I-Athena (Server Emulator)

I-Athena
Information
Websites	http://roemu.tripod.co.jp/
Dates Operating From/To	18 March 2003 - 27 March 2003
Current Status	Defunct (Likely merged into Athena)
Influenced	YARE, Athena
Influenced By	Weiss, YARE, Athena
Succeeded by	Athena
Developer(s)	i2
Technical Information
Programming language	C
Operating System	Windows, Linux, FreeBSD
License	GPL Version 2.0
Organisational Information
Organisation Type & Leadership Type	Sole Individual

I-Athena was the name of an Athena-based Ragnarok Online server emulator which intended to improve the codebase of Athena itself and offer better features such as improved memory management and the ability to run on less powerful hardware, as well as FreeBSD, Linux and Windows. The project was named I-Athena because all of the authors, according to its README.txt, had nicknames beginning with the letter I.

The project is considered to be a founding, and large contribution which was eventually merged into the Athena codebase, which introduced NPC scripts, atcommands, build automation, windows support via cygwin, as well as a substantial number of feature introductions such

History

Not much is currently known about I-Athena beyond its references in the EmuServer Of Ragnarok (EOR) bulletin boards, and in the YARE source code. Their developers state their goals along with performance improvements were to also implement NPC scripts, which were not present in the original version of Athena. I-Athena was the project which introduced the Athena scripting language for NPCs., which appears to have been later introduced into the main Athena sourcecode.

It is very likely that the developer of I-Athena was the developer who introduced most of the concepts now seen in Athena today, such as at commands (e.g. @kami) and also introduced a large part of the initial Athena source code in I-Athena. For example, its developer i2, lists a large list of features added and also remarks that they started bugfixing Athena and ended up writing an emulator. This project provides an example of a developer which created a project to improve the parent project, and then deliberately discontinued their own project so that development would continue in the Athena (jAthena) project.

This may go a large way to explanining why Athena among all the emulators was the most developed, as the author stated they had spent over a month on the emulator and had been planning to write one themselves but they instead contributed to the Athena project, despite having an I-Athena project of their own. This goes in contrast to the other spin-offs of Athena which occurred a year or longer later, which ultimately had different goals but ended up eventually in some way being re-introduced into the Athena or eAthena codebase later on after being discontinued for varying reasons, but usually due to lack of updates or popularity in relation to the more-established emulators (e.g. Omniathena, AthenaAdvanced, Odin, hAthena and so on).

Developer motivations

As with other Ragnarok Online emulators, i2, I-Athena's author, wrote in their README an explanation of why they wanted to write the software, with their main motivation being that they wanted to explore the ways in which the creativity of players could be explored in Ragnarok particularly in writing quests, but also alongside many of the other authors of emulators, cites lack of community involvement and limited content in the official Ragnarok servers being the reasons why they were tempted into finding their own way of adding to Ragnarok content. When they discovered that an emulator already existed, their motivations were to improve it in order to be able to be able to make quests within the game, which the author states were not available or were lacking.