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Anarchy Online
church writes "Oslo, Feb 1st 2000 - Funcom is pleased to announce the Linux version of our Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Anarchy Online. ... The game can be compared to online titles such as Everquest and Asheron's Call. However, Anarchy Online is set in a sci-fi environment 30,000 years into the future on a distant planet called Rubi-Ka." They're taking applications for beta testers.
"AOL" for Linux
hehehehehe
I think constructive games are much more fun -- games where you make something, or design something. Civilization has always been a favorite of mine because of this. In Quake you build nothing -- everything lasts only as long as you stay alive. In the RPG games you build your character, becoming more and more powerful.
But the worlds themselves are just as static as in Quake. They can't be changed, if you kill the creatures they all come back eventually, and it gives the feel that nothing ever accomplishes anything.
In a game where you could build fortresses, develop inter-player politics, etc., would be much more fun. I think the emphasis on 3D graphics has held back the genre. 3D graphics are fine and all, but are technically difficult and bandwidth-hungry. With tile graphics you would be able to work a lot harder on the other parts of gameplay.
The documentation, I must say, is very good for the first public release. The author definately seems like he wants this to be used and understood by others. The docs put most systems to shame.
Also, compared to many open-source game efforts, this is the product of a very mature programmer. Nothing against the young and enthusiastic, but they make many mistakes that have been made before -- I know I would. For building a strong infrastructure this would not do. And MUQ is all about infrastructure. I think he mentioned that he was the original author of the Citadel BBS system -- so it should be apparent that he's been around a while now.
mmmmmm
Screenshots Looks kinda sweet.
This sig is false.
I didn't see any, but I didn't dig too deep.
This sig is false.
GUNK?
Kind of something along the lines of this anarchy online thing.
The development process is a great deal more open, at the least.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm sorry if this offends any of you, but I've always felt that Slashdot shouldn't be allowed to become a mere mouthpiece for announcements and press releases pertaining to the Linux world. We're a tech site, and we should stick to that. Seeing this shameless plug for a game - a proprietary game, even - on the index page really sickens me, and goes to show how times change.
If michael and the gang really want to post this kind of crap, the least they can do is put them into a "Press releases" category so that I can uncheck it in the preferences page.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Hmm.. platform independencem, ease of poring... QT.. Another nail in the GTK casket.
Perhaps you're not aware, but GTK is platform independent as well. It has already been ported to the Win32 platform. And as long as we're flinging FUD around, I might point out that GTK is also language independent, while Qt is limited to C++.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
...only 60 times slower than C! ^_^
No offense, it looks like a pretty cool text-based MUD engine, but it is not going to be competing with any of these commercial real-time 3D massive multiplayer systems any time soon. To manage a real-time 3D environment, you need raw speed.
To be honest, it looks to me like it's just trying to do too much. It leaves things so open you might as well just start from scratch.
The value of a MUD engine is that it has a certain basic functionality, and you define the variation from that functionality and specific data that fits within it. If you make a MUD engine that you can do <i>anything</i> with, you haven't really gained anything over just picking the language of your choice and the OS of your choice and going from there.
For a good case study of this effect see <a href="http://www.verge-rpg.com/">VERGE</a> (the main site's down, but there's a link that'll let you into the community). VERGE is a console-RPG construction kit. VERGE 1 had a simple scripting language that didn't give the programmer a whole lot of freedom, people complained, but they made lots of games with it (well, lots of demos; I don't believe I ever did see a VERGE game completed). To "fix" these problems, VERGE 2 was created. It allowed a whole lot more and included a "scripting" language that's really an interpreted C variant. The problem is, making a VERGE 2 game was a whole lot more complicated than making a VERGE 1 game. In fact, people would probably have been better off with just a good C library for tiled graphics with sprites and a few special effects, keyboard, and sound handling. So VERGE has more or less died off, with the occasional demo still popping up, but most of the projects having died a slow death when people who chose VERGE because they couldn't program tried to move from 1 to 2.
My first impression of the discription was that it was talking about a tightly coupled operating system/programming language like Oberon or Forth. When you step back a bit, MUQ looks a lot like some LISP or Forth variant running on EROS. Not a bad platform for a MUD, but why go to all the trouble of rewriting it in C and running it on top of another OS?
Yeah, the page is down, like I said. It crashed a few weeks ago and hasn't come back up. There's a link at the bottom...
Anyway that's kind of the point. It went down and the people running it haven't brought it back up (but surely next time it will come back bigger and better! - so they dream). Giving the developers more freedom killed it because, no longer limited by the engine, they all had these grandiose visions of incredible games which they really couldn't finish.
