rAthena - the fork

[Jman]

Not a dinner fork, mind you (I am hungry), but a software fork.

As noted on a previous topic, the time has come for eAthena to fork. It is clearly known by 90% of the members who visit this forum daily that the administration at eAthena.ws has taken a turn for the worse. Development has slowed to a snails pace and has taken a back seat to politics.

As you can see, this forum was setup within about 1 week by Brian and myself (Brian did most of the work) so it should not take three people 7 months to set one up. Yes, the forums are not the most important part of the project, but they play a key role in it, as they are a great collaboration tool for members and developers to work together for the better of the emulator. Development is always the most important thing, and will remain the most important thing. We've lined up a number of developers and contributors to help us with this project.

Why 'RAthena'?

Well, to make ourselves better known, we have taken the advice of many members here and stuck with the 'Athena' name, just as eAthena had done when they forked from jAthena back in the day. The R will stand for 'Renewal', which is essentially where eAthena left off, implementation of the Renewal Mechanics. The R, creatively, can be a pseudonym for 'Our', which in the English language, is defined as 'one' or 'together'. With this philosophy and thought behind us, I believe that this small group of people can achieve great things in the coming years for the betterment of all Private servers out there.

One thing to stress is the fact that this fork will not be a 'race', or a 'competition' with eAthena. No one is discouraging you from visiting eAthena.ws, nor will anyone here shame you for it. Once the squall between the two projects come to a close, I have a feeling that we will be able to collaborate together on better terms. So, with that in mind, the staff here feels that everyone should conduct themselves in an appropriate manner when visiting eathena.ws, We will not be held liable for punishment for your actions, which is why I want to stress that this is not a competition. Yes, we split on bad terms, but we're all over 8 years of age here (I believe). I feel we can conduct ourselves in a mature manner when interacting with members and staff from both sides. I would expect nothing less of the folk at eAthena.

So...what's going to happen now?

Well, we have agreed on a merger of two projects, some of you might be familiar with. RO Resources (and their Emulator in progress) and The Sprite Repository will come over to RAthena and with them their staff. This means that all of RO Resources and The Sprite Repository's downloads and member base will be redirected to here. The downloads will be open to everyone, instead of having restrictions. In the coming days, IP.Downloads will be installed on our forums and the process of migrating the files will begin. Once this has started and been complete, a separate announcement will be made.

With RO Resources comes a project that Ind and a few developers were working on...and that was integrating the Renewal Mechanics and 3rd classes into an eAthena base, slowly (to make sure its done right) and as official as possible. When we get set and ready to dive into it (we're waiting for a few things to fall into place, first), the RR Emu source code will be merged with the eAthena HEAD revision and our emulator will be officially forked from eAthena. We will also have Yommy with official data and skill calculations on CookieRO, as well as his developers to help us as well. We're still sorting out the logistics of the situation as far as what developers will be working on what, and who our 'Project Manager' will be, but rest assured, right when the information hits the presses, it will be shared with the community.

Soon, a few things will be happening. First, the forum will undergo another URL change. eAthena.net will produce a 301 Redirect permanently error to redirect to rathena.org (the forum should already be accessible to http://rathena.org/board/ but it redirects to eathena.net at the moment). We've also registered rathena.net for redirection use. we'll then rename everything. We may have to have a bit of downtime as the DNS bounces around from server to server re appropriating itself. We might also have to switch sourceforge 'projects' because Sourceforge doesn't allow renaming projects =/

At around this time, we'll also setup a paypal address in case any of you would like to donate (details about that coming in a separate topic). We'll also have an email address that you can email all of the project managers at in case something goes horribly wrong with the forums, SVN, IRC, something.

The Sourceforge SVN will open for our developers to begin merging the changes from RREmu and various other sources into our Sourceforge SVN. Once that is complete, we'll restructure our basis around that and go from there.

Overall, we have a lot of work ahead of us, but I feel we can get through in time and emerge victorious. Let's all raise a glass and toast ourselves, for this is the start of another era of Private server hosting.

If you have any questions, or need any clarification, please don't hesitate to post here and ask.

Thanks all.

