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Check out http://www.happypenguin.org/. I've got the RSS enabled on the right side of /. If you ever up your video card, http://www.planeshift.it/ is an excellent open source mmorpg.

If we're going to talk about MMORPGs, PlaneShift is often overlooked IMHO, and it's very much free-to-play, as well as in beer and (mostly) libre (although note the proprietary licence for art and game rules, more about protecting the quality and consistency of the game than anything else).

It's not as popular as WoW by any means, but it's certainly a lot of fun, even given the fact that it's pre-1.0 in terms of status.

Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.

The following publishers develop comemrcial linux games:

http://www.pompomgames.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
http://www.introversion.co.uk/
http://frictionalgames.com/
http://sillysoft.net/
http://www.basiliskgames.com/
http://www.guildsoftware.com/
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/
http://www.rune-soft.com/
http://grubbygames.com/
http://www.caravelgames.com/
http://www.planewalkergames.com/
http://www.graalonline.com/

There are also the high profile ones such as neverwinter nights, the doom and quake series, unreal, etc.

There are many high quality independant titles such as neverball, you mentioned wesnoth, crimson fields, flight gear, torcs, the spring project, total annihilation 3d, tecnoballZ, powermanga, tile racer, pingus, clonk, freeciv, ultimate stunts, planeshift, scorched3d, VDrift, silvertree (not complete, but being created by the wesnoth guys so likely will not be vapor), ufo: alien invasion, scourge, etc.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.flightgear.org/
https://icculus.org/neverball/
http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/
http://linux.tlk.fr/games/
http://tileracer.model-view.com/
http://pingus.seul.org/
http://www.clonk.de/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/
http://www.planeshift.it/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://vdrift.net/
http://www.silvertreerpg.org/
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
http://scourge.sourceforge.net/

Many of these are very impressive independently made free games. Perhaps they lack the multi million dollar marketing budget and won't make your geofrce 8800 gtxz 45 x super elite ultra melt, but theya re *fun* games, and they are numerous. Also keep in mind this publisher and free game list is only what I could find in 1 hour of searching.

Then there are freed older commercial games such as warzone 2100, homeworld, descent 1 and 2, doom, quake, etc.

Lets not stop t

Well, there is at least one open source MMORPG, PlaneShift, though it's supposedly not complete, and when I last tried it wasn't all that great (however, that was an year or two ago, and things may have changed considerably). Apart from that, there are some commercial ones that run on Linux. For instance, EVE Online and Regnum Online run natively, while World of Warcraft runs perfectly with WINE.

Personally, I love Planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/ It's Free, fun, constantly growing, and it has a great community

I'll be the first to admit, it doesn't have quite the polish of a full-blown MMORPG, but we're working on it, (Yes, Disclaimer: I am a dev), but it is highly playable

If you like MMORPGs, and want to get your hands dirty working on one, please look and see if you want to help out, we're always looking for artists (2D and 3D), and coders

I would love to play Planescape Torment if I could get my hands on a copy. I really liked the Baldur's Gate series (Baldur's Gate II is, I think, my favorite game in the genre, followed closely by Planeshift and Baldur's Gate I). I didn't really like Neverwinter Nights (the original; Hordes of the Underdark was great), because it seemed too limited in the choices it offers (i.e. the story is too linear). My understanding is that Planescape Torment is much better in this regard. Alas, the game seems to have failed so completely it's hard to get my hands on a copy. Ok, it's probably obtainable through file sharing, but that's not an option I'm willing to consider.

Check http://www.legaltorrents.com/ - legal files distributed via Bittorrent.

But since you mentioned software, check http://www.planeshift.it/ - an open source game distributed via Bittorrent.

See also:

Nexuiz (Quake 3 clone) http://alientrap.org/nexuiz/

Planeshift (Still in alpha stage, but it works) http://www.planeshift.it/

Also check the package list in Ubuntu etc.

If you're looking for games that work under Wine, look no further than World of Warcraft, Oblivion, and so forth.

Seriously though, I've been thinking about a MMORPG collective for serious gamers. A few thousand true role players could easily afford to go in on an adequate server and you could give people memberships for content contribution. It could work, but it would be a lot of effort and there would be no profit in it, so I don't see it happening. I would join something like that.

The game looks interesting, but I think that you should save your money, and just use planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html which is already open source, uses the crystal space game engine (also open source) and is available for free NOW.

Then again I'm not really into MMORPH's so maybe there is more to Ryzom then I'm seeing.

Planeshift is a very capable GPL MMORPG. If you're looking for a 2D MMO, The Mana World is great as well (even though it is not fully developed yet).

http://www.genecys.org/
http://www.planeshift.it/

There's a couple open source MMORPG's for you to tinker with. Go ahead.

