The Free Ryzom Campaign and the Virtual Citizenship Association
Nevrax developed its game engine, the Nevrax Library or NeL, from 2000 to 2007, and published it as free software. When Nevrax's successor left the engine behind, its community carried it on as OpenNeL, from 2007 to 2010, at opennel.org. In May 2010, when Winch Gate published the source code of the Ryzom client, server and tools, OpenNeL and the game's code became one project: Ryzom Core, the engine, client, server and tools of a complete MMORPG.
Ryzom Core is published under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0. The art published with it is available under both CC-BY-SA 3.0 and the Free Art License 1.3. In 2014, Winch Gate started Ryzom Forge to concentrate on the commercial game. Since then, Ryzom Core has been maintained by its community, independently, and is not affiliated with the commercial game or with Winch Gate.
OpenNeL began in June 2007, when Vianney Lecroart (acemtp), one of Nevrax's first developers on Ryzom, imported the NeL source into a community repository. Matt Raykowski (sfb) ran the project with him. Raykowski's team had kept its own copy of NeL's history, and in December 2006 had offered to fork and maintain the engine if no one else would. Other contributors included Cédric Ochs (Kervala), Robert Wetzel (Spex) and, from the end of 2007, Jan Boon (Kaetemi), who reworked the Snowballs demo and in August 2008 wrote NeL's XAudio2 sound driver. From August 2008 the work continued in a NeL repository that Winch Gate hosted at dev.ryzom.com, where Kervala, Kaetemi and sfb were the most active community contributors. Both histories are archived: opennel_svn and nel_svn.
Since 2010, most of Ryzom Core's development has come from Kervala and Kaetemi, with close to four thousand commits each. Kervala did much of the cross-platform support. Kaetemi wrote the asset build pipeline that turns the game's art and level design into game data, and did most of the work behind the 4.0 release and on the core4 branch since.
Dzmitry Kamiahin (dnk-88) and Laszlo Kis-Adam (dfighter) came through Google Summer of Code and built much of the Qt tools, among them the Object Viewer Qt plugins and the interface editor. The OpenGL 3 driver began as dfighter's 2013 project; Kaetemi took it over in March 2014 and finished it. Meelis Mägi (Nimetu) improved the in-game web browser. Since 2023, Tobias Peters (zerotacg) has reworked the build and continuous integration. In December 2006, his name was on the campaign's list of volunteer programmers.
The Free Ryzom Campaign wanted two things: a world that belongs to the people who live in it, and code that lets anyone start a world of their own. The second has been true since 2010. Anyone can build Ryzom Core, run their own shard, and change any part of it. The first is still open, and Ryzom Core is one of the places where it can be tried.