Greek words ari which means intelligent and adnis which means pure (as in a virgin). Hence, the daughters of the Romans and Greeks where often called by this name.