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RoboCode
Make it a competition amongst the members of the club. This is a little more modern take on old clubs where the main focus was usually Chess, Checkers, etc.

For a little more advanced stuff, you could fork Mana World or create bots for the server and improve the game overall.

Make an IRC MUD using PircBot or any of the other libraries out there. I've always wanted to do this but have never gotten around to it.

Lastly, the most advanced option... research into making another Linux Distro ("Club Name" Distro -- also come up with a cool club name) or another Linux Desktop Environment (forking LXDE will be the easiest).

There are lots of little things like this that you can research on the web. Chess can still be fun if you require no use of search trees, but instead force the use of a more pseudo-random algorithm like the Genetic Algorithm. Ask around the school to see what people are doing in their spare time at home and what they think is fun. Most people using Facebook? Maybe write a really simple Facebook app and then eventually a game...

TMW is a 2D MMORPG still alive and kicking after spending over five years in pre-alpha already.

We're slowly approaching alpha now so we can finally leave behind the temporary test platform. Using our awful circa 2004 eAthena testbed (a server emulator for Ragnarok Online, based on the tangled up source code of an old MUD) we have been able to get our client technology into rather good shape. It'll be nice to work on our own server, own gamesystem and have properly designed content instead of the current pseudo content to attract testers with bright colors.

http://themanaworld.org/ - should be good enough to kill a few hours every now and then even as it is now. The community is generally rather warm and welcoming.

Incidentally, if someone has the urge to waste time on C++, we're always looking for new programmers too. Especially if you'd be crazy enough to port (rewrite in this case) the entire client into QT. Lua skills might be nice too since we're going to use that for scripting the dynamical aspects of the gameworld and if that gets too heavy, we've already been considering luaJIT too.

So you would want a client who is ready to scream 'hack the planet'-type responses at you any time your investors make you protect their investments when the problem seems to be more a fault in the legal system than with your company to begin with?

If you don't want to get in trouble, don't fsck around with online services hosted by big companies. It will bite you in the ass eventually. If you are such an advocate with such 1337 sk1llz, head on over to one of the open source MMO games and contribute to one of them instead of ruining commercial realms with closed-source shareware garbage. One action will lead to more legal nit-pickery, the other will eventually lead to the phasing out of the viability of commercial MMOs.

I'd recommend starting off helping with the Mana World project as it seems to have one of the most friendly group of developers and sticks to the 2D Ultima Online / Zelda styles instead of being a EQ knock off with eventual commercial aspirations, such as Eternal Lands or PlaneShift seem to have.

Didn't your mother's ever tell you guys "two wrongs don't make a right"? It's not about being nice and turning the other cheek, it's about staying out of trouble over escalating stupidity.

And from the gamer point of view,

nethack, doom, solitare, mines: what more do you need?

http://themanaworld.org/about.php
http://arianne.sourceforge.net/

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).

If your game depends on a load of exotic libraries, then you should jolly well provide them in their correct versions below the game itself on the downloads page.

If your game depends on a load of exotic libraries, then you should jolly well provide them in their correct versions below the game itself on the downloads page.

If your game depends on a load of exotic libraries, then you should jolly well provide them in their correct versions below the game itself on the downloads page.

If you were a big fan of Secret of Mana, there's a MMORPG on sf.net that tries to capture the feel of SoM. The sf.net page The main website

Like most projects on sf.net, it's under development and isn't out of alpha, so be gentle with it... and if you like it and can contribute to it (pixel artists, anyone?,) please do!

http://themanaworld.org/ Yeah, it's still in development... and probably will be for a long time... but it's still awesome!