Oh wait, THEY SUCK.

Gamers are willing to pay for a game because it produces better results!

I love open source products, and use them wherever it's worthwhile. When it's not, out comes the pocketbook.

Planeshift anyone? http://www.planeshift.it/

MMO games will shift to player-run or free-run, or at least the players will. Why? Because no one will chow down your cash anymore... Overall my experience in free worlds cannot compare quality-wise with commercial MMO's. Somehow free worlds have more quality, and care about the creation of their system, world mechanics and general functions. I know, this is not a rule, however, if you like playing MMO's every so often... My hint is: Find a free project! Either 100% free as in original client and server, or emulated and changed. I'm currently working on www.sundershard.com which is an emulated server for "Ultima Online". It will be an enforced RP shard, where it is required for you to be in-character at all time. A more fun way to play the game, socially, without focusing too much on grinding and mechanics. PGing will be punished by the mechanics actually, since your gains will freeze. All you have to do is play the game normally, without too much committment to get fun out of it (except for us who run the game...) For all you 3D maniacs, who will for sure say "Who wants to go back to fake-topdown-3D", its actually better for you... Less tiring for your brain, you can actually relax without worrying about so many dimensions, since the game is predictable. I played WoW, yes, got to level 60, quit. I still play Guild Wars, not very often since I work and study, but whenever I feel like it. If you like 3D games, THAT MUCH, actually I'd say go for guild wars instead of WoW, for the simple reason that its a more relaxed game. Not so much grinding, and easy ways of having real fun with it without huge time committment. If you're the PvP guy, you can just make a PvP-only character in seconds... if you're the PvE guy, takes about a week to go through one of the game's plots at normal play time. WoW is evil, WoW is actually... boring-- why? In Ultima Online, at least on a good shard thats balanced... anything can happen to you. You could be killed, your items lost, your items simply stolen, like the real world... there's suspence! PERIL. In wow.. well nothing really happens that affects you all that much, nor guild wars for that matter. If you're the kind that wants to play a thief, and know what everyone is carrying around in their packs, those games aren't for you, those games will bore you to hell OR to get the same amount of fun you have to invest 2353245 hours! I like the Ultima client because its so hackable, you can basically create your own distint world with custom mechanics, skills, appearance, graphics, everything. A basically new game out of an old game. I don't really like how OSI runs the game, its way more corrupt than the most corrupt free shard project... You can just pay them and buy advances... so I'm telling you, explore the possibility of free gaming, free MMO's that can be as fun, without costing you anything, and certainly a LOT less time, and more fun! Additionally there's games being developed like http://planeshift.it/ that have original clients and are getting more and more interesting as time progresses. Good luck getting out of Blizzard's crackhouse! :)

http://www.planeshift.it/ I've seen a lot of so-called FOSS MMO games in the works, but this one seems to be the only one I've found that has any real dedication. Still, they've been working on it for years now and there's not much to see. But it does have a working client/server and is pretty damn good for a volunteer effort.

Please don't tell me this is true? You've wasted your braintime on the most milked franchise in the history of mankind only to be sued to chunky kibbles by Sony/LucasArts/YouNameIt the instant this goes gold? Please, no, don't tell me this is true.
If only they had put their efforts into Planeshift to get it on with a viable open source alternative to WoW and GuildWars. But, no, they had to ripp a commercial product. Great. Wonderfull.
What a waste of brainpower.

I believe it's PlaneShift you're looking for. http://www.planeshift.it/. The domain is .it but the site is in English and most players in game have standardized on English too.

What's your take on Planet Shift?

He loves them both and so do I.

http://planeshift.it/

http://heroscapehq.com/

There's still room for open source, or free to play games. Have you seen Planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/ or Eternal-Lands http://www.eternal-lands.com/. The first one is fully open source, the second has only OS client. Of course none of them have hundreds of thousands players, but... check them yourself. Regards

.. the "real" role-players hang out (basically live) in the town of Hydlaa in the free online game Planeshift (from planeshift.it) Check it out, it runs on Mac, Linux and Windows!

and forget nethack... just install Planeshift ( from http://www.planeshift.it/ ) and load you're character, which is stored in their database and accessible from anywhere with Internet access. The Planeshift client program is available for Windows, Linux and Mac!! And it's open source, and FREE! It's hard at first, but great fun after a while.

If these games are so important to people, why are they and groups that advocate for them not putting their money and time into something community-developed like Planeshift*? It might take a few years to make it really comparable to something like SWG, but it would mean taking an active role in making their lives better, instead of just hoping that some faceless corporation doesn't fuck them in the ass in service of next quarter's profit margin.

*I'm not associated with Planeshift in any way; I don't even think it's that good. I just can't think of a better example off the top of my head.

