History

History
In 1999, a command line frontend for Dragonrealms called Elmekia was written that featured a very simplistic perl interface. The Elmekia front end itself never went very far, but it was the first open source project to start documenting what's referred to as the GS Protocol. This initial reverse-engineering effort is what sparked the development of Warlock.

Warlock was started in late 2000 as a primitive GTK+ client. In late 2001, Marshall Culpepper took over the project and rewrote most of the codebase, while introducing most of the key functionality points seen in The Wizard. Active development stopped in early 2002, and the project was on a year and a half hiatus. In late 2003, Sean Proctor took over active development of the project and again rewrote a majority of the codebase and ported it to GTK2 and added some more functionality. By the end of 2004 development slowed down again and there were few releases through 2005, when the project went on another hiatus from November 2005 until March of 2007. The project is currently active with a 3rd active contributor: Will Robertson.

Warlock 2 was originally conceptualized in 2003 as a ""C++"" client that would utilize the GUI toolkit of it's target operating system, and would include a seperate port for both KDE and Gnome/GTK. After some initial work, it was determined that the amount of code and effort to maintain seperate GUIs for each platform would be too difficult to maintain, and work on Warlock 2 halted. In early 2005, development discussions surfaced again about which technologies to use for Warlock 2. After numerous considerations, the decision was made to go with Eclipse and Java. Eventually all development on the original Warlock halted and became focused on Warlock 2, which has since far surpassed the original.