What is Arianne?

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 TCP 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 arianne's clients. Arianne's server is totally client agnostic.

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 server: Marauroa.

Marauroa is completely written in Java using a multithreaded server architecture with a TCP 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 game's 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.

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.