We released Stendhal 1.48: Aesthetically Pleasing.

Among new quests and items, this release adds animations for special creatures and a parallax effect for walking at high altitudes.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.47: Pizza in Demand.

Among many changes to the world, we released an official Android App, which is available in the download section of our website or on F-Droid.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.46: Getting with the Times.

This release contains many improvements to the webclient and resolves some confusion around item defense modifiers.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.44: Branching Out.

This release contains two new bank chests in Fado and Magic City, several new achievements for hard core players and many improvements to the webclient.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.44: Memories.

This release contains two new achievements, pictures from the Mine Town Revival Weeks Festival, and lots of work behind the scene.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.43: Fashion and Competition.

This release contains significant improvements to the webclient.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.42: A bag as a gift.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We had to do a second server-only bugfix release. Please see Stendhal 1.41.2: Fixing defense for details.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in chat. Of course you can also join us, just to say hello :)

We had to do a server-only bugfix release. Please see Stendhal 1.41.1: Reverting unintended consequences for details.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in chat. Of course you can also join us, just to say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.41: Encouraging Exploration.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.40: Sticky Conversations.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.39: For Love or Greed.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.38: Silence is golden.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

With Stendhal 1.37: So much space the Deniran Air And Space Museum opens. Furthermore preparations for the Mine Town Revival Weeks have started.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us, just say hello :)

With Stendhal 1.36: Construction preparing the celebration of this years Mine Town Revival Weeks.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

With Stendhal 1.35: Appreciating Helpers we started to celebrate Stendhal's 15th anniversary. Have a look at the announcement to learn about new achievement and other improvements.

If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

With Stendhal 1.34: Dojo there is finally a training opportunity in Stendhal. Have a look at the announcement for more changes.

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

Stendhal 1.33: Finding the Lost City features lots of new creatures, items and achievements. There are new zones to explore and new quests.

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

Stendhal 1.32: New Faces features a completely reworked outfit system with additional layers for eyes, mouth, masks and hats. There are many new sounds and improved graphics. And not to forget: Two new quests.

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

Deniran City is getting more and more lively, as we released Stendhal 1.31: Populating Deniran tonight.

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.30: Cool Caves tonight. Now it is possible to explore the caves north of Deniran City.

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

We released Stendhal 1.29: Big city casts its shadows tonight. Among many small changes, it features a sneak peak at Deniran, the capital city.

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

Mine Town Revival Weeks have started and we released a new version of Stendhal tonight: Stendhal 1.28: Let's play dress up!

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

Operating system update

Starting last Saturday, we performed an operating system update on the Stendhal server. Going from Ubuntu 14.04 over 16.04 to 18.04. The operating system update itself went very smoothly.

With the update of the operating system, a number of software packaged got new versions. For example Java, PHP and MySQL.

Website and Wikis

PHP is the the programming language used by the website and Wiki. We used version 5.0 in the past and the update brought version 7.2. PHP 7.2 has significant incompatible changes. So we prepared the update for months: We rewrote the entire database access code for the Stendhal website from mysql_* to PDO. And we did an update of MediaWiki, the software that powers the Stendhal Wiki and LibreGameWiki, on a local computer to fix a number of extension issues.

Database

Most of the update went smoothly with only a couple of hours of downtime. The MySQL update, however, create a bit of a headache: It had to rewrite all of its data files. And with a database of almost 200 GB of structured data, that took quite a while.

A database table of 1 GB without indexes took about 20 minutes. With indexes, it took about 60 minutes. Unfortunately this process is not linear: A 6 GB table with indexes took a significant longer time than 6 * 60 minutes. The largest tables are 80 GB and 60 GB.

This in itself would not have been a problem. All the tables that the Stendhal server needs are in the 2 GB range, or lower. So we updated these tables first and the Stendhal server went up again on Sunday morning.

Sunday morning: Stendhal is up again and there is no lag

In the background, more tables were still being converted. The MySQL database server was very busy, but there was virtually no lag in Stendhal. How did this work?

You might not know, but Stendhal is in fact a turn based games. It's just that the turns are very short, just 300 milliseconds. Each turn, the server processes commands sent by the clients, creature logic, NPCs logic and many other things.

If the server is not able to handle everything within 300ms, the game will lag. In the past, a significant slice of those 300 milliseconds were used up by waiting for database queries. So a couple of years ago we rewrote the database access code to be asynchronous. The Stendhal server does not wait anymore, for a database query to return. Instead it will continue to move the world forward regardless. It will check pending database results in the next turn, or the turn after that, whenever the database is ready.

