Athena, jAthena, eAthena, rAthena

A history of the Ragnarok Online server emulator family, 2002 to today, with links into this archive.

Every open Ragnarok Online server emulator still in use descends from one Japanese project called Athena. The name changed as the code passed between communities: jAthena in Japan, eAthena for the English translation, then rAthena, Hercules, Auriga and others. This page puts the line in order.

Family tree

Before Athena

Two Japanese efforts came first and are thanked in Athena's readme. Weiss was a Ragnarok server written in Delphi, active from January 2003 into 2004. Project YARE ("Yet Another Ragnarok Emulator"), led by Lemming, ran from 26 May to 5 November 2003, shared code with Athena and hosted Athena's first site at project-yare.de. Gravity closed YARE with a legal warning. Packet write-ups and a code base called 0052.lzh, posted to the EmuServer of Ragnarok bulletin board around 19 January 2003, were the shared starting material.

Timeline

Late 2002 to January 2003
The Athena Project starts work after Ragnarok Online's open beta ends and the game goes pay-to-play. Athena's own readme describes it as "one of the emulators built on the 0052.lzh released in mid-January 2003" and thanks Lemming of Project YARE, the uploader known as 0052, the poster known as 35 from the emulator thread, and the Weiss board.
July 2003
The Athena Project releases Athena Dev v2.1.1 under the GPL, with contact at project-yare.de. It is the last numbered Athena release. Every later Japanese version is a patch on top of it. Archive: jathena/athena-dev-2.1.1.tar.gz (15 July 2003).
Autumn 2003 onward
Japanese developers keep patching v2.1.1 in a numbered series posted to the emulator threads. English speakers call this line jAthena; in Japan it is still just Athena. The raw uploads here run from patch 0505 (November 2003) to patch 1666 (2006), and packaged builds from athena-dev-2.1.1-mod0629 (December 2003) to mod1164 (March 2005). A SourceForge project named jathena was registered on 20 June 2004 and published its last release, patch 2060, on 13 July 2006. The changelog carried by Auriga reaches patch 2261. Archive: jathena/raw/, jathena/.
November 2003
AppleMod, an English translation of Athena by AppleGirl with RoVeRT, appears with build 554a. Each build is named after the Japanese patch it follows: 601mod (13 December) and 641mod (25 December) are here. eAthena's own changelog starts on 22 December 2003. A SourceForge project named eathena was registered on 20 December 2003. Archive: eathena/archive/, archive/641jap-641mod.diff.
January 2004
AppleMod is renamed eAthena ("english Athena"). The first release under the name is eathena715test, built on patch 715, in text-file and MySQL builds. Release 817 follows on 19 February as athena-817 and athenasql-817, the text and SQL editions eAthena keeps for the rest of its life. Archive: eathena/archive/.
May to November 2004
eAthena 0.4.0 in May, then 1.0 release candidates RC1 (July) through RC5 (October and November), TXT and SQL editions. Archive: eathena/archive/.
September 2004
Freya forks from eAthena during RC4, founded by Yor and MagicalTux with stability as the goal. eAthena commits from 13 November 2004 already pull fixes back from it. Freya's development ended on 21 April 2007, its administrator Tsuyuki saying eAthena had become stable enough.
October to December 2004
eAthena moves into Subversion at dev.deltaanime.net; the changelog for 27 October records the first branch being made. The earliest revision that survives in today's rAthena git history is revision 2, dated 4 November 2004, carrying 1,978 lines of English changelog and the full Japanese changelog up to patch 1032. The SVN opens to the public in December 2004.
2005 to 2009
eAthena becomes the standard server for private Ragnarok servers, with its site at eathena.ws and code later hosted on Google Code. A Preview Release, PR1, ships in November 2005. This archive keeps Windows snapshots of trunk and stable built every two hours, plus personal development branches by Celest, DracoRPG, Evera, FlavioJS, Kevin, SketchyPhoenix and Wizputer. Archive: eathena/svn/, eathena/trunk/.
21 November 2006
Auriga starts from the Japanese Athena line. Its first commit, "Patch 0001, Auriga starts", is by Rayce, who was also the last named author in the Athena changelog it carries. Auriga remains active in 2026 at auriga.moe.hm and on GitHub.
January 2009
3CeAM, "3rd Class eAthena Mod", is started by Rytech about a week after Rune Knight and Arch Bishop reach the Korean Renewal test server on 24 December 2008. It adds the third jobs and Renewal client support. Public work paused around May 2009, continued privately, and releases ran on SourceForge until 2018. rAthena later takes its third-class code from this fork.
19 November 2009
eAthena gains Renewal client support, from a patch by Diablo applied by skotlex. A separate renewal branch follows. Archive: eathena/renewal/, client/Renewal/.
28 November 2011
eAthena trunk reaches revision 15000. The last automated snapshot built here is athena-trunk-15001-win32.rar. Archive: eathena/trunk/.
29 November 2011
rAthena forks from eAthena, citing administrative problems at eathena.ws and slowed development. Revision 15001 on the new rAthena SVN is titled "Welcome to RAthena!" and is committed by brianluau. It is the first commit that exists only in rAthena. On 5 December 2011 rAthena merges RREmu, Ind's Renewal codebase, bringing Renewal formulas, 3.1 classes and mounts, and merges eAthena revision 15006 at the same time.
January and February 2012
rAthena adds Royal Guard, Shadow Chaser, Sura and the other third classes, with the base code credited to 3CeAM.
2012
eAthena continues at a slower pace, mostly by Ai4rei. The trunk changelog's last entry is 12 August 2012 and the last SVN revision, r15192, is 6 October 2012. The snapshots here stop on 15 September 2012. Archive: eathena/svn/trunk/Changelog-Trunk.txt.
10 January 2013
Hercules forms from rAthena. Its first commit, by Trojal, is "Merge rathena repository to form Hercules initial commit", with Ind (shennetsind) and malufett committing within days. By 28 January rAthena is committing batches labelled "Hercules merges".
July 2013
rAthena moves from Subversion to git and GitHub. Git integration files land on 17 July 2013 and the last SVN-synced commit is dated 20 July. The first outside pull request is merged on 1 September 2013, and SVN support ends late in the year.
June 2017
rAthena's core source files migrate from C to C++.
Today
rAthena and Hercules remain the main English-language descendants and Auriga the main Japanese one. Brazilian forks brAthena (founded 2009, later rebased on Hercules) and Cronus (based on rAthena and eAthena) serve that community, and eAmod by Zephyrus continued eAthena as a paid product. All of them still carry the Athena Project's 2003 changelog in their history.

Release names at a glance

NameMeaningYears
Athena Dev v2.1.1Last numbered release from the Athena Project2003
modNNNN, patch NNNNJapanese patch number on top of v2.1.1 (jAthena)2003 to 2006
554a, 601mod, 641mod, 715test, 817AppleMod and early eAthena builds named by the Japanese patch they followNovember 2003 to February 2004
eAthena 0.4.0, 1.0 RC1 to RC5, PR1Versioned eAthena releases, TXT and SQL editions2004 to 2005
rNNNNNSVN revision; eAthena and rAthena share the numbering up to r15000, then diverge (rAthena r15001, eAthena to r15192)2004 to 2013

Sources