Genesis: News Volume #1

In response to the flood of requests for news, we have decided to publish this abstract of Genesis's current state.

A lot has happened within the core of L2JFree since the last announcement, and by core I am not referring to the code itself. It is a fact that the code did evolve and come a long way whereas the biggest change, would be without doubt, the increased dedication the team has put into the project, although not visible to users' eyes, a lot is going on in the background which does consume a lot of time and require serious commitment.

Public activity:

Private activity:

#1 - Now for the real news, as you may have noticed both core and datapack have been moving at a somewhat fast pace which, seems to be making our supporters happy. Yet, it keeps getting better, since - like stated in the previous announcement - the modularization base hasn't been implemented so far, working in Genesis can be quite confusing and create some conflicts between commits. However as soon as the base has been complete - which you can expect to see in the near future - , each developer is free to work on each module separately with no concern about what others are doing, hence, modularization will be a true breakthrough, not only regarding Emulation, but to the rate at which changes can be made.

#2 - At this point, even though incomplete, the network layer is capable of supporting amongst others, login, meaning, the basic authentication protocol is present. Current relevant network's capabilities are: support player account authentication, character creation and world movement.

#3 - Datapack is also starting to show its presence in the project, you can expect the first major commits within the next days. The datapack is now integrated with the core, meaning, content on both ends can and will be added as soon as possible. The datapack has suffered a several changes, which include static data no longer be deployed in a database, this allowed us to remove all SQL files and instead, use integrated XML files to both auto-generate and auto-update the database's structure. A decision was made to tackle some of the non-user-friendly features in Emulators, with that in mind, from now on configs are automatically generated from the code, and kept in sync all the time, thus allowing an easier management.

#4 - The hierarchy tree of game objects has been completely redesigned, providing an increase in performance, a cleaner code, more flexibility and last but not least, an infallible code.

#5 - Like stated previously, an effort has been made to ensure Genesis was far more user-friendly, hence from now on, both Login and Core are PnP (Plug 'n' Play), meaning, all you have to do is compile them, and even without configuring a single file you are ready to launch! Neither a DBMS nor database tables need to be installed, never again will you have to worry about changed database structures, its as simple as it gets: you run the server and have fun.

To sum up: the new core will be by far closer to retail, faster, more stable and last but not least, user-friendly to both new users and advanced ones.

As for the repeated question "was it really worth starting over?", on behalf of the entire team I shout a firm and secure: "YES". Starting from scratch has allowed the integration of things that would have never made it into other L2j* branches, including multi-DBMS support, component factories and so on, whilst on the other hand, allowing us to avoid several of the existing problems present in L2j's structure. Again I remind you this is not a competition of any sort, this is simply us, trying to innovate and do better, never removing the credit of L2j's accomplishments.

Stay tuned for the News Volume #2.

Note: This text will not be updated, meaning, it only reports changes that happened until 2011-09-16.

Comment here: http://forum.l2jfree.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=96