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| augmento |
 Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 2:08 am |
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Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
Location: South Korea
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 7:29 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
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I'm familiar with Multiverse. I had already set up a world and wrote a little "Hello World" plugin that registered itself with the engine and that's about it. If MV ever goes out of business, they say they will OSS it. It is not OS, so scratch it - unless we don't want to be religious about open source and just want to construct a world/platform. I honestly don't care either way.
On the list: I'd suggest adding NeL and Delta 3D. Delts is Open Source (LGPL licence) and feature rich. I'm not certain that the same engine that powers the "VIrtual RealiTy and HUman Factors AppLications for Improving Safety" and the "
Tactical Tomahawk Weapon Control System" simulator is suitable for an MMO, but its worth a look; all its components are general useage components. In fact, it uses CAL3D for character animation control. CAL3D came originated in the WorldForge project. |
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| sdahan |
| Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 4:19 pm |
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Joined: 06 Dec 2006
Posts: 68
Location: Tsukuba, Japon
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| IMHO it is too soon to seriously think about what game engine we will use or what other project we will join. Before, we need to define our specification and our design. |
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Sylvain Dahan |
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| augmento |
| Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 1:21 am |
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Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
Location: South Korea
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metaverse is a different project than multiverse 8)
A general outline of the game is good. trying to define too many details before picking an engine does not work out well. there will always be trade off between what the engine can do and what you want to make.
I would also like to add Mortic to the list with project Expanses
http://ex-naryan.sourceforge.net/main/?book=0 |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 7:30 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
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augmento wrote: metaverse is a different project than multiverse 8)
errrr.... my bad :oops:
*whistles innocently and debates editing his last post* :P |
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| KrYoS |
| Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 7:39 pm |
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Joined: 30 Dec 2006
Posts: 50
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| Personally, utilizing another open source project isn't really the best way to go. As not everyone working on what the community wants will be familiar with it, and you will create a lot of tension and distress by those who struggle to learn the platform and what not. Granted, it would have been that way had the purchase of Ryzom succeeded, but the difference there is it was a polished product for the most part, and most open source projects are slim on documentation and commenting in the code. Granted, not all are, but many are. And then to top it off, many are in a stage where we would have to create our own framework around the already there open source project to further get to the goal of an MMORPG. |
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| sdahan |
| Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 4:15 am |
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Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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Location: Tsukuba, Japon
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KrYos, we have to study related work. Not doing it is stupid. After knowing what they done, then we can make a decision.
KrYoS wrote: many are in a stage where we would have to create our own framework around the already there open source project to further get to the goal of an MMORPG.
I do not understand what you mean. Lot of cited project are just multimedia library with a 3D engine. How they can make thing difficult for us to achieve our goal? |
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Sylvain Dahan |
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| KrYoS |
| Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 5:32 am |
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Joined: 30 Dec 2006
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sdahan wrote: KrYos, we have to study related work. Not doing it is stupid. After knowing what they done, then we can make a decision.
KrYoS wrote: many are in a stage where we would have to create our own framework around the already there open source project to further get to the goal of an MMORPG.
I do not understand what you mean. Lot of cited project are just multimedia library with a 3D engine. How they can make thing difficult for us to achieve our goal?
True, we do have to study related work, I will not argue that, and I apologize for going on about that, as a lot of the aspects of the work of other projects would be well to study.
Alright, about how some projects can make it difficult starting out, maybe not in the long haul. Mainly it will be in the learning curve of whatever 3D engine is decided upon to use. That's the main area of difficulty that is being pointed at. Again, I apologize for not being specific on that aspect. |
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| sdahan |
| Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 3:59 pm |
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Joined: 06 Dec 2006
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Location: Tsukuba, Japon
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KrYoS wrote: True, we do have to study related work, I will not argue that, and I apologize for going on about that, as a lot of the aspects of the work of other projects would be well to study.
Apologies? Did you do or say anything wrong? |
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Sylvain Dahan |
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| KrYoS |
| Posted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 6:46 pm |
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Joined: 30 Dec 2006
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| No I did not, but it is a habit of mine nonetheless. I tend to be a rather polite person. |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 2:15 pm |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 79
Location: Germany
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This thread has a lot of stuff thrown out, but no direction.
How about we first formailze, as best we can, the common vision; where the overlap is in what everyone envisions they want to build. This defines the scope of the broad community project. Then we evaluate the available platforms against that common vision and take special wishes of invdividuals into account.
