What is Arianne?

Arianne comprises a multiplayer online games framework and engine to develop turn based and real time games, and the various games which use it.

The main subprojects active now are the framework/engine, called Marauroa, and a multiplayer online adventures game called Stendhal. Some of the original subprojects are inactive now, you will find archived information about them on this site.

Arianne has been in development since 1999 and has evolved from a tiny application written in pseudo-C++ to a powerful, expandable but simple framework called Marauroa, running on the Java platform. Marauroa is totally game agnostic.

Our reference engines are coded using Java in order to achieve maximum portability.

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

Arianne example game screenshots:

• 
• 

How is it licensed?

Arianne has always been an Open source project, written and released under the GNU GPL license. We believe the right way is the open source way and we want you to have the power to change, edit and configure whatever you want, both on the clients and server. Arianne always welcomes your contributions and modifications to the code to create the best possible open source reference platform for game content providers.

What is Marauroa?

All our efforts are supported by Arianne's engine: Marauroa, which is portable and robust.

Marauroa is completely written in Java using a multithreaded server architecture with a TCP oriented network protocol, a MySQL or H2 based persistence engine and a flexible game system. The game system is totally expandable and modifiable by game developers.

Marauroa is based on an Action - Perception design philosophy. 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.

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

Your cooperation reporting problems is invaluable: You are our best developer and we want to hear from you.

If you'd like any more information, try our wiki.