EAthena (Server Emulator)
eAthena, short for English Athena, is a cross-platform, open-source game server emulator software for Ragnarok Online, and was in the early period of Ragnarok Online emulation, the most influential and popular server software. It accounted for the vast majority of servers which ran Ragnarok Online "private servers", and was released under the GNU General Public License (v2), and was one of the most long-lived emulator projects, running for 16 years before closing and being succeeded by rAthena and Hercules.
History[edit | edit source]
eAthena started out as a direct English translation of the original Athena project, which was a project largely started by Japanese developers. The project was started by developers AppleGirl and RoVeRT as AppleMod and originally was a translation of the Athena Project (referred to by English-speakers as jAthena), which was an emulator based on 0052.lzh, the server developed by Mr 35 and posted on the EmuServer Of Ragnarok (EOR), a Japanese-speaking BBS discussing reverse-engineering of Ragnarok Online's server protocol.
The original efforts were largely a straight translation of the NPC script files in the Athena source code, but after a short period of time, the eAthena project began to diverge from the Athena’s source code and began to implement features which were being requested by the English-speaking Ragnarok players at the time, but also some of this work that diverged from the original Athena project was later merged into the source code of the jAthena project, such as skills and other bug fixes as well as vice versa.
At the time, there was somewhat of a perception that the original Athena project was not interested in, or hostile towards western developers, or that it was private and not interested in open development. This was probably related to responses provided on the EmuServer of Ragnarok BBS where a minority of developers had written harsh comments suggesting that if people did not speak Japanese then they should not participate or ask questions on the BBS.
At the time also there were many emulator projects, including Weiss and Athena itself, that posted information warning the user of the potential legal pitfalls of reverse engineering or running the server, as they were unsure of its legality in Japan or in the larger environment. This was the most likely reason why the original Athena developers developed out of plain sight, but their releases were at the time widely distributed and known among developers in and around eAthena and server emulators which were based on 0052.lzh, so this, along with the constant stream of updates from Athena to eAthena provides enough evidence that the Athena project were not sufficiently private.
With regards to the perception of isolationism or hostility to western developers, the perception however was mostly not the case. On various Athena Project releases they included a README which was actively asking for developers regardless of their language or background, and indeed on the EmuServer of Ragnarok BBS, most of those who responded to the board’s first foreign visitors largely went out of their way to respond positively and helpfully to those who joined, even going so far as to explain Shift-JIS encoding, how to run the emulator and other useful information in English and also in German via translation websites.
An abridged timeline of the eAthena emulator development provided in a later release of eAthena is presented here: [1]
- Nov 2003 - AppleMod 554a released
- Jan 2004 - eAthena 715 released
- Feb 2004 - eAthena 817 released
- May 2004 - eAthena 0.4.0 released
- Jul 2004 - eAthena 1.0 RC1 released
- Oct 2004 - eAthena 1.0 RC5 released
- Dec 2004 - SVN Open to public
- Nov 2005 - eAthena Preview Release v1.0 (PR1) released
eAthena proved to be a stable and usable emulator and in turn spawned many additional derivatives such as rAthena and Hercules emulators.