Sunday evening: Logins take forever

While this approach works fine for everything that happens in world, there is one operation that absolutely requires answers from the database: Logins.

On login, the Stendhal server has to do quite a number of database queries: It has to check, whether the account is banned, whether the account or network is blocked, whether the password is correct. It also has to load a list of characters.

As mentioned above, the world of Stendhal moves forward without issues. But the player who is trying to login, has to wait until the data is available.

On Sunday evening the queue of waiting database queries got so large, that logins took several minutes. The client appeared frozen, but just riding through the login process would eventually lead to being able to play.

The situation was far from ideally, but more or less acceptable.

Monday: Things getting worse

While MySQL was working on larger tables in the background, the queue of pending database operations grew and grew.

To give some numbers: The database query to record a rat being killed, usually takes less than 10 milliseconds. Now, however, the background process was using up all system resource, and this query took 8 seconds (8000 milliseconds) instead.

While in game, the client sends regular "I am alive" messages to the server. If the server does not receive such a message from the client for more than a couple of minutes, it will disconnect the client.

On Monday, we ran into the following issue: The login process took so long, that the timeout limit was reached. The server disconnected clients, which were waiting for a login confirmation. As mentioned above, the client only starts sending "I am alive" messages after the login process was completed.

Post mortem

The update of the operating system went smoothly. The update of the PHP version did go smoothly, too, because we did prepare well for it.

The update of the MySQL server did not go as planned: Converting tables in the background did use significantly more system resources than we expected. This resulted in the Stendhal server being mostly unavailable for almost another two days. We still have three database tables that need converting, at some point in the future.

Please keep mind, that Stendhal is a spare time project. If we were a company, which owned a second server, we would have done this: Use xtrabackup to create a backup of the database server, which is point in time consistent. Then use this backup to setup replication on a second server. Pause replication and do the MySQL update on that server, resume replication to catch up all the changes that happened in the mean time.

In the future, the client should handle pending login requests better, instead of freezing. In theory, the Stendhal server knows the size of the database queue, so it could signal the client the remaining time.

Anyway, after doing this operating system, we are good to go for another 4 years.

We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and hope that you still enjoy playing Stendhal and might consider to contribute.

We released a new version of Stendhal tonight: Stendhal 1.27: Cure the Curse!

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

We released a new version of Stendhal tonight: Stendhal 1.26: Hell Bells!

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

Stendhal's inhabitants started to advance to new projects and we moved forward to a new release Stendhal 1.25: Ados Advancements!

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

We are fighting the consequences of the epic battle to make the curse slowly fade away. As a first step we released Stendhal 1.24: Fighting the Curse!

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

After an epic battle against evil forces, we released Stendhal 1.23: Cursed!

PS: If you are interested in contributing to Stendhal, please join us in #arianne-chat. Of course you can also join us just say hello :)

The year is coming to an end. Christmas is around the corner. Checkout the freshly released Stendhal 1.22: Joyful times!

PS: Stendhal is completely open source. Join #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Did anyone mention a party? What about ice arrows? Do they mix together or stay separate? Checkout Stendhal 1.21: Get the party ready, which we released tonight.

PS: Stendhal is completely open source. Join #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Do archers use bows? What happens when you take off your scuba gear under water? Learn for yourself in Stendhal 1.20: Trust and Confidence, which we released tonight.

Important note: There will be no automatic update for the download client to Stendhal 1.20. Please download the current version manually. Please see the link above for details.

PS: Stendhal is completely open source. Join #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Does the Kraken really exist? Check out the underwater world in Stendhal 1.19: Deep Sea Mysteries, which we released tonight.

PS: Stendhal is completely open source. Join #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

The Mine Town Revival Weeks have started with a big party in the old mine town, north of Semos. Join us to play games, enjoy dressing up or explore the world for a huge paper chase.

This years Mine Town Revival Weeks are a bit late because many citizen of Semos have been very busy, even thinking about skipping the festival completely this year. But on popular demand, we are going to celebrate anyway!

