Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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.
;) 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.
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?
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.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
...just plain glacial.
...dozens of tiny servers to manage each part of the protocol stack...
...no one is really certain what's going to be done and how it's going to get done.
...the success or failure of most open source projects can be directly correlated to the amount of obsession some central figure...
Yep, huge, slow, steady, and relatively unstoppable. Good description.
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.
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.
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