The WorldForge Project Celebrates Three Years!

cyanide writes "Well it has been three years since The WorldForge Project was first announced on Slashdot as an effort to develop open source Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORG ^? ). Back then we were calling ourselves 'Altima', but since then we've released our first game, Acorn, and are now working on our next release, Mason. The project really is thriving now, and I'd love to see some new blood join us. "

Comments

cheating

[eric6]

perhaps this is a silly question, but if the MMOG is open source, wouldn't this open the gates for a ton of cheating?

development pace

[b-side.org]

not to be rude or anything, but WF makes Mozilla look like linux - development is just plain glacial.

a lot of the slowness seems to center around the core design of building dozens of tiny servers to manage each part of the protocol stack, but a large part of it also can be attributed to a lack of clear goals. it seems like no one is really certain what's going to be done and how it's going to get done.

not that there's anything 'wrong' with that, but it's interesting to see the way large products take shape. it seems like the success or failure of most open source projects can be directly correlated to the amount of obsession some central figure has about getting them running.

Re:development pace

[praedor]

I had forgotten its existence until this Slashdot article. I slipped on over, expecting something new and...nope, pretty much the same as when I last checked it out.

Since I am not a coder, I can't join up on that front. I went to see about possible clients. Same old thing, you click on the clients link and get a short list of clients, none of them playable. The really interesting ones (the 3d clients) are all but useless...and Geosil, you get a page telling about it and bunch of bforken links to screenshots. It is absolutely not downloadable. There is NO download link anywhere. What's the point? No source, no alpha or beta level client, nothing.

None of the 2d clients are really usable yet either. Nothing beyond 3 lvl and 3 lvl is not playable.

Oh well, I guess I check back in a couple of years and see if anything has changed.

Quick question...is Worldforge going slower or faster than Golgotha Forever (the game that is literally taking "forever" to get anywhere)? The problem here is that by the time anything is useable and playable, the graphics tech will be sooo far behind it will be like playing Centipede in a world of Half-Life or Halo.

I would like to see something really cool come of this but games are just not an area where open source works well. Companies push the envelope and are constantly getting places with really cool AI and REALLY great graphics, etc. The glacial development time for all the open source game projects assures that anything produced will ALWAYS be generations behind LAST year's commercial games.

Re:development pace

[b-side.org]

I don't fully understand your analogy - a 3 year project (WF) makes another 3 year project (Mozilla) look like a 9 year project (linux)

In three years (!) mozilla has a useable browser, but only barely. Linux changes daily. Sometimes it makes a little move backwards, but it's generally been a straight curve forward and up.

Compared to that, in three years WF is, well.. it's pretty much exactly the same as it was 2 years ago. When did the first Acorn betas start showing up?

Actually, it's not at all my intent to diss WF - you guys are working on a huge project. I'm just sayin', it's slow like death.

Have you looked at openrpg.com yet?

[Naum]

OpenRPG

Open source role playing application - I believe it's written in Python and can run on both Windows and Linux platforms. Offers dice rollers, maps, minature battles, adventure building, chatting, etc. ... I haven't used it yet, but it seems to work for others and I am planning to give it a try soon ...