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The WorldForge Project Celebrates Three Years!

Posted by Hemos on from the making-it-happen dept.

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. "

11 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. cheating by eric6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

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    fight global cooling

    1. Re:cheating by geekster · · Score: 3, Informative

      Eric S. Raymond wrote an essay about this... here.

    2. Re:cheating by Patoski · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I would point you to MUDs which have been around and open source for many many years yet cheating in the mature MUDs are quite low. Generally things are massively exploited at the beginning and then the holes are closed. I suspect WorldForge will be much the same way.

      -Pato

      --
      G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
  2. Worldforge's Philosophy on Cheating by scrytch · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm nominally a member of worldforge ... more like I hang around them all the time on irc, while my hobby projects that do directly involve them get pushed down on my project stack. There's plenty of disagreement on how to best prevent cheating, but much of it boils down to this: closed source hasn't prevented cheating in other MOG's (I like how we're boiling down the acronym from the unwieldy MMORPG to MOG -- don't really need the "massively" anymore, that's implied). Given the inevitability of failure here, the prospect of cheating needs to be treated more as a policy approach than anything else.

    One approach is to make the client dumb -- basically just a display for its inputs, the server only sends you what you need to see. Cheating is still possible here, but it'd be an impressive hack.

    Another approach is that a protocol codec might be made closed source, and with a few clever techniques, you can send "booby trap" packets that flag cheaters if they are ever responded to by a client (also requiring a closed protocol codec at the other end). This isn't foolproof, and might indeed turn out to be a useless measure. But hey, we can always lock 'em up for circumventing, right? ;) Finally, if the folks who wrote the protocol code are among the GPL zealots of WF, then it might be politically infeasable to go with a "closed one-off" approach.

    Bottom line, cheaters exist for open and closed source games, and WF will be no exception. WF can provide means to catch a large chunk of cheaters, not all of them, and ultimately it's going to be up to the policy of the server admin as to what to do with them. We just make the tools, you use 'em.

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    I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
  3. development pace by b-side.org · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    Indie rock lives! b-side!
    1. Re:development pace by __aaedhn419 · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      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) - but I believe WF has done well for a distributed volunteer effort. Unlike mozilla, none of us are employed by WorldForge, and unlike linux, we don't have a heritage of bad and good OS design to learn from. MOGs are the bleeding edge, which is a good place to be. :)

      Also, I believe some careful examination of WorldForge will reveal that we only have 2 different game servers, Cyphesis and STAGE, and that our goals are clearer than many open projects. Witness the rapidly growing Mason documentation at http://moria.mit.edu:8080/wf/dev/systems/in_develo pment/mason and the almost completely defined acorn rules at http://www.worldforge.org/website/rules/acorn/rule s . I believe that WorldForge seeming slow would only be because we need more help, not that we're unfocused. ;)

    2. Re:development pace by SpeedBump0619 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...just plain glacial.

      Yep, huge, slow, steady, and relatively unstoppable. Good description.

      ...dozens of tiny servers to manage each part of the protocol stack...

      hmm...I think you may misunderstand the reasons for those "dozens of tiny servers". I won't dispute the WF has created many servers, but most of them are developmental. As I see it, once everything is in place a world will be made up of 4 servers:
      1) a metaserver (so you can find the game you want)
      2) a media server (providing all the graphics in your chosen game)
      3) the game server (you know...the thing that actually does something)
      4) the AI "server" (which looks like a client to the game server, running the NPCs)

      all of these can be colocated if you choose, but we are developing with a goal of distributed world processing, so it makes *sense* to do some subdivisions.

      ...no one is really certain what's going to be done and how it's going to get done.

      This is really only half true. We *do* have a good idea of what is going to be done. I suggest you look at the documentation on the Mason game. All of that is planning, determining what needs to be done, and what *doesn't* need doing (yet in some cases).

      Sadly, I do have to admit to not knowing how it's all going to get done. As I've never done it, or anything like it, previously this is new territory. I find that part of it's appeal, the exploration of something new.

      ...the success or failure of most open source projects can be directly correlated to the amount of obsession some central figure...

      This is close, but not quite correct I think. Who is the obsessive figurehead behind Mozilla, Linux, Gimp? Maybe they do have one, but my guess is on something more fundamental: Vision. The developers of all successful open source projects have a common vision, and that vision is what binds and drives them. Sometimes that *is* one inspired person, and at other times it is a community vision.

      -SpeedBump the verbose

    3. Re:development pace by praedor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.



      --
      In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
    4. Re:development pace by Chris+Johnson · · Score: 3, Funny
      Actually, it's more like the problem is clear but unprioritized goals that have zilch to do with actual gameplay fun. This might have changed since I hung out with WorldForge people- dunno- doesn't sound like it.

      By this I mean: by the time you actually _have_ elves and barbarians and such, or whatever you have in the way of gameplay, you also have houses composed of zillions of individual 'brick' objects which are independently quarried and sold by autonomous mason software 'agents' so peasants make their houses brick by brick and you can do the same- it'll take several months- and at some point you have to ask, why? WorldForge much more closely resembles an academic project than any sort of game. This is a fine thing- but I don't think that means it's going to turn INTO a game, ever.

      What's going to be done is 'everything'. If you needed half a brick, you'd be able to go to a house anywhere, break the wall, get a brick out, break the brick and dynamically form two half-brick objects. A new type of object! Exciting! Who knows what you can do in a game where you can dynamically create wholly new types of objects due to the great flexibility of the underlying software! I'll tell you- you can sit there holding half a brick. If that bores you, you can break it again, and sit there holding a quarter of a brick. Maybe you can hit somebody with it, though there is a (laudable) pacifist streak in WorldForge development that makes it questionable you'd be allowed to do unkind things like that.

      WorldForge is an impressive dream- but it shouldn't be considered a game. Perhaps it'd be better considered an artificial-life or artificial-world project.

  4. Download mirrors list by cartographer · · Score: 3

    This is a list from a website mirror a couple months old, so you might have a few broken links. But here are some locations where you can get wf code and media without going through the bogged down main page.

    Enjoy
    _____________________________________________

    Main Download Site

    The primary worldforge ftp site is at this location:
    ftp://victor.worldforge.org/pub/worldforge

    Mirror sites are also available at the following locations:

    ftp://two.woovis.com/pub/worldforge thanks to James Nugen
    http://grimicus.dyndns.org/pub/worldforge/ thanks to Dan Tomalesky
    http://kafka.i-site.com/~novalis/mirrors/wf/downlo ads Pennsylvania, USA thanks to Dave Turner
    http://kafka.i-site.com/~novalis/mirrors/wf-debian / Pennsylvania, USA thanks to Anders Petersson
    http://purple.worldforge.org/wf/downloads/ Colorado, USA thanks to anubis
    ftp://ftp.fr.gnome.org/pub/worldforge/ Paris, France thanks to Alexis de Lattre

  5. Have you looked at openrpg.com yet? by Naum · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ...

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    AZspot