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Aerianna has been on a long journey and is currently at Ados market. Stendhal is available on Github, in addition to SourceForge and the arianne website moved, too. We released Stendhal 1.18: Voyages to celebrate this phase of traveling.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Fish are jumping out of the water. Did they smell the summer rain? We released Stendhal 1.17: Water from above and below with interesting new features tonight: A global weather system, visible swords and clubs during fights as well as a new medicinal ring are just some of the changes.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

It's winter time, it's snowing. And Semos is decorated for Christmas. We released Stendhal 1.16: Lil' Sonwflake tonight.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Stendhal 1.15.1: Poisoned Death is a server-only security fix. It fixes an issue resulting in multiple corpse from a single creature.

If you are curious, let me explain how this bug happened. This bug has a very long history and I will present it in chronologically order, giving some background information on the way when necessary.

It's time to celebrate the old Mine Town north of Semos city with games, foods and drinks. We released Stendhal 1.15: Celebrating secrets tonight. It includes more secrets, but also some transparency.

Please see the announcement for details on additional changes.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

We plan to update the operating system running stendhalgame.org on Sunday, the 22th of June around noon server time. The update is expected to take less than two hours. During this time the Stendhal server will briefly unavailable.

Update: The server is back up. The game was down for about 10 minutes. Due to incompatibilities with the new Apache version, the website was offline for about an hour, and we had to disable spdy. So far everything else seems to work fine.

We like to invite everyone to a meeting in Semos Townhall on 8th of June (Sunday) from 20:00 to 21:00 server time. You can learn the current server time, by typing /info in the chat line of the Stendhal client.

1. On the last meeting, we discussed the new Stendhal website, which is live now. We like to learn about potential issue and ideas for further improvements.
2. We want to talk a little about, why privacy is important. We have been using forced-https, Forward Secrecy and Strict Transport Security for quite some time now, as it is suggested by Reset the net. And since today, we even score A+ on ssltest. But there is still some work to be done.
3. Does the recent change of limiting atk/def based on level has negative side effects? Did it fix the issues that it was supposed to fix? Is further rebalancing needed, e. g. of monster levels? Is it a bad idea that capped atk/def will become available again, when the player levels up?

We released Stendhal 1.14: Knowlege and Wisdom tonight. The updated Stendhal website offers much easier access to information. Thank you for attending the development meeting and giving valuable input.

Please see the announcement for details on additional changes.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

With Semos and Fado decorated for Easter, a certain bunny is not far away. Keep your eyes open for chocolate eggs and easter baskets!

Happy Easter from the Stendhal team.

Hi all, we like to gather feedback on recent enhancements and discuss future ideas for the Stendhal Website.

We like to invite everyone to a meeting in Semos Townhall on 2nd of April (Wednesday) from 20:00 to 21:00 server time. You can learn the current server time, by typing /info in the chat line of the Stendhal client.

1. Is the new unified search returning helpful results?
2. Is the new integration of Wiki content a good idea and working properly?
3. How should the start page look like, in order to be attractive to new people as well as seasoned players?
4. How should we structure the navigation menu?
5. Other ideas concerning the website.

Update: Log of the meeting.

We have released a new version of Stendhal. Have a look at the announcement of Stendhal 1.13: Hellish repainting.

In addition to changes to the game world, this release fixes an issue with the web-based starter.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Stendhal 1.12 was released tonight to celebrate Christmas.

Have a look at the announcement of Stendhal 1.12: Good tidings we bring.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Update: We fixed two bugs with a server only release 1.12.1:

• a karma exploit on accepting accepted quests
• a bug which prevented defensive PVP actions against weaker players.

Let's party! Stendhal 1.11 was released tonight and a big party takes place at the old mine town north of Semos city. The Mine Town Revival Weeks have a long tradition in Stendhal, but there is something new every year. Join the festival at the abandoned mine town in the north. Celebrate with costumes and food, quests and puzzles.

Have a look at the announcement of Stendhal 1.11: Let's party.

PS: Join us in the #arianne-chat to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Stendhal 1.10 adds many cosmetic changes and some new features. Have a look at the announcement of Stendhal 1.10: More than cosmetic change.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Harold announces in-game trade offers on the website now. There is a feed available, too. So that you can use a feed reader to subscribe to the announcements.

Harold will continue to use Twitter.

Stendhal 1.09 adds two new quests and a number of other improvements. Have a look at the announcement Stendhal 1.09: Strong helpers needed.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Stendhal 1.08: Spend Summer outdoors. Have a look at the announcement for details about new quests, items, creatures and sounds.

