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Daimonin

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Daimonin Daimonin's Logo.
Developer(s)	Community Based Effort
Designer(s)	Michael Toennis
Version	Beta 4 0.9.7.1  (2007)
Platform(s)	Windows, Linux, Apple Mac
Release date(s)	1999
Genre(s)	MMORPG
Mode(s)	Multiplayer
Media	Download [1]
System requirements	TODO
Input methods	Mouse and Keyboard

Daimonin (Computer Game) is a part of the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)^[2] initiative. It is a cross platform ^[3] Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)^[4]. Players take the role of adventurer in a world which was previously under siege by forces of Chaos.

Daimonin features a tile based graphic system with an isometric (actually dimetric projection or ¾ perspective) perspective. All code is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL)^[5]. The client and server will run on Microsoft Windows ^[6], Linux ^[7]and Mac OS X ^[8]. There is even an instance of it running on Nokia N810

Contents 1 History 1.1 Crossfire 1.2 Pre Alpha 1.3 Beta 1.4 Beta 2 1.5 Beta 3 1.6 Beta 4 2 Forks 2.1 Atrinik 2.1.1 Objectives 2.1.2 Achievements 2.2 Angelion 2.2.1 Experimental features 2.2.2 Major landmarks 3 Spawns 3.1 Gridarta 3.2 Crossmagi 4 References 5 External links

History

Daimonin has a decade long history of development. It was originally forked from Crossfire ^[9]and has been developed actively ever since.

Crossfire

The original game on which Daimonin was based was a hack and slash open source multiplayer online RPG named Crossfire ^[10]. Michtoen, who wanted to improve some of Crossfire's features and to make it into a Massively Multiplayer game, began the Daimonin project based on the Crossfire source.

Today, Crossfire continues to grow and develop independently from Daimonin and some of Daimonin's developers actively contribute to both projects.

Pre Alpha

This is a time of legends (circa 1999) back when Daimonin still looked a lot like Crossfire and many of the features of Daimonin had not taken shape. Very few people remember this time of ant shields, the oilskin cloak -4 [damned] and the first incarnation of the Baby Water Dragon from Stoneglow.

Beta

At a time in the distant past, towards the end of 2003, came the first Beta release of the game Daimonin. While it was not the initial creation of Daimonin, it did mark the point when it began to look like the isometric Daimonin we know today.

In those days, the world was very small compared to the world of Beta 5. The world as we know it began as a much smaller version of Stoneglow which had only two places to fight monsters. The first, and only, dungeon was an ant cavern beneath the well near the Mercenary's Guild in Stoneglow. Cashin would give the "retrieve the ant queen's head" quest to enterprising new adventurers who would go into the well near the guildhouse. The second place was an ogre outpost just outside the north gate of Stoneglow. This outpost had a few ogres and a hill giant that always dropped silver pieces. There was actually a third place south of Stoneglow called the Southern Warzone, although this was completely different to the current Stoneglow Warzone, and even to the Southern Warzone of later Betas. The map consisted merely of a gravel floor and a few guards crowded around some slimes. The rate the guards killed the mobs however meant that gaining exp in here was quite difficult. During that time, the level cap was around 10 for those who would train all the possible skills (throwing, punching, melee).

Although there were two-handed and polearm weapons available in the shop, the skills to use these weapons could not be learned as of yet, so they were useless at the time. In fact, the only weapon that could be used was the weapon you started with at the beginning of the game. Corpses behaved a little differently to what they do now. If it wasn't looted for a certain amount of time, the corpse would disappear and all the items inside would drop on the floor. Rings were particularly rare during this era, and amulets were much more common. There was a big difference to how levels were calculated compared to later Betas. In Beta 1, your exp from each skill was added together to give your overall exp, and your main level was calculated from this sum, using a different table than skill levels. This meant that if you had each skill at level 15, your main level would be somewhat higher, at around level 30.

About a week after the Beta was released, a new map was added, the Dark Cave. There were no quests in this dungeon yet, and at the time it was only added in order to provide a few higher level mobs for the players who had already conquered this tiny world. Compared to today, it only consisted of the first half of the cavern and the area in which the Purple Worms exist now was not accessible. The strongest mob at the time was the Elder Wyvern which was at level 12. At one point, there would be about 20 players camping its spawn, as it would be the only mob in the game high enough to provide any form of exp. At the end of the beta, the level cap for each skill was around 15-18 for the most enterprising of adventurers.

Several days after the Dark Cave was added, apartments were introduced as the players were now getting overloaded with stuff, including money. Banks did not exist at this time, so players were forced to carry their money with them until this point, nearly all of which consisted of copper coins. Another notable feature addition that happened at around the same time was diseases, leading to the small world being spammed with stinking puddles of diarrhoea for a few hours until everyone became immune to the disease. Finally, an experimental feature was implemented where players did more damage to mobs if they were much higher level than them, or vice versa. This proved to be a little unbalanced so it was removed shortly afterwards, though strangely, mobs are still able to do higher damage to lower level players even in Beta 4.

