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Saga of Ryzom, Free and Open Source Software?
chew827 writes "Nevrax has been suffering bankruptcy and is in the process of liquidation and are trying to sell the Saga of Ryzom, the #3 rated MMORPG on mmorpg.com, to any prospective buyers. A group has assembled to try and raise enough funds to buy the intellectual property and open it under the GPL license — something Ton Roosendaal did for Blender."
Blizzard buys it and then shuts it down to eliminate the competition. It is evil, but hey, it has been done before and they have cash-a-plenty.
Horizons has gone through some owners, as well, and even got Peter S. Beagle to take over some of the story writing. I'm not surprised that Ryzom is hitting the skids, though, as WoW pretty much has every moron in the world ponying up for the pleasure.
Can't stand WoW myself. Not too fond of Ryzom, either, come to think of it.
What's fascinating to me is that City of Heroes and City of Villains continue to do well in spite of the WoW-ed world. I guess it's just the fantasy genre that's too crowded.
All you fantasy MMORPG developers that haven't made it to market yet, take heed, sez I.
Making a project Free and/or Open Source doesn't automatically makes it better no matter what some zealots may say. In this case, a MMORPG project may or may not be suitable to such a change. The advantage of MMORPGs in the form that we all know is that one or several servers are run by an entity/company by its rules and the server rules are stricytly controlled by them.
Open Source almost always equalös division and we will see millions of variations of modifications that will be incompatible with each other and that will bring down the quality of the game.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Learn to count for fuck sake !
From the website: !
Highest Ranked MMORPGs
EVE Online Rating: 8.3
Guild Wars Rating: 8.3
EverQuest II Rating: 8.3
Dark Age of Camelot Rating: 8.2
Ryzom Rating: 8.2
Looks like number 5 to me
It sure isn't quality. A friend of mine downloaded the free trial they have. He played for an hour or two then uninstalled it because it was that bad. I hit it back in open beta and concluded I wouldn't be buying it.
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While I personally hate MMORPGs, I wish these fans the best of luck in acquiring the game. Something as large and mainstream as the #3 MMO going FOSS can only mean good things for open-source in general.
What I wonder, though, is who would actually run the game. A perusal of your fandom of choice's lower levels of fanfic will raise questions of the ability of even the most enthusiastic and well-meaning fans to actually run the canon.
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Of course there will be "millions of variations" (heh, dream on.. :P .. hundred(s) at the most i guess), but all the bad ones will die out or just be played by the gangs that cooked them together. The good ones will attract more players and developers and thus - evolve. Also, open source software being used on a server doesn't mean that a server admin can not be BOFH:ish and impose strict rules.
Cheers..
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
... I haven't exactly seen an explosion of free MMORPG's hit the scene despite the core engine of Ryzom having been GPL'd for as long as I can recall.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
It seems like people are criticizing the effort because they've only considered the code that will be saved, or that the game itself wasn't very good, or that nobody will be able to run it with commercial success. But what about the various other assets like art (models, textures) and music that would be saved?
I think it would kick ass for smaller dev groups to have a production-ready (well, it's been used in production, anyway...) library of (L?)GPL-ed art to pick from, even if it was just to have available at production time and not polishing/shipping time. All that stuff sucks up resources and gets in the way of little shops producing anything commercially viable.
Granted, it ain't Oblivion but it's sure better than looking at a blank page to start with.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
Open Source if done right can be good for projects where access to data and source code, community contributions and decisions by community consent are good things. That is clearly not the case for mmorpgs due to data security and balance decisions that clearly cannot be done by public.
Data Security: Assuming that potential cheating issues are somehow resolved, even that all mmorpgs out there use security by obscurity approach due to non-trusted client AND need to offload large chunk of computations client-side at all times, simple access to formulas will take min-maxing to the extreme and will make balancing nearly impossible.
Balance Decisions: What community of players would ever agree on balancing changes? For any mmorpg player your class/type/template is underpowered and class/type/template of anybody that beat you is overpowered by definition. Good luck getting anyone to agree how to balance the game.
As to mmorpg.com ranking - it is irrelevant and biased data. Subjectively - no way obscure vaporware like SoR can be ranked #3 when even in North America when there are more than 3 mmorpgs that are NOT going bankrupt right now. Objectively - you should look into available subscription data, mmogchart.com is a good place to start.
I find it immensely sad that it has come to this.
When I started Nevrax it was with the idea that all the code would be GPL both on the client and the server side. Following a dispute over corporate strategy with the VCs funding the company, a good chunk of the core team left (myself included).
From that point on, the remaining managment and shareholders slowly closed more and more of the code - destroying in the process the spirit and the vision over which the company had been founded. In the end, destroying the company itself.
If Xavier Antoviaque and the folks behind this initiative think they can bring the ideas underlying Ryzom back to life , I sincerly wish them the best of luck.
I could see some other, dumber, companies doing this, but Ryzom is a niche game, there's no way they'd waste money to but it just to shut it down.
I find it interesting to note that Saga of Ryzom's parent company already GPLed the engine -- but offers a non-GPLed version for a fee:
http://www.nevrax.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php
So it should be trivial to get the end product.
The attempt to hit OSS is really a recognition that the game needs a LOT of work in a short period of time, more than anyone is likely to put into it ($).
g ames
The market is pretty much saturated with EverQuest and WoW. There is huge money and tons of time behind polishing these apps. Even lesser crud like GuildWars.
You can't do A1 titles on a shoestring budget, and if you build it they don't always come because you need to support it. (So capital and operating costs...) So they're looking for a buyer; and one buyer is suggesting an OSS because its sisyphysian in nature.
There are other open alternatives around. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_
The story of some of them is the same; source company can't keep the burner going without income so does whatever it can to keep the dream alive.
Software development is almost pure labor. Labor is the most expensive part of any endeavor. You can't take from the huge pot of $ without an equal amount of $ comming in. And there is a boatload of competition.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
I played Ryzom for more than 9 months, roughly from the introduction of the encylopaedia missions to shortly after the introduction of the PvP outposts, and for the most part, I loveed it, and made many friends there, some of whom I am still in contact with on a daily basis. One of the tings I liked most about it was the fact that it was so different to the other games around.
One of the high points in my eyes were the crafting system, which was, Shock! Horror!, more complex than 3a + 2b -> Sword No 5. Enough that best crafters gained a reputation for crafting better items than anyone else, and their items were highly sought after.
Other things that made it nice were the classless system (get bored of tanking? fine, heal instead), and the community that generally took in new players and guided them, with a remarkable lack of "FFS! Noob!".
Even though I've stopped playing, I used to pop my head in from time to time, and it is sad to see it get to this state, especially with the relatively recent addition of player created content (sort of player made instances) but hopefully there is an opportunity here for it to be reborn anew.
If that were to happen, I think it's likely we'd see different pricing structures from different suppliers... for me, a per-hour fee might be ideal, while serious grinders would enjoy unlimited access for a monthly fee. Either way, I don't think I'd end up spending $200-300 per year to play the game a couple hours a week, which is reason enough not to play WoW, IMO.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The life blood of any MMORPG is adding new content. Look at the original EverQuest; seems like they pump out an expansion every 6 months so there is some new quest to solve or item to gain.
Now you want to trust the content to programming geeks? Have you SEEN the state of the average fan fic?
Talk about Dork Ex Machina.
Every quest will involve having to visit the 99th level Wizard/Paladin/Thief in their trans-dimensional fortress who is surrounded with topless wenches while he watches a death match between Picard and Kirk. Oh, and Sam and Frodo are "doing it" in the next room.