This release is signed with a new certificate because the old one expired after one year. You may get a dialog box saying that Stendhal is a new applicatoin. In the past, certificate rollover required a complete new download of Stendhal. But since last year it works automatically.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Update: We released Stendhal 1.08.1 which fixed a movement related issue after zone changes on Microsoft Windows.

We released Stendhal 1.07: Traps and Puzzles. Have a look at the announcement for details about new quests, items, creatures and sounds.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

The Stendhal team wishes you all a happy easter.

Enjoy the easter decorations in Semos City and keep your eyes open for Easter Bunny. If you have some spare time, there is someone who needs some help on her easter quest.

Update: Hetzner reports that the faulty Router was swapped and the problem is solved.

Update: The maintenance was completed successfully this morning. We apologize for an unplanned server restart this evening, which was unrelated to the maintenance by our hosting provider.

On 7th March 2013, our hosting provider will do a firmware update on a core router. The Stendhal game server and website will be unreachable for about 15 minutes in the maintenance window between 05:00 and 07:00 server time.

Please be careful not to get killed in game.

We released Stendhal 1.06: A bit of toil but little trouble. Have a look at the announcement for details.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Christmas is coming to Stendhal. And as a special present, you can now resize the client.

Read the announcement of Stendhal 1.05: Ready to meet Rudolph? for details.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Update: All services now resumed.

Hello, we use SourceForge to coordinate the development of Stendhal and to host the Stendhal download files.

Unfortunately SourceForge is suffering a major outage at the moment. If you have downloaded Stendhal, you are fine. But the download, the web-based starter and the updater are unavailable until the issue is fixed.

Please check again later.

The Mine Town Revival Weeks have started with a big party in the old mine town, north of Semos. Play games, enjoy dressing up or explore the world on a paper chase.

Read the announcement of Stendhal 1.04: Hallowe'en means Mine Town Revival Weeks! for details.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Warning: some players have been using an unofficial version of the client and their accounts were hacked.

What happened: this unofficial version of the client included a cheat to automatically heal. This triggered Stendhal's bot detection scripts. Our scripts run periodically to analyse the logs. So after some time the accounts who used it were permanently banned. We did more investigation and noticed that the accounts who were banned, had also had their accounts accessed illegally - from another country.

Conclusion: this unofficial, self-healing version of the client, has a secret part which tells your password to the creator.

What you need to do: If you ever used this bot (and got banned), change all your passwords everywhere. Everyone else: please be careful and only run programs which come from trusted places, such as the official Stendhal and Arianne websites.

Update: In the mean time someone sent us a copy of the bot. We can confirm the presence of backdoor-code which transmits usernames and passwords to the bot creator.

Somehow, it's a game which inspires loyalty. I've (kymara) been playing since 2006 and can remember many of the names who were around when I started. Now that I'm a core developer for the game and with hendrik, lead the project, it's great to see names crop up from years ago - players keep coming back to see what's been added recently.

Some players have clocked thousands of hours of playing time (which may have been idling or just chatting to friends.) It made me wonder ... what's the total playing time of all players? (read more)

Stendhal 1.03 features three new achievements and a very beautiful place called Ados Botanical Gardens.

Read the announcement of Stendhal 1.03: Records for details.

You can now change your email address. This may be a good idea, if you did not provide a valid email address on account creation: it allows us to restore your account in case you forgot your password or we notice suspicious behaviour, which indicates an account hack.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

We are happy to announce the next release of Stendhal which features amazing light effects and an improved tutorial for new users, among other things. Read the announcement of Stendhal 1.02 released: Overcoming darkness for details.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

Update: The operating system update is completed and the server is up again.

We are going to update the server operating system of stendhalgame.org today.

If everything goes according to plan, there will be a short downtime of less than half an hour around 21:00 server time.

We're excited to announce the first feature release after the stable release: Stendhal 1.01: Community spirit has lots of big and small changes, that did not make it into Stendhal 1.0.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

As you may have noticed, we had two short downtimes during this weekend. If you're curious, we'd like to give some background.

stendhalgame.org has enabled support for the new Internet Protocol called IPv6. Don't worry, you don't have to change anything. We will still support the traditional Internet Protocol.

The main benefit of IPv6 is a very huge address pool. The traditional Internet Protocol only has about 4,000,000,000 addresses and many of them cannot be used for technical reasons. Last year the world internet administration ICANN ran out of IP-address blocks. Although there are still addresses left at the level of continent administrations and service providers, time is running out.

