Slashdot Mirror
Last Chance to Help Free Ryzom
An anonymous reader writes "With the consistent influx of MMORPG's in the last few years it was obvious that many would fall by the wayside, one of those to fall is Ryzom, as you might be aware it is now going to be up for sale, and in an enterprising move for open source there is an initiative to buy Ryzom and put it under the GPL, much like Blender was in the past. However, time is short, apparently "Pledges must be made within the next few days, since the deadline for the final bid is expected sometime before Wednesday, December 19th". Already there is over 150,000 Euros donated and the FSF has donated 60,000!!
If you (like me) can see the benefit of having a fully developed MMORPG that is completely open source just donate a little, quickly!"
If everyone's the equivalent of a dev team member, then what's to stop everyone from making a monster at the start that dies in one hit and drops a trillion gold?
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
isn't the 19th a tuesday?
The cheap part is the code... How is the project going to be hosted?
Last I checked it still cost money to put a cluster of computers on the internet.
The market has spoken, this game was not worthy. I get that the cause is noble and all. But just because it becomes open source, etc, doesn't mean that this is a good game.
Now, I do see some advantages of having an engine like this open sourced, so I guess just for having this bit of code out and about, that could be a good thing.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
I seem to recall there being quite a few open source MMORPG already present. Wouldn't it make sense to use/work on the them rather than trying to opensource an existing game?
If it's GPL it'll get ported to Linux and then my marriage will be over! Please! For the love of Mike! I only just escaped from WoW!
Beep beep.
i really hate to be the downer, but i played ryzom for a while and found myself totally underwhelmed.
there's a reason why its going out of business.
Let's make this open source and see what's there. If there's a half decent engine behind it, then nothing's to stop one of us with the time, resources, or the inclination, from forking it and having something worthwhile pop out the other end.
A democratically run MMORPG? Have you seen the Warcraft forums? 100% of the userbase will be screaming "NERF!" about all the other classes in the game. :) There can be only one captain on a ship, is what I say.
Just as an afterthought.. what would happen if Blizzard would GPL their software? Obviously they would remain in control of the artwork and such, so nobody can start running their own little World of Warcraft. But what would it mean for other MMORPGs out there?
It's not such an insane idea really... look at the Unreal engine which gets used in dozens of other games. Would it improve or destroy the MMORPG market? Would Blizzard go bankrupt or be able to buy even more solid gold humvees?
I see the need for open source games that can rival the closed source ones and maybe a few moves like this might not go a miss... but do we need this game? If things have really gone that bad that they've been forced out of the market and can't compete then maybe this is because the game isn't that good. I've heard people saying that there are big problems with the way it plays - can we fix them to make this game as good as it needs to be? Even if that is possible will this be less effort than putting all that money towards one of the open source MMORPGs which already exist and making them a lot better?
How will this make money seems to be the other question? Will it be charged for or free as in beer aswell, if it is then how do we keep things ticking over with the servers etc? and who will own it? the FSF? the contributors? the donators? I can't get on the site but I really do hope that they have decided on these things and decided well... and would want to know the answers before I gave a penny (or euro, it seems)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The deadline is a full year away then, no need to panic.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
If you want money, you have to pay for it, like the rest of us!
Hippies.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
To keep this thing ticking over you need full time sys-admins, support teams, server farms, bandwidth and various other reasonably expensive things.
Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more.
Now the game has already been written, so I'd have thought dev expenses would currently be minimal - so not too much saving moving it to OSS.
The first load of expenses are fixed(ish) and have to be covered, so either OSS as a whole is going to have to pay for other people to play - or people themselves will have to pay to play - and we can't let everybody run about compiling in their own stuff...and the more people come in, the more it's going to cost to run..
And it's not even as if the damn thing is covering it's costs at the moment - hence the sale...
The whole concept seems bizarre.
Seemingly there is something that is losing money, so OSS thinks it's a good idea to buy it?
Imagine this were some failed Microsoft product - would the OSS community all start bouncing on their chairs clammering to take it over and give up on this 'Linux thing'?
I've read the article and most of the replies.
What exactly are the benefits of having an open-source MMORPG?
The load balancing costs, server costs, bandwidth costs will force every instance to be a pretty small one.
Admitedly it's super-cool to run your own little world, so from that angle I can see a benefit.
But is there some sort of greater-good benefit that I'm missing?