Anyway, back on topic, I mentioned EROS(seemingly also down...), because one of its big things is persistent store. Instead of having a filesystem, it just has the most incredible virtual memory system you've ever seen. Efficient multithreading is also really the OS's concern; it can do it so much more efficiently with special code.
As for QuakeC, a massive multiplayer RPG is much more complex than Quake. Imagine trying to track everything you do in a MUD while running a Quake match between 400 people.
Also, for your primitives to do most of the work, you need to have a very close idea about what your going to be doing with those primitives, meaning a very specialized and limited engine. I don't dispute that scripting languages in games can be valuable tools, but there's a big difference between a specialized scripting language you use to define the top level interactions and a "sky is the limit" wide open general purpose interpreted language that you use to place the scales on a dragon's back.
You've gotta wonder, is it worth all that effort to put another layer between the implementor and the hardware?
Anyone care to explain to me how that managed to get marked as a troll?
Roses are red, violets are blue. I'm a schitzophrenic, and so am I.
From their website:
Their huge success is without any doubt based on the Nano-Tek® technology the company patented 25,000 years ago!
Not only do we fail to fix the patent system in the next 30,000 years, but it gets even worse. Patent lifetime is now 25,000+ years!
Roses are red, violets are blue. I'm a schitzophrenic, and so am I.
In Europe (this is Oslo....), a comma is a dot, and a dot is a comma. Thus 3 million would be 3.000.000 and 8 and three quarters would be 8,75 ...
As the beta-testing sign-up was announced well before the Linux version was, its not guaranteed that this round of testing will include the Linux client... just a word of warning.
:wq
I'm all for RPGs... All too often though RPGs are the domain of the standard issue Tolkien-esque universe... Fireball spells, long-swords, skinny hats. Never been my bag, but I always participated because I loved the multiplayer aspects of MUDs.
Well I'm out of the closet now. I loathe mixing regents, I hate kings, queens, dukes, elves, hobbits, pretentious frickin' bards, preachy knights... I dislike chain-link armour.
Now, an argument can be made that if one wants sci-fi type multiplayer adventure, they should be playing Half-Life, or UT. I say nay! I wanna build a character who can weild dual pulse-cannons or whatever!
Back it up, mage boy, I got me some killer robots to smash.
-- The unsig...
Think all the current MMORPGs suck? Want to play from Linux
(and on alpha, ppc, sparc, mips, arm, whatever. *BSD or commercial
unix, windows, anything you can get it to compile on, too)? Want to
run your own world? write your own client? Then free software is the
way to go. Check out Worldforge,
a project to create an open source MMORPG.
Just a FYI, there's a lonely geek who's been working on a server designed for just these types of games for over 6 years, it just entered beta two months ago. Its been GPL'ed since the beginning. So go check out MUQ, located at www.muq.org.
Muq is a MUCK/MUD server engine (secureity, network, database storage, and job support) that has (so far) 3 language frontends to it: a FORTH-like (MUF), a lisp-like, and a C-like (MUC). The C-frontend was created in a couple of weeks. Or you can create your own compiler front ends. It has a very optimized inner loop and is intended for huge databases of small objects. So all the internal operations are very very lightweight.
It also has an OO scheme to die for, as it shamelessly stole CLOS from LISP... I think it even has a partial implementation of MOP. (Meta Object Protocal, lisp-heads will know that this lets you completely redefine your OO system if you need to.)
I checked out the new version from 4 months ago and almost blew chunks, no muck server engine should rotate the OpenGL teapot as part of its self-tests. :) It's gotten better since.
MUQ has exportable encryption support. (twofish and diffe-hellman, I believe) It is turning into the emacs of MUCK-servers. With luck, somebody may even implement emacs on top of it. :)
It has an implementation of a distributed-world packaged in the distribution, but that is still buggy and highly undocumented. But you can implement your own world on top of the core engine, up to and including OpenGL.
Eventually, when it gets GTK/QT integration, you'll run it as both the server and client, one batch of interpreted software runs on and implements the world-server, or the world-server farm, and another batch of code runs locally, integrating with OpenGL and GTK/QT interfaces to run the GUI frontend.
As with most opensource projects, and especially one with a scope this big, as big as emacs, it needs volunteers and support. And the author deserves some gratification as his child has been in developer-releases for 6 years before last december's beta-release, with his work almost unknown for that entire period.
So grab the source, and design your own giant world on top of MUQ