You can find more information on IPv6 at Wikipedia. We did a talk on server configuration for IPv6 last year, but it is in German. Why today? The 6th of June is the world IPv6 day.

We don't expect any issues. But if something goes wrong, please open a bug report at our SourceForge project Arianne.

We're really happy to announce the first stable release of Stendhal. Please help spread the word about Stendhal 1.00 by sharing the announcement.

Thanks to all players and contributors over the years who have made Stendhal the fun and friendly game it is today. Really, thank you.

PS: Join us in #arianne to learn how you can contribute, or just to say hello :)

There have reports about a bunny with a basket full of sweet chocolate eggs roaming the world. Keep your eyes open and you may be rewarded!

The Stendhal team wishes you a happy Easter.

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

Enjoy!

PS: Join us in #arianne to discuss the release and learn how you can contribute.

The game server is currently down and we are investigating. There will be another update after 16:00 server time (UTC + 1)

Update: The server is now back up. We are investigating the reasons for the downtime and will keep the server monitored.

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

Enjoy!

PS: Join us in #arianne to discuss the release and ideas for the future.

Bluelads4 is running a special event on Saturday, the 19th of November at 18.00 server time, at the beer garden in Fado city.

1. should players have unlimited access to free or cheap healing from NPCs?
2. when players gather next to the npc, there is a tendency (sometimes deliberate) to block each other from talking to the npc
3. when players gather next to the npc, there is a tendency (sometimes deliberate) to block each other from moving around

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

The yearly Mine Town Revival Weeks north of Semos City have just started. Have fun!

In some rare conditions the updater may require up to 3 restarts with additional automatic downloads in between. Check the version number in the title bar: 0.97

Stendhal is not affected by Hetzner Security Issues

Our hosting company Hetzner has informed us about a security issue in their admin system. Attackers got access to the domain name administration, bank accounts of server renters like me, and the unencrypted passwords for managed servers.

We can confirm that the domain name stendhalgame.org was not manipulated because the system sends emails on all DNS changes. Furthermore we did not rent a managed server but a root server which we manage ourselves. The passwords for our server are not known to Hetzner.

geomac's "Maze Runner Reward Challenge" started October 1st, and will end October 15th 23:59 server time. Each day, ask Haizen for a maze to accumulate points. Maze scores will then be compared and participants will be awarded. Thanks for your participation and interest!

Update: The results are now out! Congratulations to cuddle who got the most points overall, a huge 914! And kiheru achieved the fastest maze time during the contest, with 180 points from one maze! See all the scores ...

Hi all,

I like to invite you to a meeting in Semos Townhall on Sunday 2011-09-11 at 13:00 server time. You can see the current server time in the bottom left corner of the website or using /info in game.

The topic of the meeting are policies issues on bug abusing, admin (miss)actions, bots, item duplication, player killing, camping, etc.

I am sorry for the short notice of the meeting. But I think this meeting is very important to Stendhal's future. So please try to attend.

Hendrik

Update: The fibre was fixed. Pings between the server and the super node of the German Internet in Frankfurt are down to 10ms (from 120ms during the outage), packet loss is down to 0% (from 25% during the outage).

Our hosting provider is having massive issues in its backbone network: A fibre optic cable was destroyed between the cities Dürrengleina and Saaletal/Jena during construction work.

They are rerouting the traffic but this causes high latency and packet loss as the backup connections are obviously not thick enough to handle all the additional traffic smoothly.

The line operator expects the issue to fixed early tomorrow morning according to the status page of our provider.

Stendhal is up and running, but please be aware of lag and act carefully.

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

Summer-summer-summertiiime! Although the sun doesn't show up for all of us at the moment, we will meet at Athor beach on Sunday, the 7th august 2011 for celebrating a beach party!

For that, we search for people, who aren't shy and will present some smaller show acts to the others, like dancings, self-written poems/texts or drawings/screenshots. The start-time of the party will be 16.00 o’clock servertime (check bottom left corner of this webpage). So, prepare yourself, it will be awesome! :)

We'd like to invite everyone to a development meeting on Tuesday, the 9th from 20.00 to 21.00 in Semos Townhall. We are looking for ideas on how to make Stendhal less confusing and more interesting for new players.