In short, it is prio 2 behind agreeing on vision. |
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The Ruleset Modeling Language - A project for making it easier to design virtual worlds. |
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| valentin |
| Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 6:23 pm |
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Joined: 07 Dec 2006
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thanks cayle for your your input, delta 3d was unknown from me until then and seems to be the best existing gpl effort on this theme.
back to your point about formalizing our effort, the discussions we had all this crazy month about our objectives seem to be resumable as 'making a second life me too in order to build the matrix (not as in the coen movie but as in the neuromancer novel)'.
another technical way to define our (?) goals would sound like having all the necessary tools for any team to 'run a shard' of a good enough quality as so users would be willing to pay to play. this includes client, server, graphics, ai, recipies, ...
i'm convinced the business plans of propriatary mmo prevents them by design from building anything universal. i'm also convinced a gpl plan would not be limited in such way and could tend towards an extensible limitless virtual world.
valentin |
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| valentin |
| Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 6:48 pm |
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Joined: 07 Dec 2006
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another facet of the problem can be seen by a question, why is there no existing gpl mmo today ?
by existing mmo i mean of good enough quality (wich excludes most of the existing efforts) and complete so anyone can legally run a plug and play shard (wich excludes nel, planeshift, and other partly-only released efforts).
building a mmo takes years of human work before anything is usable, and it's about impossible to keep a gpl team alive for years without anything usefull in real life.
gnu started small, linux started from gnu, firefox started from netscape. a mmo cannot start small because lots of code and graphics has to be in at first start, this is why we thought buying an existing mmo would be the best way to start, having a working game in order to attract a gpl community to go forward.
valentin |
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| barometer |
| Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 7:12 pm |
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Joined: 28 Dec 2006
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Quote: this is why we thought buying an existing mmo would be the best way to start, having a working game in order to attract a gpl community to go forward.
The problem is to find one, and if we don't do anything about it...who will ? |
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| KrYoS |
| Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 5:06 am |
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Joined: 30 Dec 2006
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| There will always be other ambitious folks out there to try, of that I am sure, but being the ones to succeed would be a great treat. Myself, I'm ready to try just about anything right now. As for a 3D engine, many are out there that can be used, yes. But the question is, which one affords the most access to the graphics pipeline for the end user? Most graphics software is expensive, and I believe that is one major aspect that needs to be looked at, of that there is no doubt. So going off looks and features alone is not something we should readily do. We also have to look at overall cost for the team to be able to use it. |
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| valentin |
| Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 9:59 pm |
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Joined: 07 Dec 2006
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barometer wrote: Quote: this is why we thought buying an existing mmo would be the best way to start, having a working game in order to attract a gpl community to go forward.
The problem is to find one, and if we don't do anything about it...who will ?
well, finding one may not be so much of a hassle, i've been trying to buy 'wish', gone for 800k usd (ooops), then shadowbane (wolfpack became 'consultants' for ubisoft), then ryzom. this means three possible games in less than a year, and with the nowdays mmo meltdown more are to come, each time i got a step further and the gpl offer was evaluated more and more seriously.
if we can propose some serious gpl offer, with money (we offer more or less 200k euros including fsf offer), but better with some proof of serious chances of success, we may find some willing candidate sooner than we expect.
some have been named on this forum like seeds, some haven't like irth online, lots we dont even know about, this quest is to be continued.
but what we are looking for after all is a working demo, pleasent enough to keep energy going into the project (the project being a free world, ie free not as in beer), well written enough so a gpl group can manage it's evolutions.
this can be achieved by a buy out, or a build from scratch. i was very reluctant to build from scratch option because of the time to release problem until some well advanced existing gpl projects were cited here.
especially the delta 3D code is appealing, modular, well written, complete, professionally undertaken, and so on. they lack persistancy (being a simulation engin) but not much else.
metaverse is very active too with great idea, some demo, an active community, but not on par with existing games at all.
planeshift is real today, but not free, only the pure c++ code being gpl excluding graphics and recipies (so you can participate fully but not use it legally).
maybe some kind of glue coding between delta3d and worldforge or so is doable to get a gpl working prototype attractive enough within a short timeframe.
valentin |
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| KrYoS |
| Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2007 10:05 pm |
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Joined: 30 Dec 2006
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| There are all sorts of projects out there, the only real problem is finding a way to meld them to keep them modular and able to be easily editted. That there would take a while, of that I am already sure, and in some cases, depending on how well they are coded, sometimes it is easier to rewrite large parts of code from scratch just to make them work well together and be in a state where it is easily editable by someone else. |
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| Cayle |
| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2007 9:32 am |
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Joined: 20 Dec 2006
Posts: 56
Location: Germany
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There is precedent for closed source games going OSS, or becoming otherwise available at the source code level, but code that was OSS to start with tends to be higher quality. The first three quake engines are OSS. I've never worked with Quake 2/3 myself, but I've heard secondhand that its not easy to work with. Apparently, its not well documented and the ID programing style is a bit chaotic.
