l1j-en is an English-language server emulator for the South Korean MMORPG, Lineage 1. It targets feature-complete support for the final 2009 US client.
See the project documentation on the l1j-en project wiki for general project info, the client connector, FAQ, and the setup guide.
If you need any help, contact our mailing list or hop on the channel #l1j on Freenode IRC.
Pre-history
Prior to l1j-jp, history is somewhat problematic. Several people claim they are the original creators. Hard proof has been lacking. Plus so many years, revisions and changes have gone by, its relevancy may be questionable. There was a barely functional project called LoSe that is possibly the parent of all l1j projects.
Pre-l1j-en
This code base was originally a fork of l1j-jp named lindc translated to English with stability and security improvements. An important goal was to leave the code as similar/compatibile with l1j-jp as possible so we could take advantage of their content updates. They had a larger team and progressed further/faster on that than we did.
l1j-en created
Around Oct, 2008 the project was renamed to l1j-en to detach it from any particular server. Sometime in l1j-en's early life we began pulling in updates from l1j-jp2 as well. jp2 was actually located on l1j.org at that time.
In 2014 the project slowly transitioned to git (on GitHub), away from SVN and Google Code. Github has since removed the repo that was located there.
From 2014 to 2018 the code base has entered many periods of dormancy. Work began in earnest again to bring up the zelgo server. Several old and new members of the project have randomly come and gone over that time period.
Move to l1j.org
In 2018 we moved to l1j.org and worked on cleaning things up, optimizing things and sticking to the original open source principles of the project. Code compatibility with other l1j projects was no longer considered a priority, allowing us to plug all known security holes that would plague high population public servers.
Last US version compatibility complete
As of late 2019, the milestone 10 DB build was published, along with new build scripts that work with Java 9 and higher (Java <8 support has been deprecated accordingly). We generally recommend running it on JDK 11 LTS, but others >8 should work. With the majority of major issues addressed, the development team considers this project in a stable state and fully usable for classic client servers.
Current status
As of 2020-07-04, this repository has been moved back to GitHub, with any legal concerns addressed (see legal section). We've also funded a legal retainer agreement should the need arise. In the unlikely event this repo is moved again, an announcement on the project's group forum will be posted.
Along with the above, we have also started a branch of this codebase that is
compatible with the feature set of 3.63, due to much popular demand (mainly
enabling the higher resolution clients). This is already in a usable state,
and we are closing the gap on new features to get it of comparable quality to
what's in the master branch. Do a checkout against branch 363 to use this.
No one behind this project offers an opinion on the legality of running a private server. This project only covers just the codebase and ancillary documentation you see here. l1j-en itself is devoid of any information gleaned directly from the client. This is a "clean room" implementation of a server compatible with various clients, all implementing long abandoned versions of game feature sets.
None of the contributors to this project are or have in the past been customers of the original creators of Lineage, and are therefore not beholden to any EULAs a customer must agree to. Despite this, we intentionally to not touch the official client, only making use of custom-built headless clients and therefore run no proprietary software in the development process. A side goal of this team is to create various clients that can be used with this server, and these are the only methods of play that are officially endorsed here.
As such, we will not accept contributions that potentially violate copyright/trademark law.
Report issues and suggest features and improvements on the l1j.org issue tracker. Discussions and questions should go to the mailing list and IRC channel.
Pull requests are always welcome! For those migrating to Git from SVN, see the DEVGUIDE.
Those interested in joining the development effort as a team member should feel free to let us know, preferably on the IRC channel. We always need additional help with programming, Lineage 1 domain knowledge (particularly with newer game content), and documentation.
Distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.