Stendhal

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Stendhal
Stendhal.jpg
Stendhal is a fun friendly and free multiplayer online adventure game. Start playing, get hooked... Get the source code, and add your own ideas...
GenreMMORPG, Adventure, RPG
Latest release1.46  (Announcement)
Release dateMar 27th, 2024
DeveloperArianne project
Code licenseGPL v2+,
Website, Web-Client: AGPL v2+
Media licenseGPL v2+
EngineArianne
P. languageJava
LibraryJava2D
Contribute
Stendhal is a free game. This means that the source code is available to be studied, modified, and distributed. Most projects look for help with testing, documentation, graphics, etc., as well.


Stendhal is a multiplayer online adventure game with retro style graphics, hundreds of different creatures, items, NPCs and quests. It is written in Java by the Arianne Project, which was awarded project of the month March 2010 by SourceForge.[1]


Gameplay[edit]

As a typical multiplayer online adventure game Stendhal features a rich world in which players can fight monsters and explore towns, buildings, plains, caves and dungeons. By fighting monsters and completing quests provided by NPCs, players gain experience and money. The money can be used to buy new items and improve the armor and weapons. Gaining experience allows the players to fight stronger monsters and explore more parts of the world.

World[edit]

Players start in the old village of Semos. Semos is the central hub from which players start to explore the outside world and dungeons. There is a google maps based atlas available to help players on the outside world. The Stendhal wiki has indepth descriptions on the regions and dungeons.

Cities in Stendhal[edit]

Semos City
Semos City is the town the workers of the nearby Semos quarry once settled. It is populated by 40-50 persons. The defenses of Semos is now abandoned and moved to the capital Denirian. Semos' current weak state have forced them to make an emergency notice about heroes wanted in the help of town defense.
Semos Village
Semos Village is the ancient town of Semos. It is now mostly abandoned, as most people moved to the newly founded City of Semos in the east. Nishiya the sheep seller, however, still lives here. Semos Village is the place where new players start the game.
Ados
The rich coast city Ados is in a food crisis right now, since the farm town Semos is suffering constant attacks from monsters and thieves. Ados now pays high fees to good heroines and heroes that can help protect the town Semos and the food caravans that go between Semos and Ados.
Near Ados there is a haunted area where a famous battle took place. The area is now populated by some spirits of those who died there. Take care because they don't rest in peace.
Nalwor
Nalwor is the main city of the elves located south east of Semos in the Nalwor Forest. Be careful as elves do not like humans and the soldiers will attack everyone they spot. The civilised elves living there, however, may sell valuable items even to humans.
Southern Cities
South of the river there are the cities of Fado and Kirdneh.

Quests[edit]

NPCs in the cities and world ask players to do tasks for them, such cleaning the basement from rats and snakes or investigating dungeons. Some quests are simple and short, others are quite long and tell a story as the players progresses. A quest log keeps track of steps done by the player and promises made. It also warns about tasks that might be too dangerous for the players current level of experience. There are special NPCs who will tell a player which nearby quests they are ready to try.

Achievements[edit]

Achievements have various difficulty levels from very easy, to elite

Playing unlocks achievements for completing quests, visiting places, looting items, or killing monsters for example. On the official server, the reached achievements can be checked on the game server website, and players can compare each other in the Hall of Fame.

Economy[edit]

Players can earn in-game money by doing quests and killing creatures. In-game money can be spent on buying equipment and items, such as potions.

Players can trade items with other players by using a trade GUI, if they are next to each other. Also, players can sell items through a trader NPC, called Harold, in Semos Inn.

Mini-Games[edit]

There are a number of mini games all over the world:[2]

  • Deathmatch
  • Magic Maze
  • Wishing wells
  • Dice game
  • Black jack

Special Events[edit]

A special event where players made the entertainment.

For special holidays the main cities are decorated in Stendhal and special NPCs roam the world: Easter Bunny and Santa Claus give presents. On Halloween, Stendhal celebrates the Mine Town Revival weeks. It is a fair with many mini games and dressing up.[3]

There are raids, some of them are done by the game automatically and some are organized by game masters. Players often celebrate weddings, or organize raids and quizzes.[4]

History[edit]

Stendhal is based on ariannexp which was born in 1999. The initial release of Stendhal was on March, 03 2005. The first playable version was released on April the 4th.