Planeshift is in development if you want a Windows Linux MMORPG, its a little rough but looks to be getting better.
http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html

You mean PlaneShift?

At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is where Wine really shines, for applications that are needed, but have a low chance of being ported to Linux, and for which no native application exists. In the future they may decide to rewrite the applications to be native to Linux, but the chances of doing that as a part of the initial transion are low, as the time required to develop and test such applications is generally non-trivial.

I think in general, Wine is one of the catalysts for Linux adoption, which, ironically, will at the same time will cause it's own irrelevance at an accelerated rate. Without Wine, Linux adoption would be much slower than it is right now, even if only initially, people like to stick with what they're familiar with. Every person I know who has tried out Linux (including myself), has attempted to run the programs they used to use under Wine. I can also point out that they usually find native applications that replace the functionality of the programs they were running under Wine. I certainly did, and I no longer have a use for Wine, I've been running Linux exclusively for about 2 years now.

The one sticking point for a lot of users is still games however. Few Win32 games will ever be ported to Linux, and finding native games that can act as a replacement can be very difficult except for some of the most popular games, for example, the Civilization series => FreeCiv. Not to say that there aren't any games available for Linux, but if there was no Wine, the list would be significantly shortened, and many of the games that people want to play have no equivalant.

I don't think Wine will ever be completely irrelevant, but as it gets better, it will drive itself that way.

It depends what you want.

If you want to make it easy I'd recommend Torque from GarageGames. It has greate documentation, lots of premade widgets, it's also finished and being used for a number of games. Mainly it has the polish that makes working with it enjoyable. (Tutorials, prebuild samples, etc) Not open source but has a similar community
Someone else has already recommened Crystal Space. If your looking for an example of an MMORG check out PlaneShift.

Another engine that I've been impressed with is ORGE

Anyway as I stated at the begining if you are trying to get something done ASAP go with Torque it has a lot more support. On the other hand if you want something free try Crystal Space or ORGE. One last project you might find interesting is WorldForge they have been building MMORG for a while now. They still haven't finished anything but it's more like a backend and might be useful.

I haven't seen Planeshift discussed here yet. It is the coolest looking FOSS game I have yet seen. It is a bit like EverQuest. The download is an astonishing 250MB, most of which is artwork. It is based on the CrystalSpace 3D engine, a truly great piece of code. If you look at the "related projects" link on the CS mainpage, you will find links to many, many other FOSS games based on the CS engine. Truly a vibrant community, yet mostly unknown. Check it out.

Launched this week was the free art project LessShift which allows anyone to run a Planeshift server that users can legally connect to (the Planeshift art license prohibits players from connecting to "non-official" servers with official art). We're currently in need of artists with 3ds max skills and/or Blender experts who can revive the Blender -> CS export tools. 2d artists, musicians and Quake/Halflife mappers are also needed.

All contributed art must be in the public domain or under a public domain compatible license (eg, x11, creative commons, GPL). Everyone is welcome to use the art bundle for any purpose (including developing other MMORPGs).

Is more player-created content, and I don't mean SWG's crafting system or any RPG's roleplay system.

What I'm looking for is an open-source 3D MMORPG. This way, content can be added easily because the system itself would be documented and open; one company wouldn't hold their subscribers "hostage". Someone hosting a game server could decide how much content to make available on their server, so you could run your own for, say, 20 users or (gasp) pay a commercial provider who is maintaining larger servers (and larger worlds) where thousands of users can play at once.

I know there are a few open source MMORPGs out there. A quick Google search turns up:
www.genecys.org
www.nevrax.org
eternalsun.info
www.planeshift.it

I think these articles need to look at the more independent titles as well. While I have found them to be more buggy, I would like some pressure put on the bigger companies to lower prices and/or increase content. Currently i'm fumbling my way through Planshift, and (because i'm a glutton for punishment) Planetside.

Planeshift is a free 3D MMORPG following the idea "Free engine, proprietary (though gratis) art." AFAIK it's the only free 3D MMORPG out there.
The system recently reached another milestone, though it will probably remain in development for quite some time... Maybe some Slashdot hackers will help? :)

Give me a break. The artists may like the licensing arrangement just fine, but that's only part of the picture. According to your own website, one of the main reasons you did this kind of split licensing was to prevent forks. That's not necessarily sneaky, but it does make it a bit deceptive to refer to the entire project as "open source", since the ability to fork is one of the main freedoms of open source.

The Planeshift license page states that the developers use a proprietary license for all game content, making only the actual program code open source. While they use practical-sounding phrases like "keeping resources" and "maximizing chances of success", this is clearly acknowledged as a way to keep people from forking the project (by making it impractical to do so).

