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WorldForge Forges Ahead
Anonymous Coward writes "LinuxWorld has an article up about the WorldForge Projects's game Acorn. Some of the developers of this cool open source EverQuest-like game are hanging out in the article forum answering questions. The groovy thing about the game is that you can contribute to it creatively more than with Ultima, etc., making your own special items and other stuff." There are several of these MMORPG's kicking around, and while I applaud their efforts I have this sneaking suspicion that the amount of work required is so high that none of them will ever be completed.
All to often you will have somthing that will break the game show up. The obvious things are easy to legislate against.
Hand grenades and beam weapons and other one sided technologies, introduced by a player, in a low end medieval fantasy world, for example.
An example of this is in song-writing. I can remember one guy writing a song, playing it for a friend, who comment was that it would be a heck of a lot better if it sounded like Led Zeppelin
Of Course , most players are smarter that this, but let's face it, you do have that class of player who wants to convert everything they touch into another shooter program.
Some of the funniest games I ever played in a pencil and paper setup were with characters that were deliberately and well under powered. (runaway! runaway!)
So I wish them luck, knowing how difficult it is to do this sort of thing right.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
We do not trust the clients. That is actually one of our basic design principles. The server does all the world and character related calculations. The clients are of course free to use prediction, but the server always has the final say.
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.
You can make maps that are not GPL, so there is lots of room for moneymaking. (Hi Per btw)
if people are still paying, they're going to realize that they might as well pay for the closed source game, which, at least at the moment, has far outpaced the open source efforts
that's not to say that they shouldn't be appluaded for their work though.
Thats not really open source though is it?
So we aren't really tackling the tougher issue; does opensource make security in multiplayer games too difficult?
I don't know, but quite possibly. The reason I say this is that security is difficult (nearly impossible) to obtain in multiplayer games when they are closed source and proprietary, and anything that makes it even a slight bit more difficult is not acceptable unless you're willing to concede defeat and let the cheaters have their way.
I hate to say it, but cheating in any multiplayer game project is going to be extremely difficult to curtail, and having the source code available to the public is not likely going to help matters.
Of course they could do a "blessed binary" distribution for each gameworld, kind of like nethack. That still works... right?
Sigs are awesome huh?
While I can see that the main hurdle will be that the project progressing too slowly will make it seem out-of-date compared to other commercial titles around, this need not kill it. I enjoy playing Subspace with its retro gameplay, despite the fact that the source is closed. Part of the reason it has a small cult following is that the original commercial owners have abandoned it, leaving the community to develop maps and rules as they see fit. Further, that it is behind-the-times is actually to my advantage...56K will be the majority of the net for decades to come.
They take about 4,000 man hours minimal investment. Then when your game is up, you're looking at a good 1-4 thousand in maintainence. Just convince a significant other that they should support you for a year or two while you create a work of art. Now thats always the tricky part.
God spoke to me
b4 I learned of Gnutella... I designed a network that was unhackable p2p... Basically it revolves around the assumption that the gnutella community is large, so there was at least one person who saw you last time you logged off and saved. So your data is always stored on other people's puters... Its like client/server but its patroled by computer COPS... etc. RNG are based on a bunch of other computers rolling, and all games are watched by random computers... Kinda tough to cheat... if you do, you're ousted from the community
God spoke to me
I'll agree with you that there needs to be a more newbie-friendly website, or at least a glossary of the different projects underway. STAGE alone has a mass of sub-projects, all with weird and wonderful names such as Mercury, shepherd, pegasus and thor to name a few. I was a bit daunted by the whole thing too. It took a little time to get to grips with how everthing works, but now I'm starting work on one of those obscure names - Mercury. Can't wait to get my teeth into it, either. :)
-- Nothan
This actually shows that open source should be about creating the tools for people to make these worlds, not for ruuning the servers themselves.
Another thing following from my argument is that a distributed server, call it peer to peer if you want, is better.
What it takes to create such a server is doing very "engine" like things, to allow player and wizard migration between different servers.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
You mean you got it to run and not crash all the time like 4.x does?
