Games - Otserv

	Games - Otserv

OtServ is a opensource gaming emulator for the Tibia computer game. You can connect to the Open Tibia Server using a standard Tibia client. This project is still in the development stage and is far from providing the original Tibia abilities, but the development team works continuously to improve it. The most up-to-date version is always located at the CVS, however there are also some packages which provides non-CVS features and many others which can be found all over the boards.

History

OTserv started in 2001 by Shivoc, being an innocent possibility, as it is known for being an open source project signed under the GNU Public License (GPL). In the beginning, the creators of Tibia, CipSoft, did not take any action as almost nobody played OTServ.

OTServ was not very famous either. In the middle months of 2004, Haktivex developed OTServ's first battle system (He is also responsible for creating the very first monsters, and beginning NPCs), consisting of only paladins who fire bolts at eachother, and was rather unstable. After a few weeks, a "special" OTServ named TDA (Tibia Dark Age, now The Dark Age) was created by Fandoras. Interest grew in this project, however OT-oldies insisted that OTServ lived on, therefor Tliff, Shivoc, Fandoras, and Haktivex went on to incorperate the ideas and code behind TDA into OTServ 2.9, which is now growing into 3.0+. This makes it safe to say that The Dark Age is NOT an OpenTibia Server as many believe, but that OTserv is actually a TDA server. OTServ remains opensource and freely available to this day, and has lived on without any commercial finances. This is rumored to be caused by players that are disappointed by the updates in the original Tibia.

A lot of fansites started taking place, many failures until otserv.org and OTfans.net came, that's when OTserv really started to take off, with a growth of releases. Then as it developed more and more, CipSoft actually borrowed some ideas, such as when the engineers of OTserv included useable wands in the servers, some months later CipSoft did in theirs. Less popularly known, but the demon boss Orshabaal is reportedly taken from TDA's Gatekeeper monster on "Sonia". TDA reports that their page status has received some hits coming from Regensburg, Germany, around the time before the update in which Orshabaal was introduced.

March 4, 2006, After many binaries releases, the staff of OtFans decide to enforce the GPL, and now all releases without sources are not allowed at otfans.net

The Mapping Format Milestone (XML to OTBM)

Long ago in OTserv and just about ended in OpenTibia maps used XML throughout, for the items and map. When, in September-November of 2004, OTserv became more popular, and thus maps became bigger resulting in more memory being used. For example, in the end of this period, one month before , maps were around of 5 to 7 megabytes in size. Then soon later in the year when the major release of OTServ caused a great popularity milestone for the project, so did the size of maps, causing some to go to staggering sizes such as 20 megabytes, 30, and it is rumored that some even were 60 megabytes. But a file of that size would take too much time to load to be efficient.

The first step into changing some mapping sizes was when the requirement of larger maps were needed, so the developers of OTserv decided to increase the map sizes, since at the time the default size was 512x512 in dimensions, many maps at the time couldn't be developed anymore, since they were up to the dimension sizes. After an agreement, the developers allowed the servers to use bigger maps to be played with, such as now there are maps with the range of 4096x4096. This later caused discussions that these large maps took too long to load onto the server, as before. Such a waiting duration could be up to 30 minutes, waiting for a 50 megabytes map to load.

After a few months, through the beginning of 2005, there were rumbles in the mapping systems, caused by disagreements between developers, emerging around February 2005 the possibility of very smaller map files, such them the binary map formats. Also the idea of a network-based map file, suggested and developed by Techno Pirate, being the discussed SQL format, brought a lot of other ideas to the development pool. The binary map format might be the best solution for the map loading and handling problems since the current library (expat) caused a lot of trouble to some mappers, causing 40 megabyte files to crash the computers. Indeed, it might be, but initially, wasn't accepted by the official developers, and the XML maps were to rule a little longer.

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