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| RedOctober |
 Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2006 12:47 am |
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Joined: 14 Dec 2006
Posts: 8
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Seems to be a lot of talk about this possibility, and it is one that I whole heartedly support. With the knowledge and money we have here, we could develop a graphically and architecturally up-to-date and completely open source MMOG Engine. The MMOG market is a massive new one that is constantly growing, but right now it is entirely run by a few giants (Blizzard, SOE, Turbine, etc...) The release of an open source engine and in turn open source games would greatly increase the variety and quality of what is available to the game base.
There are things out there that are like this, in a way, but nothing quite like this. There's Multiverse, Torque, Kaneva, and Second life, but they all lack the true properties of open source software(even though none of them really are open source) These engines are, for the most part, outdated and have some connection to the producing company. A truly open source MMOG engine would have no strings attached, other than sharing your code, and would foster creativity to a new level in the MMOG world. |
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| Han |
| Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2006 2:07 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2006
Posts: 34
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The funds as stated in other posts were donated specifically to be used to obtain the entity known as Ryzom. So though everyone here does share your excitement about an open MMORPG. We start from scratch if it is not Ryzom itself we end up with. In some peoples minds this is a good thing, in others it's not something they wish to devote thier time too.
We need to talk to Gameforge to see what thier plans are and then move forward based on our knowlege. |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2006 8:15 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
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RedOctober wrote: The MMOG market is a massive new one that is constantly growing, but right now it is entirely run by a few giants (Blizzard, SOE, Turbine, etc...) The release of an open source engine and in turn open source games would greatly increase the variety and quality of what is available to the game base.
MMOs are a graphical outgrowth of text MUDs, which have been around for thirty years. Even graphical MMOs have been around for ten, counting from Meridian 59. There is also an existing
First, I have some blunt questions.
- Need community worlds be massive? There is only room for a limited numbers of massive worlds, even community ones. Why even use the term massive, or MMO in this case? Why not the more general virtual world or persistent world? Also, I see people stepping forward, offering their project in progress or ruleset as a basis to rally around. I don't think this can hold a community together. I spent a long time in the Neverwinter Nights persistent world community. There are a cornucopia of persistent worlds built by small teams and populated by small communities. One of the great tension creators within teams is creative vision. The fact is that the people with the vision and drive to see through the birth of a world - even if its creation is only modding - don't readily surrender their vision to others.
I'm not so niave to think that my vision is interesting to others or that people will jump at it. A community of people who share resources and help each other build their vison has a greater chance of success.
- Is the perspective here that of players or those who would create worlds? These are two very different hings and work on very different timelines. If it is player driver, then simply buy a world and be done with it. If it is creator driven, then there is a chance to create something that really does not exist. Right now, if you do to DevMaster.net, the GarageGames forums or wherever else game makers hang out and say "I want to create a virtual world", you get laughed at. Only in the text MUD community, NWN persistent world community do people take you seriously (NWN can be modded to support a persistent world, but it is neither powerful, nor flexible beyond elves using the D20 ruleset). There are the communities at multiverse.net and mmorpgmaker, but they are Indie/Professional-Wannabees who want to sell a game.
Back to the NWN PW community example (I spent many years there). Here you have a network of people who build worlds, create art assets and help each other out. The downside is that they work on a closed platform published by a company not at all interested in their plight. Such a community, without that baggage could take flight and become the metaverse that the MMO industry illuminaries like to talk about so much at Terra Nova.
Depending on how ryzom.org goes forward, we (Project Angela, a small community virtual world team) might be willing to contribute our work to this community. |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2006 11:21 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
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We should discuss just how “from scratch” building from scratch should be and what existing platforms might be useful. If you have a pet engine that you would like discussed, toss it out, describe it, what building on it would be like and the pros and cons. I’ve already been on the quest for a platform for a while now, so I guess I’ll start.
