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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."
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!!
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.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Learn to count for fuck sake !
Dark Age of Camelot Rating: 8.2
Ryzom Rating: 8.2
Looks like number 5 to me
LOL. Looks like it is tied for number four to me! LOL!
Link seems slashdotted, so here's the mirrordot.
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Um no.
1st: EVE Online Rating: 8.3
1st: Guild Wars Rating: 8.3
1st: EverQuest II Rating: 8.3
4th: Dark Age of Camelot Rating: 8.2
4th: Ryzom Rating: 8.2
When one or more places are tied, the following position starts counting from where it would have been (ie. you don't just ignore you've had 3 people in front of you).
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
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.
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.
The NeL engine is a very powerful engine and could have been the framework behind a lot of open-source MMORPGs. The problem is that it is only meagerly documented. Nevrax nearly abandoned the community (with a couple exceptions of developers from within helping us in their spare time) so none of this documentation was ever updated and completed. Recently they converted to a wiki and some of us have been putting together documentation ourselves. One of the big issues, that opening Ryzom up would help with, is that there is a lot of code that makes no sense without context. An example that I use frequently is the NLLIGO module. Nevrax refers to this as "legos for landscape." Ligoscape is a module for rapid development of landscape/levels. Only about 10% of this module is really documented (and only self-documented through code and examples of usages in the NLSOUND library) and the pieces that make this module shine - notably the pieces that take the "legos" and generate the landscape you as a player see - are contained in the closed source tools. Opening these tools up would empower existing (and new) NeL projects as well as encourage the ongoing improvement and development of the tools.