It has been almost eight years since the first alpha release of The Forgotten Server, and today I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of The Forgotten Server 1.0. I would like to begin by saying thanks to the people who have made this possible with their significant technical contributions to the OpenTibia ecosystem, in a somewhat chronological order: Shivoc, Tliff, Haktivex, Fandoras, SimOne, mips_act, Primer, wrzasq, jakexblaster, Remere, Kornholijo, Elf, edubart and Dalkon. I would also like to thank everyone who has been testing the code and reporting issues along the development of this version, and ultimately, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release. The list with usernames of all contributors can be seen here: https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver/graphs/contributors.
Now what's so great about The Forgotten Server 1.0 and why should you use it?
The focus of The Forgotten Server 1.0 has been to become the lightweight core that powers your OpenTibia server. It should not interfere with your ability to customize your game world. The goal is that you should be able to customize essentially everything in the server using the Lua scripting interface without having to worry about any restrictions caused by the C++ codebase. We're not quite there yet, but we have made a lot of progress, and will continue to do so.
We have spent a lot of time improving the performance and reducing the memory footprint of the server. We have also worked on portability by removing a lot of OS-specific code. We have confirmed that The Forgotten Server builds seamlessly on the latest versions of Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Windows. We use Coverity and PVS-Studio for static code analysis to maintain a high quality codebase with low complexity. With the use of Coverity and PVS-Studio, we have detected hundreds of issues such as bugs and memory leaks, which are all addressed in this release.
The Forgotten Server 1.0 also maintains backwards compatibility with 0.2.15, which was released in April last year. The upgrade from 0.2.15 to 1.0 should be a smooth transition.
What's next? 1.1, 1.2, ...2.0?
We have begun with the development of 1.1, and when that's released we plan on following up with 1.2. If you are curious what the new versions may include, see our roadmaps: 1.1, 1.2. There are no plans beyond 1.2 at the moment.
Since 1.1 may be unstable during the pace of the development, we strongly advise everyone to use 1.0 in production until 1.1 is near release. We have created a branch called "1.0" in our Git repository, which we will be pushing critical bug fixes to.
How can you help?
There is a lot you can do to help. Following are some suggestions that would be appreciated.
Download: https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver/releases/tag/v1.0
Now what's so great about The Forgotten Server 1.0 and why should you use it?
The focus of The Forgotten Server 1.0 has been to become the lightweight core that powers your OpenTibia server. It should not interfere with your ability to customize your game world. The goal is that you should be able to customize essentially everything in the server using the Lua scripting interface without having to worry about any restrictions caused by the C++ codebase. We're not quite there yet, but we have made a lot of progress, and will continue to do so.
We have spent a lot of time improving the performance and reducing the memory footprint of the server. We have also worked on portability by removing a lot of OS-specific code. We have confirmed that The Forgotten Server builds seamlessly on the latest versions of Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Windows. We use Coverity and PVS-Studio for static code analysis to maintain a high quality codebase with low complexity. With the use of Coverity and PVS-Studio, we have detected hundreds of issues such as bugs and memory leaks, which are all addressed in this release.
The Forgotten Server 1.0 also maintains backwards compatibility with 0.2.15, which was released in April last year. The upgrade from 0.2.15 to 1.0 should be a smooth transition.
What's next? 1.1, 1.2, ...2.0?
We have begun with the development of 1.1, and when that's released we plan on following up with 1.2. If you are curious what the new versions may include, see our roadmaps: 1.1, 1.2. There are no plans beyond 1.2 at the moment.
Since 1.1 may be unstable during the pace of the development, we strongly advise everyone to use 1.0 in production until 1.1 is near release. We have created a branch called "1.0" in our Git repository, which we will be pushing critical bug fixes to.
How can you help?
There is a lot you can do to help. Following are some suggestions that would be appreciated.
- Star The Forgotten Server on GitHub
Starring The Forgotten Server on GitHub makes it more visible to other users on GitHub. This may attract new users and developers to the project. - Provide support to users
The scripting interface has had quite some changes with the introduction of metatable classes, and it may come as a surprise to a lot of users. If you've learned the new system, please spend some time helping other users in the community learn it too. - Report issues
Don't forget to report any issues you encounter in our issue tracker on GitHub. Unreported issues are unlikely to be addressed. - Contribute with code
We accept pull requests. If you'd like to help out, please see our roadmap for 1.1 or pick an issue to start working on. - Donate to OTLand
We're working on The Forgotten Server for free, and it's going to stay that way, but running OTLand costs money. You can show your appreciation for our work by donating to OTLand.
Download: https://github.com/otland/forgottenserver/releases/tag/v1.0