Update: The log from the meeting is available at the wiki page Stendhal Development Meeting 2011-08-09

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

The Stendhal client is signed to ensure that the download is not manipulated. Up until now the signature was only valid for one year. This means that every year a complete download was necessary.

We are proud to announce, that we did some huge improvements to the updater so these fresh downloads will not be necessary in the future anymore.

Today we fixed an issue in the calculation of the RP score which caused it to not work for players below level 150 because of rounding errors.

2. Update: We wrote up an article explaining the preparation and execution of the server move..

Update: Welcome to the new server. The migration is mostly completed now. We are still polishing some minor things in the background through.

Stendhal's game and web server are moving to a new physical host, tonight, Sunday 12th June. All your progress so far has been replicated to a new server which will have the same name: stendhalgame.org.

For the final last steps and testing, we need to freeze game progress. If you are in game or login while we are doing the final steps of the migration, you'll be transported into a special holding area - in which case, thank you for being with us during this time and please send us your best wishes!

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

Hello, we are currently doing database maintenance in preparation for moving the server to new hardware next week. During this maintenance we will copy the database to the new server hardware. After that is done we will setup database replication so that the new database will be updated with all the changes that happen to the current database.

Game server is up again.

PS: The server move happens completely in the background. You don't have to do anything. The server name stendhalgame.org will just point to the new server after the move is completed and all your progress in the game will be replicated to the new server automatically.

There is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please see the announcement for details.

Update: We release 0.93.1 fixing a bug causing the client to get confused on which item you clicked, after you moved items around inside your bag (bug report, patch).

We released an exciting update to the Stendhal Website today: With the new achievement system introduced in Stendhal 0.92, much more interesting ratings can be done.

Achievements, together with XP and age, are now used to calculate the Best Player score, and we have added the top ten Best Players to our Hall of Fame in place of the old XP ranking.

The Me & my friends tab now shows the absolute ranks instead of counting from one to ten.

So how is the best player score calculated?

Hi all,

It's been a great year for Arianne and we've compiled a review with the highlights, some statistics, and an outlook. Many thanks to all who have contributed in the past, present and future.

(read more)

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

We took a break from hunting down Santa and searching for presents to enjoy Bluelads' quiz yesterday. There were 50 questions to answer and some really generous prizes. Thank you Bluelads!

Special mentions for answering questions go to tierhalter and Rayquaza.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Update: We released 0.90.1 as bugfix because it was not possible to login unless at least one login profile was saved. (That check was supposed to be in the "delete profile trashcan" not the login button).

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Did you miss Bluelads' quiz last Sunday? Or do you want more challenges?

Come join this year's fun at the Semos Mine Town Revival Weeks celebration starting on Saturday the 23th of October in the afternoon. Try challenging puzzles, hire or win a fun outfit and make new friends.

For those who don't know the story, four years ago Susi was captured on her way back from the Semos Mine Town Revival party. She was missing for two years and there was no party during that time - all of Ados went out to search for her. She was eventually found aboard a pirate ship by players who had been defending Ados from a pirate attack.

Since then the celebrations have been resumed and are bigger and better every year...

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

We like to thank everyone who helped us with testing the release on our new shiny test server.

We released Stendhal 0.87.2 today which is a server only release and includes an update of our engine Marauroa to 3.8.3. The client is identical to version 0.87.1. The server release fixed an issue which allowed item duplication. People who run their own Stendhal server are advised to update as soon as possible.

On the main server the issue was discovered and resolved before large scale damage could be done.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Please note: For some people the automatic updater will not work for this release. If you get messages about your client being outdated without an offer to update, please download it again into a new folder. Or use the Play Now link.

We apologize for the inconvenience. The updater will work again for the next version.

Update: We released 0.87.1 today. It fixes a problem on Microsoft Windows which caused the client to be unresponsively slow. If you still have problems please contact /support in game.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Update: We fixed the problem which caused some webstart-clients ("Play now") to crash after the update to 0.86. You will notice on first start that it will ask you again to download some additional files.

Those will replace the base client instead of just updating it so the download is a bit larger. Unfortunately there is no other way for us to fix it. The problem was caused because the Webstart files for the 0.85 base client were not signed completely. Java prevents mixing signed and unsigned files in certain conditions so that it is not possible to base any update on that version.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Stendhal 0.85 can handle multiple characters in one account. Please see Stendhal Account Merging for details.

We like to invite everyone to a Stendhal Development meeting in Semos on Sunday the 2010-06-20, 20:00-21:00 server time. (That is 18:00-19:00 GMT).