In October an automatic updater for the client was implemented. This solved the problems of having to install new releases frequently because of the "release early, release often" development approach. Halloween was celebrated in game as "Mine Town Revival Weeks". The original Revival Weeks were motivated by development reasons to populate the huge city of Ados over the release time of three versions. But since then it had mutated into a recurring event.

In March 2007 the cap at level 100 was removed. In May the first large quest chain was implemented. It allows players to arrange their marriage to another player in game. Pets and housing were also introduced that year. Sometime during this year a new website was created which includes information from the game, like item stats and a hall of fame.

At the beginning of 2008 the NPC chatting system was reworked to allow players to talk to NPCs in a much more natural way.

At the end of 2008 the battle system was completely reworked to prevent players from camping for hours in game without paying attention to the screen. The new combat systems made fights a lot quicker but also decreased the impact of stats gainable by camping.[5]. Because of that change a fork of Stendhal with the camping-favoring combat system was created. This fork, however, died before the end of the year.

A research project called Player-like world was developed based on Stendhal to create a controlled environment that is used in online games research.[6]

In 2009 the existing artwork was completely replaced with images created by the Stendhal developers themselves. A continuous integration environment was setup to ensure the quality of the source code by executing automatic tests on a daily basis. In September instanced fighting zones were implemented.

In early 2012 a day and night cycle was added which supports directed lights. After 7 years of development, Stendhal 1.00 was released on May the 17th.

Development[edit]

Stendhal is developed as a totally free project. The source code for both the the client and the server is available. Because of its history, the Stendhal project is very skeptical about graphics found on the net that claim to be free. Therefore, most of the art work is original.

The development of Stendhal is coordinated using the bug tracker offered by SourceForge and the IRC channel #arianne on freenode. People willing to contribute can do this in a number of ways, starting from reporting bugs and ideas about new features, keeping the documentation in the wiki up to date, to contributing graphics and code. There is range of documentation available to get started.

Stendhal takes a "release early, release often approach" which leads to release roughly every four weeks. For every release a branch is created in the code repository. Starting with the day of the release, only serious bugs are fixed there to ensure a stable release branch while development continues in the master branch.


Release history[edit]