I think the entire thing is a fabulous idea. But I've been watching from the sidelines for awhile and it hasn't seemed to go very far. I wish I had the time to help give it a kickstart.
Well wouldn't this need some kind of identification system to identify the cheaters ? Or maybe it is automagical ..
Good idea anyway.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
It seems that they also started to write a gnutella style peer to peer client. Personally I don't know much about this stuff. Can you make a peer to peer client that is safe from cheating?
Anyways, given that different games have different needs (I wouldn't want a P2P MMRPG, too much wiggle room for cheating) I think that the two projects aren't really competitors. I mean, if I'm throwing around information about a sprite-based action game (see Nil for a good example) I probably would prefer P2P for the latency, and just use the honor system and social pressures to weed out cheaters... and frankly, writing and using 'helpful' (as opposed to cheating) scripts and macros would be part of the fun of the game, on another end. I've occasionally wondered if there's a gaming niche for 'cyborg' gaming, i.e., scripts/hacks allowed, just share what ones you use to get that give you that edge... the maps and games created for such gaming would be pretty weird and cool, probably... imagine making a game run by bots, where your sole role and ability is to co-ordinate them... I wonder if that's one of the things Valve is considering w/Team Fortress 2? I heard the 'Commander' role is approaching a certain amount of RTS in style, I believe
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
We are aware of the problems with the current website, and are working on a new website with better structure.
However, keep in mind that www.worldforge.org is a developer website. Using Wiki allows team members to keep the website pages related to things they work on updated. This also means that they can be a bit less organized. In the future we intend to set up www.worldforge.com as a page for players, and www.worldforge.net as a portal to existing servers.
I would love to see WorldForge succeed, and I might have been a part-time contributor, but there doesn't seem to be any clear direction or central motivation. Ultimately, they're going to need some to make a decent game because MMORPG's are huge productions.
We do have a very clear Master Plan. The basic idea is to implement successively more complete games, until we get to our goal, a complete fantasy MMORPG taking place in the Dural world.
We also have instructions for new developers, and there are always friendly people that are ready to answer questions on our irc server, irc.worldforge.org, channel #lounge. Feel free to drop in!
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.
The thing I liked best about MUDs and OOPs are that you could code objects in the environment, say, a HTTP server, and print "You hear a whirring noise" or something when it is accessed. Programming -- that's more interesting than slogging through giant rats!
I agree. The screen shots and what not look impressize. The other threads about cheating and bandwidth will be a problem (that can hopefully be overcome), but I don't think finishing is.
But if the "enemy" has the source available to them, all they have to do is compute what the checksum should be, hard code that in to where you send that checksum to the server, and *poof* they're in..
Dude, you're a staff member of Slashdot. You don't need to follow Signal 11's method of karma whoring (posts an opinion everyone wants to disagree with, just to get modded up as interesting).
All Open Source projects will always be completed. It's your kind of pessimism we don't need in the world of OS programming. If you think it's not gonna get done, why don't you take some of your free time and go help them? No, it's a lot easier to sit there and not do a goddamn thing but berate everyone else for not writing programs that do exactly what you like.
(okay, if you've been agreeing with me so far, may I point out three reasons you're on crack:
1. michael has a valid point based on the complexity of such projects alone... artwork, gameplay, and plot are all factors as well
2. michael has a life other than dropping everything to write a game to give out to the rest of the world.
3. No project is guaranteed to get completed, for a variety of plausible or oddball reasons. After all, a meteor might land tomorrow... do you want God to hold it against you that you didn't make the deadline for your DeCSS Mozilla plugin?
Thank you.)
How is this so different from the MUDS that have been around for years that are open sourced? Cheating is usually easy to spot and can be dealt with by the server admin.
Except that it doesn't scale up ! Ask Carmack about how he feels about having everything on the server.
MMPRG's are stuck between two bad extremes
anyone else get the impression that this guy posted anonymously because he's the same guy that wrote the article?
