YARE (Server Emulator)

YARE
Information
Dates Operating From/To	26 May 2003 to 5 November 2003
Current Status	Defunct
Reason for closure	Legal issues
Influenced	Athena, I-Athena
Influenced By	I-Athena
Developer(s)	Lemming, cix, malastare, ancorage
Technical Information
Programming language	C
Operating System	Windows/Linux

YARE (Known as Yet another Ragnarok emulator or Project YARE) was an emulator built by Lemming and others over at project-yare.net. This server emulator was developed during early stages of Emu development and there was collaboration between YARE and Athena projects. Remnants of the YARE server source code are available over at SourceForge.

The project was shutdown due to legal issues with Gravity and the following notice:

Gravity has forced us to close the YARE project. We have been warned by them and our forum hoster has been taken to court.
It seems that Gravity has started to 'kill' the private server scene so be warned if you are running a private RO server. I propose to rent a server in a country where there's no DMCA.
I can't imagine to fully close YARE at the moment, so you can perhaps expect a new 'legal' yare in some weeks.And perhaps some other guys will continue our work in the underground....

The temp-forum will stay online, but please use it only for general talk.
All other posts about private servers/illegal webpages/hacking things and all other things that violate any law will get deleted by us, as soon as we see it.
http://forum.project-yare.net/forum/

Lemming @ 21:00 - 5th November 2003
PS: Fred you were right ;) (our coding time was cool!)

History

Involvement with PVPGN

YARE is a project which is somewhat confusing given the fact its development was spread over several domains, and a lot of its development information was split out over several domains (project-yare.com, project-yare.de and project-yare.net). From the beginning of the YARE project, it appears from YARE and early Athena source code that YARE and Athena shared code between the projects, but from a technical perspective that the Athena project, and that both projects cross-pollinated -- so much so that Athena's original website was hosted on project-yare.de alongside YARE's forums, but they were distinct projects.

With that clarification out of the way -- YARE began in May 2003 with developer Lemming, and it appears early on in its history, PVPGN was mentioned relatively frequently, including naming the YARE forums as "PVPGN YARE", and in the changelog for YARE in June 2003 a commit message titled "PvPGN team makes a new mod for YARE" was published by Lemming and another developer named "mitchen", however these names do not correspond with any developers listed on the current pvpgn source code.

Similarly, the release date given by YARE developers does not show any corresponding news in the PVPGN website, which indicates that at least with regard with the PVPGN project, YARE was not considered to be a potential part of the project. This is due to the fact that PVPGN then, as well as now has a focus on Battle.NET and Westwood online for a specific reason -- that these game franchises had similar network infrastructures because they were written by the same companies. It seems it would not make much sense at the time to then write a provider for PVPGN since there was no commonality between Battle.NET games which were released as stand-alone games which had multiplayer elements, and Ragnarok Online which was at the time a stand-alone online-only game.

Although it is only speculation from the staff of this wiki, it seems most likely that lemming, YARE's original developer seems likely to be the PVPGN developer trendecide, owing to the fact that the name references the trolley problem in Spanish and there are Spanish files in the YARE releases (prueba.c) as well as lemming's continual mentions to having updated forums, site layouts and other tasks which at that point would have been seen as "webmaster" tasks. In trendecide's leaving message in PVPGN it appears there was some dispute between them and the other PVPGN developers, which led to their departure, specifically over their skills as a developer -- it's the opinion of one staff member here that trendecide formed YARE as a means of moving from "webmaster" to "developer", which seems to have succeeded.

Symbiotic relationship with Athena, I-Athena

Investigating YARE shows that the timeline of ragnarok emulators has not been a linear one, and there were multiple efforts occurring at the same time, with developers sharing code and yet maintaining different projects as a result. In YARE's source code it appears that YARE shared source code with both Athena and I-Athena, which at some point appear to have then eventually merged into Athena when finally YARE and I-Athena ceased development.

A procession of one project following on from another as detailed by Evera in the eAthena documentation is inaccurate because in fact many projects interacted with eachother - Athena with YARE, I-Athena with YARE, and Weiss with Athena. The graph of these interactions appears to be fairly complex and most likely wide, and also given YARE's multiple reboots of its codebase and relatively big release numbers, that YARE was a kind of test bed for other code, and also in some ways a nursery -- given that some of the developers later moved from YARE to Athena, and vice versa.

What is interesting is that also the diversification of projects although it occurred for a variety of different motivations -- one project as a means of learning network programming (Athena), another being a rewrite of that project by more experienced developers (I-Athena) and then another project which picked and chose parts from each in order to provide the most up-to-date experience to the people of its linked public (private) server - pRO.

The effect of this, even if unintentional is worth considering -- having multiple projects all of which are in some way dependent upon eachother for development and improvement even if informally, but yet being in different locales and being in someway distinct from eachother, provide a kind of swarm behaviour like observed in birds and other species in nature which also acts as a means of guaranteeing overall survival of a given species. YARE appears to have drawn the short straw in getting the attention from Gravity and others, causing them to shut down, but yet, because of its somewhat symbiotic relationship with Athena and other projects, when it did shut down, YARE was the project which ended but yet Athena continued on to then split off into Athena and eAthena which also developed in parallel for a significant period of time -- which ensured that reverse engineering and public server (private server) versions of Ragnarok Online continued to flourish despite any real formal coordination between the projects.

Public server (private server) involvement

There are atleast 3 private servers that seemed to have used YARE emulator : mRO, advertised over at the YARE homepage, bRO and a Thai pServer named "Ragnarok 2003" .