Ragnarok and Java

[Lemongrass]

Hello guys,

in my spare time I like to code some things that are related to Ragnarok Online or Athena.

So not long ago I decided to create a project featuring all the data related to both Ragnarok Online and Athena and combine them into one java library.

I call that project jRagnarokOnlineData.

To make it somehow more interesting for all of you I also have two other projects called jRagnarokOnline which is a version of the game Ragnarok Online written completely in java, which means platform independent, using jOGL. The second one is called jRagnarokOnlineStudio, which will be as the name says featuring a lot of usefull tools combined in one "studio".

So to the status of my project jRagnarokOnlineData, which I want to finish before all the others:

It currently supports the reading of all file formats regarding Ragnarok Online except GRFs with a version less then version 0x200. It does support the reading but it is still really buggy.

The tools is also able to read and write all the data of Athena which is stored in the SQL database. For that purpose I used the hibernate technology which is an obfustication layer between the java classes and the database standing behind it. It would also support other things than MySQL very easily.

After I manage to fix my current problem which I'll tell you later and which is the reason why I'm writing this post, I'll add support for reading and writing the client side LUA files or the compiled LUB files. In my researches I found out that it seems to be very simple to combine java with lua.

So to my current problem:

I am currently trying to get the write methods of the GRF format working. The problem is that I want to stick at native java as most as I can. So I use the java.util.zip package for the ZLIB compression. The thing is that reading is working like a charm, whereas writing really gives me troubles. No matter what I do the Deflater's deflate method returns a compressed length of 2 and I end up with an "empty" byte array which only contains some kind of ZLIB signature(at least that's what I think those two bytes are, since they are the same everytime).

Has anyone got decent knowledge about the usage of the ZLIB deflater of java or does know of any other implementation that is working platform independent?

I hope the community can help me out here and without a doubt you would not regret to help me finish those things.