~Jguy

[Teny]

Woo finally

Time to get started

Come idle at #RAthena on the Rizon IRC network

Edited November 28, 2011 by Teny

[Z3R0]

so wait? are we using rizon? and if so why? I understand the need to move from danet, but why not freenode?

[Teny]

We debated on it for about 2 minutes then Tress/I agreed it had superior service, probably because we spend the most time on there.

Also, freenode is full of dickies.

Edited November 28, 2011 by Teny

[jTynne]

*slow claps*

Pleased to see everything working out. Even happier to see RR being used for the start of the RE stuff. Can't wait to see what the future holds!

[Z3R0]

officially hates rizon... someone has my nick... I have it everywhere else... grrrr

[Mercurial]

Cheers fellow developers its a great time for RO development XD

Edited November 28, 2011 by Mercurial

[Diconfrost VaNz]

this is great!!!

[vBrenth]

Yeah the irc really bad =,=" i registered my name and i didn't receive any confirmation and now i can't use my nickname again.... T_T

Overall update is great!

Edited November 28, 2011 by vBrenth

[iBallBar]

That's great . I forward to this.

[Brian]

hmm I received the email verification from Rizon.

Maybe check your spam folder?

You can try resending the validation code too:

/msg NickServ RESENDCODE <nick>

Ex: 
/msg NickServ RESENDCODE vBrenth

[Truly]

This sounds really great! The merge along with new administration and reorganization seems like you said, "for this is the start of another era of Private server hosting." +1 for that haha

[BlueskyVPS]

finally

3rd jobs will be fixed now

[Yuki]

I was wondering if my eyes went crazy for me as the "e" changed to "R" for me today haha XD.

I'm very happy to hear about these updates, and kudos to all the staff members and the affliated groups to be part of this!

I love how the community is more engaged than ever, and I hope it will continue to do so in the long run.

Welcome to RAthena, everyone! Here's to a good start with everybody =D.

[Latheesan]

really happy to hear this news; finally

[Tonetzkii]

Finally! this is a good news for me..

Good luck!

[Diconfrost VaNz]

Finally, the xray project is dead for good xD

[Judas]

nice!

[Rxz]

This is great development, good luck to rAthena.

[simplynice]

We're all hoping this will work NOW.

-Congrats and Goodluck.

[Kratos]

Not sure if someone likes this idea, but I think as this is a new fork and we will need new developers, there should some kind of workshop for new members. I mean there are lot of stuff like clif.c, chrif.c which people currently don't know what it does, so we should have something like a general glossary of what file controls or does.

Good luck, if I see I can help with something I'll do it, but for now I'll refine my skills

[Teny]

Not sure if someone likes this idea, but I think as this is a new fork and we will need new developers, there should some kind of workshop for new members. I mean there are lot of stuff like clif.c, chrif.c which people currently don't know what it does, so we should have something like a general glossary of what file controls or does.

Good luck, if I see I can help with something I'll do it, but for now I'll refine my skills

Mind = Mind.

[xazax]

Not sure if someone likes this idea, but I think as this is a new fork and we will need new developers, there should some kind of workshop for new members. I mean there are lot of stuff like clif.c, chrif.c which people currently don't know what it does, so we should have something like a general glossary of what file controls or does.

Good luck, if I see I can help with something I'll do it, but for now I'll refine my skills

Actually, I think it is pretty obvious what those files are for, at least it should be for those, who wants to apply for a dev position. However that is true, there is a room for improvement in the documentation of the code. So what we need there, is not a glossary, but proper documentation.

Edited November 28, 2011 by xazax

[KeiKun]

Not sure if someone likes this idea, but I think as this is a new fork and we will need new developers, there should some kind of workshop for new members. I mean there are lot of stuff like clif.c, chrif.c which people currently don't know what it does, so we should have something like a general glossary of what file controls or does.

Good luck, if I see I can help with something I'll do it, but for now I'll refine my skills

if you have knowledge with C language

its already easy to determine what that file is for~

[Boreas]

I hope this won't be another useless eAthena clone, which relies on buggy and wonky code. I wish to see working commits and well structured code instead, as well as tested formulas.

You have my support with this step, although it is sad that it had to come this far. Anyway, best of luck on getting all the work done to launch this project!