After those feature additions, the main server saw nothing else interesting for a few months until the advent of Beta 2, where a new test server was put online in order to bring the new Beta to a wider audience before it was placed on the main server.

Beta 2

After about 6 months as Beta 1, Daimonin entered Beta 2 in mid-2004. The world underwent a major shift and several new dungeons appeared for the first time such as the Old Outpost, Stronghold and Slime Lords. The Dark Cave was also expanded; the new section consisting of fire wyverns and several purple worms. The wilderness increased in size rather significantly, although it was still small compared to what it is in Beta 4.

This new era brought with it a slew of new features and over 100 new arches. The exp bar in the client now worked, and the two-handed and polearm skills became learnable for the first time. The lighting system was also significantly upgraded. The game saw its first use of one-drop items (later renamed to no-drop), and new quests were added, such as the elder wyvern's tooth. It also marked the introduction of coloured mob names to indicate their level in relation to yours.

About a week after the release of Beta 2, the players had already begun to approach the maximum level. In order to mitigate this, the second floor of the Old Outpost was added with the highest level mob now being King Rhun at level 30. This increased the cap to level 48, after which every single mob in the game were too low for exp. This cap was reached by several players shortly before the end of the Beta.

There was also an announcement towards the end of the Beta that a new dungeon, the Dark Temple, would be released soon containing level 30+ mobs. The new dungeon didn't arrive alone however, as it brought Beta 3 with it as well from out of the blue.

Beta 3

After a short-lived Beta 2, Daimonin entered its third Beta in July 2004. This release was a bit of a surprise given the roadmap that was planned for the next Beta. The original Beta 3 was planned to have the feature set of what became Beta 4. However, since there were still a lot of things to do until then, a new interim Beta was added in between, making it more of a Beta 2.5 release.

This new Beta 3 still brought with it many major changes however. Many new arches were added, and the number of maps increased substantially. The biggest addition this time was the first floor of the Underground City, about half of the current Dark Temple and a bunch of wilderness maps to accommodate them both, including Fort Ghzal. This took the highest mob up to level 74, the mob being the Beholder Hive Master in the Dark Temple. Those mobs provided enough difficulty to greatly slow down the pace at which the players were gaining levels. Magic devices such as rods and horns were also implemented in this Beta.

During this time, there were many players at level 90+, but no-one ever reached the maximum level of 101 before the Dark Temple was later expanded with higher level mobs, including the Raas and Lom Lobons, finally allowing players to reach level 110. One small problem that became apparent with this Beta was that storms were overpowered, although they were only available in magic devices. This problem became much more apparent towards the end of the Beta when more and more players found high level storm rods and horns. This led many players to level up magic devices as their main skill, as it was by far the easiest to train. These players were coined rodbabies. Rods and horns later had a level requirement in order to use, so that players at level 1 couldn't clear out a room of mobs with a level 110 stormer.

Another notable thing that appeared in this Beta were seasonal maps. The first ones to appear were several maps for Halloween in 2005, where giant pumpkin mobs appeared in various areas. Then in winter at the end of that year, a new winter mapset appeared with some new quests and a few unique drops. After winter had passed, they remained in place until the end of the Beta as the game was getting crowded at this point, although the unique drops were removed. Finally, Cavern of Despair, a new dungeon appeared during the time of Halloween 2006.

Towards the end of the Beta, there was a long wait with everyone looking forward to the new features arriving in Beta 4, and an endless promise of it being released in 'two weeks'. Just when it looked like Duke Nukem Forever was about to beat it to it, a wave of destruction hit Stoneglow. A bunch of superpowered mobs then came waltzing through the town, killing any players they could see. Over and over again. While on fire. If a player was lucky enough to kill one of them, they had a chance of getting crystal mail +2 of the last eyes, or an amulet of magic shielding. The end of Beta 3 was nigh, and Stoneglow was taking the brunt of the armageddon. During the final hours, the players were allowed access to some DM commands such as /goto while the player files were being transferred to Beta 4. Many players leaped out of the saucepan of a devastated Stoneglow and into the fire of the testmaps. Much chaos ensued, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth as the final signs of life in the Beta 3 world approached its demise.

Then Beta 4 was placed online and everyone woke up to find it was only a horrible nightmare.

Beta 4

Around 2007, Daimonin entered its present Beta stage. The concepts of Planes were introduced and the Human plane was introduced. Stoneglow and its fellow cities joined the Demonic planes and would serve as the place for higher level players to train. Some of the quest dialog features were enhanced so that they presented a graphical interface instead of having to chat with monsters through normal talking.

Forks

Daimonin is very well known to inspire many forks. Atrinik ^[11]is by far the most famous, prominent and long lived fork of Daimonin, meanwhile Angelion ^[12], also a prominent fork, has now merged into Daimonin.

Atrinik

Atrinik was forked from Daimonin around April 2009. The Atrinik homepage mentions that Atrinik is a fork of Daimonin and Crossfire, because the developers feel appropriate to give credit to Crossfire, as the chosen version of Daimonin they forked was close to Crossfire-features with isometric view.

