History
This project is the "Duke Nukem Forever" of my projects. The roots are probably somewhere around year 2001 when I had first discussions with Galed about how interesting it would be to make your own online RPG, after running into some ORPGs ourselves.
In 2001/2002 we discovered a (then-free) online RPG called Dransik, which was very simple but enjoyable to play. Roughly around the same time some classmates introduced me to Crossfire - The Multiplayer Adventure Game. Needless to say, I spent a quite some time playing both games, and often stopped to think about what I would like my own game to be like.
On 2002-11-04 I registered an IRC channel #fealdia on Freenode, inviting some interested people along from Quakenet and others from Freenode's #crossfire. The channel was originally meant as a place to discuss the planning and development of a free ORPG, but it slowly evolved into a casual user community instead, spanning various topics more or less related to free software (xeno also dubbed it as "dead project graveyard" ;-).
On 2003-01-21 I registered a project on SourceForge, called "Fealdia". The project, written in C/C++, had only two public releases of the map editor, v0.0.1 on 2003-04-10 and v0.0.2 on 2003-06-20.
The C++ version went through several rewrites and big refactorings. First commit under Subversion version control is from 2004-03-07, and marks the beginning of the last rewrite in C++. The development lasted somewhere until 2006.
Unfortunately, this project was never really released, partially because of copyright (some libraries had borrowed code and were not giving proper credit) & missing graphics issues (eg. the ones I used for development I didn't have a permission for - this is the same reason you don't see any public screenshots of the C++ version).
On 2007-01-18, development began anew once again, this time in Java (thus, JFealdia). At that time I had attained some more Java experience at work, and had started liking the language. Subversion was used until 2007-06-20, at which point there was a five month gap in development, and then I converted the repository to git, and started working on the project on a more regular basis, again.
So, something around eight years has passed and this project is still in a very early phase. Meantime, I have graduated from the high school, moved to another town, graduated from the Technical University of Tampere, and gotten accustomed to work life. On top of that, several smaller free software projects have also consumed my time, leading to long periods of inactivity on this project. To be honest, I don't expect this project to ever become a mature one, but it has been very interesting and hopefully someone else will also find it intriguing :-)
-- Heikki Hokkanen, January 2009
PS: While all code so far has been written by me, I would like to thank the folks on #crossfire, #fealdia and #jxfire for all the interesting discussions we have had. Without those, I don't know if I would be here writing this. Also apologies for the way too long delayed release, hopefully you hadn't given up on seeing the day yet! Big thanks also to David E. Gervais who has created graphics that can be freely used in these projects.