You can learn the server time in the bottom left hand corner.

• Open points from the last meeting:
  • How to determine the danger level of a zone (based on some gathered statistics)
  • Thanks for the translations: Stendhal Gioco, Stendhal Jeu, Stendhal Juego, Stendhal Spel, Stendhal Spiel
• Recent changes and pending features for 0.85
• Ideas for new quests
• Discussing your ideas on how to improve Stendhal.

We had a Stendhal Development meeting in Semos on Tuesday, 2010-06-08.

You can see a summary of results and the full chat log at the Wiki page Stendhal Development Meeting 2010-06-08.

The next meeting is planned for Sunday, 2010-06-20, 20:00-21:00 server time. (That is 18:00-19:00 GMT). You can learn the server time from the bottom left hand corner.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Did you know that our engine Marauroa was originally developed as base for a multiplayer online Pacman game?

About 5 years a feature was added to Marauroa supporting the management of multiple zone (game boards) at the same time.

In order to ensure the quality of new features, test cases are needed. The test case for the multi zone feature was called Stendhal.

Well, as you know it got a bit out of hand...

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. Please check the announcement.

Hi, this is just a short posting to let you know that the reports from the real life meeting are online. We held the meeting in the middle of March to celebrate the 10th birthday of the Arianne project and the 5th birthday of Stendhal.

Oh, and you may have noticed that we own a real domain now: stendhalgame.org. But don't worry: The old name - stendhal.game-host.org - will continue to work.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. If you would like to see what is new you can check arianne.sf.net.

Update: We released 0.82.1 tonight.

• new command /clickmode to toggle between single click walking and double click walking (on popular request).
• fixed movement to drop target (only Microsoft Windows was affected)
• fixed /mute not being stored across restarts
• fixed pets not ownable

We had a big spring party in Ados on Saturday 27.03.2010. Maria was on hand to sell party food and drinks, and there was a Tournament where players challenged each other to prove their strength.

To say thank you to our players who are being so helpful this Client Quality Week, we had a raid on Saturday 6th March 11am server time.

This week we are going to concentrate on the software quality of the client and we need your help. We are having two goals:

1. Learn about any existing error and fix it
2. Reduce the impact of unknown errors. (The sound driver choked? Okay, that is bad, but the rest of the client should keep working).

Read an interview with the Arianne team here!

We're really delighted to announce that Arianne has been selected as SourceForge's Project of the Month for March.

To put this in context: SourceForge hosts over 230,000 projects, and in the past some very famous names have been Project of the Month: Mediawiki, TortoiseCVS, phpBB, Gaim, phpMyAdmin ... so it's a great achievement, it's a wonderful promotion for Stendhal and Arianne, and we really couldn't be happier.

We even appear on the main page SourceForge.net!

You can join in our success: spread the word and tell your friends about Stendhal :)

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. If you would like to see what is new you can check the announcement.

Update: We released version 0.81.1 tonight which fixes a client side crash on login next to an NPC without sound effects and a server side issue with negative HP caused by the "logout while dying" issue.

Kezman won the scavenger hunt, he was the the first to post a sign and name the item at the locations below. He received 12 empty scrolls, 12 home scrolls, 1 diamond and 24 gold bars.

Stendhal is 5 years old in March and the team are meeting to celebrate.

This real life meeting is for anyone who has contributed to Arianne and Stendhal, past and present. The activities will include a day of talks from key speakers from the project (past and present). Also there'll be some social events - dinner and a party. More details at Arianne Project Meeting 2010. Did you know, being a dedicated Stendhal player makes you a contributor, as you were helping test the game!

On Friday 22nd January a sign appeared in Semos:

"I hid my cat somewhere in Fauimoni. Find and bring her to semos tavern and totaling up to 48,500 HP and a few scrolls. You have until Sunday 11:59.59 server time. Good luck and thanks for your participation. Note, cats name has been changed. lol Have fun!"

Xhiphin Zohos, from Fado, called for help, because somehow many caged creatures had been let loose. The bandits who did this were in disguise. Luckily, there was a lot of help to kill the creatures, which had gone wild after being captive for so long.

Semos was in danger this New Year, from creatures which threatened to invade. Legions of creatures started to appear in the Semos Mine Towns, and a cast of blackness fell over the island.

Mayor Sakhs had been forewarned of the disaster, and he called warriors to help defend Semos.