Torque: I’ve been toying with this lately. It is really an FPS engine, but can be tortured into building a credible roleplay persistent world. I’ve got some screenshots here. It is on the shortlist for us in PA. It has a reputation for being poorly documented and hard to use, but I’d disagree with this. There is tons of documentation, you just have to be patient and resourceful in searching GarageGames website. I was able to get a build configured on MS Visual c++ Express with minimal fuss from a provided cookbook and the tutorials are extensive. It is not OSS and not really suitable for an open source community movement, but it works for a small team going it alone.
Multiverse: They are trying to build a “long tail” based business. They give away the tools, but the users connect to your world through a central service. If you charge (not really relevant for community worlds), they take a cut. They’ll let free community worlds use it for free. We originally went the MV direction but stopped when it became clear by poking around the API that the server does geometry in 2D. It has a very nice architectural layout that is worth a go-over for anyone who would build a server. Again, I’ve got screenshots here.
Delta 3D: I turned this up only the other day while searching for “procedural vegetation” in google. It is an obscure engine and not even in the devmaster.net database. It was developed by the US Navy for use in military simulations. I can’t say anything about its scalability yet. To my knowledge, it is not used in any persistent worlds. A teammate of mine is looking more closely at it and we have it on the shortlist. I do like the featurelist and the fact that the dev team is a professional one that can afford not to care about having to sell it.
Worldforge: is an 8 year old project for doing exactly what people are talking about here. Joining forces with them is also worth a possible look, or even adding ourselves to thei effort. This group has the publicity and they have the experience. Duplication of effort is silly.
Blender: also has a game engine. I know next to nothing about it.
CrystalSpace: I like the xml format for the world, but otherwise I know nothing about it. Planeshift is done on CrystalSpace. |
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| RedOctober |
| Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2006 3:29 pm |
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Joined: 14 Dec 2006
Posts: 8
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All of those engines have their shortcomings, and the two with the least are Torque and Multiverse. Torque is a bit dated, and the things that bums me about MV is the central server thing, your game will never look independent if you develop it on MV.
That's why I was hoping we could get a hold of the NeL "MMORPG Skeleton + Toolkit", it seems like the perfect solution. |
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| Grom |
| Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2006 10:29 pm |
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Posts: 11
Location: Poland
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:47 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
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So what can NeL do and why is it so much better than any other option? The only thing I could get from the wiki is that it uses its own file format for models and how landscape collisions work. Info is pretty thin. There is nothing on how collision detection is handled in general, or even if it is server or client side. So based on the NeL page, I'm not exactly jumping for joy over it.
Can someone enlighten me on its feature list and why exactly it has no drawbacks? |
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| piglop |
| Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2006 7:51 am |
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Joined: 03 Dec 2006
Posts: 2
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| Grom |
| Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2006 1:30 pm |
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Posts: 11
Location: Poland
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| augmento |
| Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2006 3:21 pm |
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Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
Location: South Korea
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| sdahan |
| Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 3:12 pm |
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Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 68
Location: Tsukuba, Japon
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Cayle wrote: Worldforge: is an 8 year old project for doing exactly what people are talking about here. Joining forces with them is also worth a possible look, or even adding ourselves to thei effort. This group has the publicity and they have the experience. Duplication of effort is silly.
After reading what they done I think we should seriously think about the possibility to work with them. |
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Sylvain Dahan |
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| nFriedly |
| Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 1:09 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2006
Posts: 11
Location: Dayton Ohio, USA
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| I mentioned this somewhere else, world forge impressed me a lot |
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Nathan Friedly |
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| augmento |
| Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 1:46 am |
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Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
Location: South Korea
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| Azgoth |
| Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 3:56 pm |
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Joined: 27 Nov 2006
Posts: 2
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Irrlicht is a pretty nice engine, with very active community, that I follow for some month. But, it's not a game engine, only 3D and now audio engine.
Some guy do tutorials to bind it with physics and network engines.
At the beginning, Irrlicht was designed for fps, so no third person camera class is build in the engine, only some code snippets in the forum.
Unless I like this engine (well documented, nice community), I don't think it's suitable for our project from scrath. |
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