One of the primary freedoms afforded by the GPL and other FOSS licenses is the right to fork. Without the ability to fork, a project can die or stagnate if the leaders lose interest or turn into assholes, even when there are other interested people who would be willing to keep that project alive. In other words, the ability to fork gives you "The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3)."

IMHO, any project that claims to be open source but deliberately attempts to prevent forks should be regarded with suspicion.

I have mentioned some of them in other posts, but I summarize them here and also mention what appears to be an untruth in their license webpage.

1. People are forbidden from using non-code content, even in other free projects. Legal, but nasty.
2. Authors are required to allow themselves from being forbidden to use their own content as a condition of being a full contributor. They aren't allowed to contribute content they used in any other game, EVEN IF THEY HAVE THE LEGAL RIGHT TO DO SO, EVEN IF THEY HAVE THE LEGAL RIGHT TO GRANT A COMPLETE UNREVOKABLE LICENSE TO USE THE CONTENT, AND EVEN IF THEY HOLD THE COPYRIGHT.. Very nasty, legal, but extremely unfair.
3. They claim these restrictions are needed to prevent authors from retroactively removing permission to use the content and to prevent authors from denying future uses of their work. A simple non-revocable, assignable, perpetual license granted by the author to the project would be sufficient.

I know they don't want forks, and want to have control, but the license even does the authors wrong.

Only people that would likely agree to those shackles would want to get paid in return. Not good for a free project.

See http://www.planeshift.it/pslicense.html

The source code is viewable in CVS on sourceforge. I see directories for both client and server code. The pieces of code I looked at are under GPL, and written in C++.

From reading their licensing page, it looks like they are making all the client and server code of the game GPL, but all the art, game rules, etc. that make it a particular world are under a special proprietary license. They have a very good argument for why they chose the licensing style they have, though myself I think they are perhaps over-paranoid of forks.

In summary, they make it easy to use their engine to create your own, entirely different game, but they don't allow you to create slight tweaks of their existing game. They also don't permit use of custom clients with their servers and content, as I read it.

The source is available in sf CVS. See here for instructions.

However, a source release is not available, not in their home page, not on sf.

Also, the project is not completely Open Source. Part is covered by the GPL and part by a proprietary license of some sort.

See their explanation.

See them? I don't

PlaneShift the FOSSMMORPG (...phew...) is about to finally release It's new prerelease, Molecular Blue. They Have shut down the old servers and started the migration for everyone who played the old one. This new release will include fighting, magic, quests, etc.

I think this could be a nice example of OSS gaming.

http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html

planeshift is free!!!

http://www.planeshift.it/

There's even a Mac client in alpha!

Or, instead of paying, find a free one. Try Planeshift (http://www.planeshift.it/) when the new version gets released in a bit. It will have combat, guilds, money, etc. Their philosophy is to have a game with NO subscription fee, period. Sounds like a good idea to me...

Unfinished, but in active development:

Planeshift

It's coming, albeit slowly...

Crystal Space is well designed, it just takes some getting used to. It's extremely OO. It's bloated somewhat. You need to have it handle all your variables for you etc.

However it's extremely powerful, and kicks the ass out of this engine from my impression. The existing renderer isn't too good, probably about the standards of this one, but their new renderer is capable of cel shading and bump mapping to make Doom 3 envious. And as the poster pointed out it's behind a relatively big-name OSS game. Although I must admit I haven't seen many other examples of its use.

If you are planning on using CS for development, consider CEL, the Crystal Entity Layer. Like CS itself it's in production and nowhere near finished, but handles entities for you (including physics and AI). Something to look out for.

CS's version number at the moment is 0.98r004 - this is normal. They keep increasing it in tiny amounts because, unlike GAIM, they are scared of reaching 1.0 :)

There's another OS 3d engine called crystal space 3d. It's been in development FOREVER now, and I'm still waiting for a completed cross-platform game, but it looks like a cool proejct. Anyone feel like porting this to mac?

What about PlaneShift?

Planeshift
GNU GPL (mostly)

Still in development, but keep your eyes on Planeshift a very ambitious and so far very well done online role-playing game. (It's playable now but not complete and a very large download). I hear that a new preview version (with a MacOSX port) is on it's way.

There are a few other games in progress based on CrystalSpace as well (which works on Mac, Linux, Windows, and other platforms as well with varying degrees of support).

Hi Actally an OSS MMORPG project is already ongoing. The Planeshift project started end of 2000/ early 2001 and development is still going strong. If you want to help them go take a look at their recruitment page For example, a the moment they are looking for 2D and 3D artists as well as Background/setting team members. It's been a while since I haven't tested their game (more than a year) so I won't comment on it, but the best thing is to head over there and try it yourself ;) Be aware thought that it is an ongoing project, so don't go there looking for a finished game :)