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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.
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