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Hey, that arguments remind me of some of the greats faults in cryptography. Your argument is basicaly the same as security through obscurity. ... and are all completly documented cryptos that remain unbroken. (At least with an good key length)
deCSS has clearly shown that this principle doesn't work. Blowfish, AES, TEA, RSA,
Kindly pull your head out of your ass.
There's a world of difference between enabling secure communications with an open source program and preventing cheating in multiplayer games.
In cryptograpy <oversimplification> the goal is to enable Alfred and Betty to communicate without letting Chris listen in. </oversimplification> This assumes that Alfred and Betty can trust each other not to phone up Chris and tell him what the other person said. In short, you can trust the client - it's third parties you can't trust.
In gaming, this assumption does not hold. I can not trust Betty not to hack her client and frag my ass by shooting through walls. There are only 3 ways that I can deal with this.
1) I can just accept that Betty might be cheating and try to avoid the servers that she plays on.
2) I can try to ensure that Betty will have a very difficult time cheating by hiding the source code from her. This is security through obscurity, but I will make it impossible for *most* gamers to create cheating clients. If Debbie does build a cheating client and share it with Betty, I can release a patch that will break it and make make go back to the drawing board and release a new one. Since Betty, Beatrice, Bill and Bob aren't all that bright, they will have to play fair, at least until Debbie builds a new cheating client. This is security through obscurity, but it's workable.
3) I can move all the crucial logic from the client to the server. Since Frank runs the server and is trustworthy, I don't have to worry about hiding the source from Betty or Debbie. This is the most effective method of dealing with cheaters, but it also will increase bandwidth requirements and cpu overhead on the server. Either Frank or myself will have to spend serious cash on servers and tell the modem users to fuck off, or we'll have to live with shitty performance.
Those are my options. If I am a for-profit development house, option 2 is the most attractive one for me. I don't want to spend lots of money on servers or tell modem users to fuck themselves so option 3 is right out. Option 1 is also right out, as widespread cheating will piss off my user base and hurt sales.
Sure it's security through obscurity, but as long as you can keep the userbase *relatively* free of cheaters, that's *good enough*. The users will complain about campers and low ping bastards instead, and since they do that with *every* game, it won't hurt sales.
Security through obscurity is only a bad thing if a single exploit can fuck you over. If someone hacks your credit card database, or the government reads your emails about your pot smuggling operation, that's a disaster. If 1 or 2 people figure out how to cheat at counterstrike, that's only a *very* minor annoyance. Security through obscurity does work to restrict the number of people who can find holes. As long as your system can tolerate a small number of cheaters, you do not need bulletproof security.
Understand?
--Shoeboy
This is the land of Eric. Behold the list of those who entered and did not leave.
Really enter(yes/no) ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
The WorldForge philosophy, as I understand it, is that anything you can do with a client from an automation or display standpoint is 100% legal. So, provided there's not a bug in server enforcement of game rules, the open-source thing should be a non-issue.
However, I do disagree with some of the philisophical decisions the WorldForge developers have made on this issue. As I understand it, it would be legal to have a bevy of automated "slaves" that bankroll your main character.
"somebody could commit a CVS change with nobody knowing the difference. "
No, they couldn't. While WF does give wiki accounts out like candy, CVS is read-only until someone contributes something real.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
That's an interesting point, and one that has been discussed on our IRC channels. We see no reason to not implement sex, and are planning on implementing sexual reproduction in the final game. If somebody does not want it in their game world, they are always free to run a server with sex turned off. Whether to display anatomically correct models would be up to the clients too.
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.
Thanks for a reply, sorry if that sounded a bit harsh, but it was just the impression of a casual first exploration.
I guess what I meant by lack of a central plan is that you seem to be working on several different things at the same time, which seems to be a tough road to hoe.
Best of luck, I'll be keeping track. Is there any plan to solicit donations for server maintenance?
"an MMORPG needs a centralised server"
Why? Sure, the servers need to be synchronized... But not necessarily on the same system.