2024 1.46 Stendhal 1.46: Getting with the Times 2024-03-27
2023 1.45 Stendhal 1.45: Branching Out 2023-12-25
1.44 Stendhal 1.44: Memories 2023-10-06
1.43 Stendhal 1.43: Fashion and Competition 2023-03-09
2022 1.42 Stendhal 1.42: A bag as a gift 2022-12-25
1.41.2 Stendhal 1.41.2: Fixing defense 2022-10-25
1.41.1 Stendhal 1.41.1: Reverting unintended consequences 2022-10-24
1.41 Stendhal 1.41: Encouraging Exploration 2022-10-22
1.40 Stendhal 1.40: Sticky Conversations 2022-04-13
1.39 Stendhal 1.39: For Love or Greed 2022-03-07
1.38 Silence is golden 2022-01-08
2021 1.37 So much space 2021-10-03
2020 1.36 Construction 2020-10-10
1.35 Appreciating Helpers 2020-07-15
1.34 Dojo 2020-05-02
1.33 Finding the Lost City 2020-02-28
1.32 New Faces 2020-01-18
2019 1.31 Populating Deniran 2019-09-26
1.30 Cool Caves 2019-07-09
1.29 Big city casts its shadows 2019-02-01
2018 1.28.1 Fixing client transfer 2018-10-17
1.28 Let's play dress up 2018-10-10
1.27 The Curse and the Cure 2018-06-05
2017 1.26 Hell Bells 2017-09-19
1.25 Ados Advancements 2017-06-14
1.24 Fighting the curse 2017-03-10
1.23 Cursed 2017-02-05
2016 1.22 Joyful Times 2016-12-04
1.21 Get the party ready 2016-09-13
1.20 Trust and Confidence 2016-04-13
2015 1.19 Deep Sea Mysteries 2015-12-08
1.18 Voyages 2015-08-18
1.17 Water from above and below 2015-04-20
2014 1.16 Lil' Snowflake 2014-12-15
1.15.1 Poisoned Death 2014-10-26
1.15 Celebrating secrets 2014-10-05
1.14 Knowlege and Wisdom 2014-06-02
1.13 Hellish repainting 2014-02-10
2013 1.12 Good tidings we bring 2013-12-12
1.11 Let's party 2013-10-15
1.10 More than cosmetic change 2013-09-09
1.09 Strong helpers needed 2013-07-25
1.08 Spend Summer outdoors 2013-06-05
1.07 Traps and Puzzles 2013-04-18
1.06 A bit of toil but little trouble 2013-02-12
2012 1.05 Ready to meet Rudolph? 2012-12-15
1.04 Hallowe'en means Mine Town Revival Weeks! 2012-10-22
1.03 Records 2012-09-12
1.02 Overcoming darkness 2012-08-07
1.01.1 client bug fix for slow zone changes 2012-07-05
1.01 Community spirit 2012-07-01
1.00 The next era begins! 2012-05-17
0.99 small change, big difference? 2012-02-05
2011 0.98 Day turns into night 2011-12-02
0.97 Wear a Rainbow 2011-10-12
0.96 Welcoming new adventurers 2011-08-25
0.95 Fixing the updater 2011-07-14
0.94 Preparing for server migration 2011-06-04
0.93 Birth, life and death 2011-04-12
0.92 Achievements and Expedition Groups 2011-02-26
0.91 Quest progress 2011-01-02
2010 0.90 Seasons Greetings 2010-12-10
0.89 Food, flowers and fights! 2010-11-24
0.88 Newcomers and new trading 2010-10-15
0.87.1 Bug fix release 2010-09-14
0.87 New client! 2010-09-13
0.86 The Wizards Circle 2010-07-26
0.85 Wood, wood everywhere 2010-06-27
0.84 Don't deny the desperate Despot 2010-06-02
0.83 Dark or Light, Fire or Ice? 2010-04-30
0.82.1 none 2010-03-28
0.82 Spring is coming! 2010-03-26
0.81 Music to your ears 2010-02-20
0.80 Harold's new job, Trade Manager! 2010-01-08
2009 0.79 Back to reality 2009-11-13
0.78 Semos Mine Town Revival Weeks 2009-10-22
0.77 Adventure Island Awaits 2009-09-02
0.76 Ported to Marauroa 3.0 2009-08-02
0.75 Beauty and Balance 2009-07-12
0.74 What goes around comes around 2009-05-23
0.73 Houses sweet houses 2009-03-31
0.72 New abilities 2009-02-22
2008 0.71 Semos Mine Town Revival Weeks! 2008-11-30
0.70 Rules of War 2008-10-03
0.69 Wrath of Angels 2008-08-12
0.68.1 Fix it and tidy up 2008-06-30
0.68 Gnome Sweet Gnome 2008-05-29
0.67 Happy Valentines 2008-02-14
0.66 Embracing Marauroa 2.x 2008-01-08
2007 0.65 Christmas is coming! 2007-12-03
0.64 *grr* Baby Dragons! *grr* 2007-11-15
0.63 Huge, strange, sweet, wild, safe 2007-10-18
0.62 Sky towers and deep dungeons 2007-08-13
0.61 Wofol opens its doors 2007-06-22
0.60 A Marriage of Beauty and Chaos 2007-05-22
0.59 Beach or Battle? Pizza or Perish? You decide ... 2007-04-14
0.58.1 Abracadabra fixed 2007-04-09
0.58 Vampires roam Semos Catacombs! 2007-03-10
0.57 big changes for a little world! 2007-01-30
2006 0.56 Merry Christmas! 2006-12-19
0.55 Halloween night! 2006-10-31
0.54 Dice Gambling 2006-10-01
0.53 Archers and Farmers 2006-09-03
0.52 none 2006-08-14
0.51 Deathmatch happiness 2006-06-21
0.50 major release since December 2006-06-16
0.48 Buddies 2006-04-18
0.47 Liches and Kobolds 2006-03-24
0.46 getting there... 2006-03-10
0.45 Diplodocus! 2006-03-03
0.44 none 2006-01-29
0.43 none 2006-01-22
0.42 Venom rats are bad! 2006-01-06
2005 0.41 none 2005-12-20
0.40 none 2005-12-18
0.39.1 none 2005-10-26
0.39 money! 2005-10-23
0.32 none 2005-09-25
0.31 Bug fixes 2005-07-08
0.30 Items system and new RP Combat system 2005-07-03
0.25 Initial support for items 2005-06-05
0.20 New Monsters, more dungeons and better eXPerience 2005-06-05
0.13 Better RP than before 2005-05-30
0.12 none 2005-05-23
0.11 Monsters, dungeons and eXPerience 2005-05-20
0.10 none 2005-05-12
0.03 none 2005-04-28
0.02 Sheeps and food 2005-04-17
0.01 none 2005-04-05
0.00 none 2005-03-01

References[edit]

External links[edit]