Objectives

The atrinik developers thought that beta 3 of daimonin was the best as beta 4 lost many players to the changes and the development of beta 5 was shaping up slowly and resembled vaporware. This is why Atrinik was born.

Current objectives are: Cleaning up server code Documenting the server code Bringing back more spells and skills from Crossfire More game content and storyline Trade skills (fletching, crafting, etc) Proper player class management (wizard, fighter, priest, etc)

Achievements

Incomplete list of achievements, in no particular order: Implemented player-managed guilds Restored many spells from Crossfire, including meteor, meteor swarm, destruction, finger of death, and many more. Implemented PvP arenas Implemented post office which allows players to send items to one another Implemented parties Made old Crossfire random maps code work again and made several dungeons that are random Implemented player shops Done many server-side and client-side improvements to increase speed and efficiency, for instance the quickslots are now stored server-side, so they don't disappear randomly. Many improvements to the Python plugin, including Python 3.0 and 3.1 support A flexible and powerful quest system and client quest list. Many improvements to balance the game, both content and feature-wise.

Angelion

Angelion started around 2005, during Beta 3. Noting the lack of various clan and party features, Jlittle decided to make his own project based on Daimonin to add in the features that he was asking for. The project began named simply daimonin-jle or "Jlittle edition". The Dungeon Mastering philosophy of Angelion revolved around being able to edit and save maps in game time as well as testing various experimental, but highly interesting, features. Because of these interesting features, it attracted a few developers. After a few months, it was decided to start a new project Angelion based on the changes that had been made.

After about a year or so, however, Angelion had lost most of its new players and the developers (mainly Jlittle, Gramlath and Dantee) were the only actively involved participants. When Beta 4 was released, Gramlath decided to "refork" to try to integrate the features of Angelion into the Beta 4 code, but this did little to bring people to try Angelion. At this point, it had largely become a process of trailing Daimonin's changes. As a result, the project was disbanded in 2008 and some of its more useful features are presently being integrated into the Daimonin code base for future Betas. One of the offshoots that continues to exist today, however, is the Crossmagi project.

Experimental features

Player groups. [Daimonin added this feature independently during Beta 4] Live editing and saving of maps by DMs. Simulating multiple dungeon levels through stacking of maps. (i.e. Mapstacking) Stretching of floor tiles to create simulated slopes. (i.e. Tile Stretching) New monetary denominations. Used various unused items that Daimonin technically had at the time, but weren't accessible. Many new terrain features. [Most of these are now in Daimonin] Many new objects. Many new monsters. An attempt to create a very large world. Creation of various scripts and tools to aid in map editing. Various experiments to integrate features from Crossfire that were currently disabled in Daimonin. Clients with configurable widgets. [This feature was added into Daimonin based on Angelion's work]

Major landmarks

Freeport - the first city in Angelion. It eventually became the newbie starting city for the time before Alpha 1. Fort Sether - started out as a city to the northeast past the tavern. Name eventually became used for the prison fort west of Asteria. Asteria - based on the Stonehaven prototypes we had inherited, Gramlath created a new city with Byzantium as inspiration. Stoneglow - was "destroyed" in a cataclysm due to various issues, shuffled off to its own dimension and eventually removed. Aris - a small village to the west that was meant to be the starting place for Alpha 1. Brisbane - a town that had been "recently" conquered by orcs. Galesten - a town north of Fort Sether serving as the northern border of Asterian territory before passing through the mountains. the Tavern - a tavern on the road passing between Freeport and Fort Sether that would serve as a stopping point for quests [it "survived" the annihilation of Stoneglow] Elven Forest - a planned city in the forest for elves. "The Capital" - a planned city far off to the west that was going to serve as the capital. Wizard's Area - a hidden plane for the DMs and GMs to hang out and work.

Spawns

Gridarta

The map editors for Daimonin, Crossfire, Angelion, and several other Crossfire forks were brought together in the form of the Gridarta ^[13] project. One of the major goals is to have a single editor that can produce maps usable by any of the involved projects.

Crossmagi

Crossmagi ^[14] is a graphics and animation project that has provided 1000's of images for Daimonin and Angelion.

References

External links

• Daimonin.net - Daimonin's Homepage
• - Review of Daimonin Game from ohloh.net
• - Stats concerning Daimonin Freenode Channel
• - Game Review from gameogre.com
• - Daimonin Information and Review at onrpg.com
• - Game Review and overview from happypenguin.org
• - Game Reviews and Overview from mmorpg.com
• - Game Reviews and Overview from linuxlinks.com
• - Game Information and Ranking from rpgrank.com
• - Review of Atrinik fork
• - Overview and review of Atrinik fork
• - Overview of Atrinik fork
• - Daimonin's Sourceforge Development page
• - Crossfire's Wikipedia page
• - Crossfire's Homepage
• - Atrinik's Homepage

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