Um, if you're interested in networked applications involving 3D graphics, such as most modern games (including MMORPGS), you might want to check out Verse.
Briefly, Verse is a system (network protocol, client library, and a lightweight server) to make development of such applications easier. It's based on cool tech (such as subdivision surfaces), almost completely free and open (we use GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses), and best of all: not vapor!
Verse has been under development by two full-time developers for over 20 months, so we sure have code. If this sounds interesting, swing by the above SourceForge page and take a look. Thanks.main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
You're right, and mozilla will never be a browser.
Hey, wait a second, I'm posting from it now!
Combine a Quake 3 or perhaps Blade of Darkness 3D engine with the actual gameplay for these MMORPG's? The graphics are typically disgusting and drab enough that it's distracting. Developers could then concentrate on building a complex realm and plot.
I mean, an MMORPG needs a centralised server, or at least a directory of servers currently running. Granted, as someone mentioned in another thread about the CDDB thing, people can use other boxes, but an MMORPG uses a serious amount of bandwidth (unless it's shit), and a dedicated box really is needed.
I've worked developing a multiplayer game (a sports game). While it was slightly different in principle, the theory is the same, and a dedicated server could only manage about 300 users playing at any one time.
Game like UO and EverCrack have THOUSANDS online at any one time, spread over several servers. How can a free game compete with this?
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
Cheating, hidden codes, and advantageous bugs will be plentiful in this game, and so nobody will play it. It will be a failure of the Open Source model. And let's not get into the idea of them trusting client-side programs to be run. You can't even trust Diablo client-side, so why would you trust something with open source?
I'd rather have a small group of developers (say, 5 or so) writing the game, with no source code availability. This would reduce the number of bugs because only those 5 people would know the source, and so naming conventions and other programming practices could be held. Plus, there would be a clear picture of where the project was headed. Some average coder would be unable to put in a function "just for fun", and so bloat would be minimal.
It'll be interesting to see where this project leads; to /dev/null or to a Brave New World of programming. Time will tell.
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That's just the way it is
Complex? You mean like an OS kernel, or a windowing system? How about a database?
TONS of Free Software out there is extremely complex.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I run an open source multiplayer game, Dusk, and while there are many people who attempt to exploit bugs, there are equally many people working hard to track both the people who exploit them and the bugs themselves, so problems are usually fixed quickly and without too much loss. Have some faith in the ethics of good hackers.
you're absolutely right. that's why IIS kicks such ass on apache!
badoomski!
I realize it's a development project and not a finished product, but I think they need to present a more coherent website. There are dozens of projects listed and it's very difficult to understand what one should download and install if one wants to observe their progress.
I would love to see WorldForge succeed, and I might have been a part-time contributor, but there doesn't seem to be any clear direction or central motivation. Ultimately, they're going to need some to make a decent game because MMORPG's are huge productions.
> if people are still paying, they're going to
> realize that they might as well pay for the
> closed source game, which, at least at the
> moment, has far outpaced the open source efforts
Yes, to the gamers it will just be a matter of price. To the people running the servers, using a free engine and initial maps may be more cost effective than developing their own, and may thus lead to lower prices for the gamers.
This of course requires that the volunteers can create a quality engine for free.
The problem here is that the best/worst cheats are the ones that are the least noticable. When you make the aimbot so it makes you 10% more accurate, or a lighting change that makes people visible (and easier to shoot) in dark areas, these are the types of changes that are very hard to protect against and are made significantly easier with the source code sitting right in front of you.. These are the problems/dilemas I face when trying to determine whether or not to release the source to my current endeavour or not.. What I think I'd really like is a system to make the client prove itself.. but how do you do that in a way that you can't just hard-code in the answers?
So wouldn't it make perfect sense for the two projects to work closely together?
Of course, that's the beauty of free software/ open source software . . .