Torque came from the games Tribes 2. The team that wrote the engine bought the rights to distribute it from the publisher and went into business as GarageGames. Despite having excellent tools and a large, active user community, Torque has a reputation for being difficult to use; primarily because the original code was not designed with the intent to distribute.
That las line is the key. Stuff intended for redistribution tends to simply have code that is nicer to work with. Stuff written to be closed source and not redistributed often has nasty hacks, is less well documented and not very flexible. Compare the code for skeletal animations in Torque with that in Cal3D (used by Delta 3D and CrystalSpace). This is important to me as PA is going to use procedural animation liberally. Torque's is convoluted and that is after 5 years of cleanup by GarageGames. Sifting through it, it is by no means clear to me where/how I can insert my procedural controls into the pipeline. Cal3D is clean, easy to read and well documented. I've located a method in the mixer class that I can edit to create my entry point. That took all of half an hour from downloading the source for Cal3D and reading the gettin started docs.
The real asset that you walk away with when you buy an MMO is that one particular world and perhaps the art assets, but they are tied strongly to the genre. |
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| valentin |
| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2007 11:07 am |
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Joined: 07 Dec 2006
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Cayle wrote:
The real asset that you walk away with when you buy an MMO is that one particular world and perhaps the art assets, but they are tied strongly to the genre.
the real asset is that you know it does work and scale. mmo software tends sometimes to magic especialy speaking of scalability. there is an interesting thread on delta3d forum where trying numerous simultaneous animations led to point out a software architecture misfit.
but yes, what you get from propriatory mmo buyout in short term (working demo and knoweldge it does scale) you lose in long term (badly written, poor documentation, hard to understand and modify).
this was obvious for ryzom, 2.5 millions lines of code, gee, and a 'patch over the patch over the patch' kinda coding practice.
yet another potential gpl usable code, the one currently under developpement at http://www.mekensleep.org (3Dpoker but meant to grow up from there).
and yet another interesting one, http://www.vworldpowered.com/ (making a 3dmap from satellite pictures, the base engin of dark and light mmo, not free but freeable if we can get pourieux, it's author, drunk enough)
valentin |
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| KrYoS |
| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2007 5:52 pm |
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Joined: 30 Dec 2006
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| Yes, I will agree that closed source turned OSS is hard to understand code at best. It is the joys that is the world really. OSS from the start is the best way to go for the documentation/reusability one would like to see. That is why I do tend to lean towards the OSS world for pieces of the pie. |
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| augmento |
| Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2007 11:30 pm |
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Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 9
Location: South Korea
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| have expanded the list a bit. |
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| recentcoin |
| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 7:08 am |
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Joined: 15 Jan 2007
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As someone who's dealt with a *lot* of open source projects over the years, I'd strongly suggest that consider taking the money that's been donated to for the purchase that didn't go through and consider hiring some full time professional developers to pound out code on one of the existing open source game engines.
Searching SourceForge for "3D Game Engine" brings up 11,990 results. If you keep those search terms and limit that to projects that have files, you get 118 results. My point with this is that writing a game engine is *not* a new idea. Having the resources to actually get something to at least an Alpha release is quite unusual.
Most of the engines out there are the product of one or two people. Only a handful of the projects have more than 10 members. My point behind this is that you could pick up one of the existing OS engines, pound out the code and turn it into what you seem to be looking for. I think this might be a better option than to sit around, vulture like, waiting to pick off a failed company.
Just my 2 cents...
RC |
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| Xavier Antoviaque |
| Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 2:41 pm |
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Joined: 15 Nov 2006
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recentcoin wrote: As someone who's dealt with a *lot* of open source projects over the years, I'd strongly suggest that consider taking the money that's been donated to for the purchase that didn't go through and consider hiring some full time professional developers to pound out code on one of the existing open source game engines.
While considering asking for the pledged money to help creating or freeing a MMO could be an option (if the pledger has the option to say no without feeling guilty), I don't think that hiring a development team would do it. The money wouldn't be enough to achieve the goal, and we would just have added to the long list of development disasters the MMO industry has already filled.
But if you have more specific ideas, please post them in the VCA General forum. That's a subject we'll need to discuss more in depth. |
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