Semos is decorated for Christmas! There are holly wreaths, sparkling lights, big trees and baubles. If you're very lucky you might find Santa Claus out delivering gifts - he could be anywhere outside and keeps moving - listen out for a "Ho ho ho!".

Merry Christmas from the Stendhal team.

On 22nd November 2009 we had a development meeting in Semos Townhall.

If you are interested in the results, please have a look at the Wiki page Stendhal Development Meeting 2009-11-22. You will find a blue navigation box on the right hand side which will lead you to result logs of the various areas. The complete chat log is included as well.

The meeting was generally seen as being very inspiring and helpful. We should repeat it in a couple of weeks. This meeting was about 3 hours. So it was getting quite a bit tiring for lasting to long. The next meeting should therefore be limited to one hour.

Thanks again for participating.

Hendrik

Hi,

Stendhal 0.79 is mainly a bugfix release. We fixed an incompatibility with the most recent Ubuntu Linux version 9.10 and a server side crash. Here is a complete list of changes.

With these fixes out, we are looking forward to adding new interesting features and expanding the world of Stendhal. Therefore we are inviting everyone to a development meeting on Sunday 22. November 17:00 in Semos Townhall server time. Please have a look at the bottom left corner of this page to learn the current server time.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. If you would like to see what is new you can check arianne.sf.net.

Have fun during the Semos Mine Town Revival Weeks.

Here is a new release of Stendhal for you to enjoy. If you would like to see what is new you can check arianne.sf.net.

Have fun!

The database maintenance is finished. The important tables have been converted.

The gameEvents table has been archived as we have done a couple of times in the past. This means that the table is still available for admins with database access to look things. But the recently killed box on the website will only show kills starting today.

There is some more maintenance required but we are confident that we can do that without further downtime.

Thanks for your patience.

We need to do some database maintenance and for that the server must be taken down and the website will only work partly.

From 8.00am server time on Monday 17th August till approximately 20.00 (rough guess), the server will be down. It may take less or more time than anticipated - you will be able to see if the server is online at the 'server stats' box.

Here is a new release of Stendhal, which has been ported to the latest version of the game engine Marauroa. This is invisible inside the game, but if you would like to read more you can check arianne.sf.net. Thanks!

As a side note: We only restarted the server once during the 0.75 period to install a little bug fix. So the problem which caused the server to run out of memory is obviously fixed now.

If you want to say a small thank you to the developers and people who contribute to Stendhal, you could nominate the team, which is called Arianne RPG, for an award. Sourceforge is the site where Stendhal and the rest of the Arianne project is hosted and it is where you get your downloads from, and where the forums and bugs trackers are. They are running these awards so that the users of each project make nominations. The prize is fame and happiness :) Select which category you think Arianne deserves, probably Best Project for Gamers is the best. Please click on the image below and thank you for your support :)

Recently we held a poll for players to vote for who they thought were the nicest players in Stendhal. This is because we value niceness in this game! There was a great response from everyone, the players really wanted to thank and reward those who had been kind to them.

Pirates raided Ados from their ships which were anchored at the city. They attacked the town hall and castle but brave players defended the buildings and people. IschBing, Maja and Mein_Dino were particularly courageous.

During the raid the pirates got stronger and stronger - not just smugglers and buccaneers but evil pirates and leaders too. The leader pirates seemed to hint of a captive girl on their ship. The players became worried, and wondered - is this the lost girl Susi? At one time the whole of Ados was looking for her. After they heard Susi shout for help they were sure she must be captive - but where? She said she could see water, so Peka and IschBing realised that the place to go was the pier. The other players followed. Once on the ships a wide search began for the lost girl. Mein_Dino found Susi first and the players led her back to Ados. She was reunited with her parents Mr and Mrs Ross.

Susi had been captured on her way back from the Semos Mine Town revival party, two years ago. Last year there was no party as everyone was still so sad at Susi going missing. This year we celebrate the party again. Go to arianne.sourceforge.net to learn more.

The wiki was moved to http://stendhalgame.org/wiki. This will allow us to support upload of images and render data directly from the game on wiki pages

The old address http://arianne.sf.net/wiki will still work and silently redirect to the new location.

A dedicated server for our game!

We have a dedicated server for the game thanks to a generous benefactor! We did the move to the new server at the same time as the release of 0.68.1. For news of the changes please see the announcement