Not to go too far on a tangent, but while reading some other comments, it begs the question, "How do you keep an open source game secure?" I've been working on a real-time, multiplayer and have been trying to figure out how to work the network protocol to be secure enough to stop people from cheating. This is hard enough when the "bad people" have to snoop through binary packets to determine what is being sent, but when they have the actual code, it becomes trivial. The argument that came to mind after that was, "If you release the source, then there will be people to help you find and fix those bugs." Call be cynical, but I'm thinking there'll be more people looking to exploit the bugs than fix them.
Have you seen the list of credits at the end of Diablo? I would bet that there are at least 50 people from Blizzard who worked on Diablo. My point about the small number of developers is that a singular vision could be shared. How could a vision of a video game be shared by 50 people at the same time? Among 5 or so, it is possible, because of the high amount of personal interest and input in such a small group. But 50?!?
How dare you threaten to mod me down as a troll? Just because I was unclear does not mean that I am trolling.
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That's just the way it is
Worldforge isn't trying to create one specific game.
They are creating the tools that will reduce the task of creating an online world. Hence the name Worldforge.
Acorn happens to be a client/world that has been designed and developed as a "test" of the current development.
It usually helps to read about something you are planning on criticizing.
kojent
On the FAQ it says:
What is the difference between WorldForge and Majik?
WorldForge: WorldForge's approach is not to create a single game, but instead a flexible framework that can support a variety of different kinds of servers, clients, rule sets, worlds, and graphical "looks".
Majik: The Majik Project strives to create not a system for creating roleplaying worlds, which is what WorldForge aims at, but is a concentrated effort to create one complete and evolving roleplaying world.
If you limit the amount of trust given to the client, most of these problems go away..
Of course, this brings other problems to the server (which makes it more complex).. you have to maintain the client's state (as in everything the client can see) on the server - and only send that. You also need to send the client input events ("move forward 1 meter") to the server, and make sure that the 'character' is capable of moving/doing that.
All of which will increase bandwidth requirements..
In essence, the client becomes a 'dumb' terminal; it only displays what the server sends it, so someone can't write an 'aimbot', or make all of the walls transparent (well, they could make the walls transparent, but it wouldn't do them any good.)
The short answer is that you'd write it just like you'd write any other secure app - you don't trust the client.
After downloading (wow 60MB!) and trying the Acorn Demo - I have to express my zeal!
:-) o.k. - it will take possibly another year that there is a playable Version. But I am really thrilled!
:-)
Considerung, that it is an Demo/Alpha Version, also the graphics are nice! It reminds my of an old Amiga Game "Fairy Tale" - but that's online!
I wish the best to the developer teams!
Competition good: motivation to do better (exploiting the human competitive instinct), forced to optimize, blabla
Competition bad: reinventing the wheel, wasting effort on doing the same thing over and over again, and so on
Depending on how high is the project's objective, it will require more and more resources (developers) to ever complete - otherwise it will be progressing so slowly that it will be obsolete by the time it completes, or the developers will just give up. Doing an 'echo' program is simple enough for one man, doing a MMORPG isn't. If these projects are really staggering this much, there's too much competition; merge a few and try again.
majik3D was my favourite for-the-skies MMORPG but they went out of GPL, I'm not too familiar with details but apparently a company, shall we say, intimately collaborates with them and wanted Majik proprietary. There was some hassle with some proprietary libraries too, but that's the essence, and I also got the impression from their lead developer that they weren't too impressed with one lousy patch they received for being GPL.
That probably doesn't have anything to do with this and likely is inaccurate anyways, but I thought you'd like another pointless comment to waste your space.
- Kaatunut
That's true for developing the game AND playing it. Anyone who knows/is an addicted EverCrack player knows this firsthand.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
> Game like UO and EverCrack have THOUSANDS
> online at any one time, spread over several
> servers. How can a free game compete with this?
Eh, the _source code_ is free. This does not mean the connecting to the server need to be free. People will idealy be able to pay a subscribtion fee for a big server, try it free on some small hobbyist server, or even try to create a competing commercial server if the existing servers are too expensive or poorly managed.
You'd still the the central server to pass data to the other servers. LIke I said in my original post, a directory server.
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me