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
I've never played MMORPGs, and might never do so. I don't have the time to get sucked into something like that. I'm more into games that I can save and walk away from, then come back later.
However, by adding this game class of game to the open source arsenal, we increase the overall attractiveness of open source systems like Linux to people (especially kids and young adults) who are sitting on the fence. I may donate for that reason, rather than from having a personal attraction to the game.
They were called MUDs.
What surprises me is that no one has written an open source 3D graphical MUD (which is all MMORGS are) from scratch yet. I realise its difficult but when has something being difficult stopped many projects before?
I vote we buy it, and make it all web 2.0ish. It'll be a socially collaberative MMORPG, where the common man develop patches and the community will vote for it. It'll go the way of Digg, and then the trolls will get to it, so you'll end up fighting greater goatse monsters in the dungeons of 'BIlL O'REILLY'S VAGINA LOLZ!1!'. It'll be fantastic.
Ryzom wasn't very good when it was released, but now it's actually really fun. The dev-team has already released an addon that allows players to create their own adventures. The graphics are also quite good for an MMORPG, so it should be possible to create a cool open-source MMO.
The engine itself is already released under the GPL: http://www.nevrax.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php But there seems to be very little documentation available.
Can someone who knows about this tell me if the textures, art, and models are included in open-sourcing this? Preferably in a commerical-use-friendly license? Because then I would absolutely consider donating.
A large library of free 3d-models with textures would be incredibly useful as a starting library for other open-source engine projects.
Open Materials Database
We have an entire year...the next time we have a Wednesday, December 19th is in 2007.
Peace,
Brad
I'm not usually one to criticize how people spend their own hard-earned money. But given the time of year, if I had an extra few dollars to spend, it would not be to buy a game to have it open-sourced, it would be to help sick kids enjoy life.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
A serious response to your troll post:
I hope things like spawning monsters and their attributes are controlled by the server. So only the guy running the server can use that sort of cheat, and if he overdoes it, he will find his server empty.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Quake 3 is a good example! Remember that there were several Open Source Mods just waiting for the engine code to be OSS... I believe you'd see the same here. There are OSS MMORG games out there, but none work "out-of-the-box" to where the focus can be on JUST art and game play not spending time waiting for basic features. All the "really good" OSS games are clones of commercial games that were able to leverage lots of free artwork made by fans for the established commercial game.. Nexius, Battle for Wesnoth, FreeCiv, etc. The open source "artists" and "gamemasters" are a different breed than programmers and they prefer to be in already working places like Neverwinter or Diablo2 for example where their work gets a large audience. The real NEED is for an artwork repository for OSS games with tools to migrate art between OSS engines. An extension of CChost just for game art would be really useful so engine writers would have something to work with... think of all the game mods out there...Quake, Unreal, Neverwinter, Dungeon siege, Diablo...but it's all over the web right now in incompatible formats... that needs fixed.
Informations and contributions
:
:
Q: Where to get news, discussions about ryzom.org and contribute to the project?
A: Discussions, news and decisions regarding the project are open to the public, you can check them or participate by the following means
* English and French ryzom.org forums
* The project dedicated chat (freenode IRC network, chan #ryzom.org)
* Ryzom.org mailing-lists
Q: What is the goal the donations have to reach?
A: The first goal for the donations pledges is 100.000 euros. This sum has been estimated as a reasonable target, in order to have some credibility with the administrator, to cover part of the expenses linked to Ryzom buyout and recovery and last, to provide to the Association enough involvement as a - at least - third part in the SAS (Société par action simplifiée) structure offered by the buyout plan.
Q: How to help the project except by doing pledges?
A:
* Discussion: first, you can contribute to the project development, in the forums and chat discussions.
* Diffusion: "Spread the word next steps". You can also help diffusion and knowledge about the project by communicating and debating on it around you and in the various places of speech you are used to be active (forums, etc.). Ryzom.org doesn't want to give a strict guideline about it, nor "news model", which can simply appear as spam. The Community think the conviction of each one's own is the most precious strategy of communication. Nevertheless if you have no idea of how to communicate, and in order to coordinate actions (the deadline is very short), you can find on the forums some threads making proposals (French, English) and listing websites which have been may have to be contacted by the community (English).
* Translations and various skills: at last, some help regarding to the online writings translations (Call for translators), website improving and update, or more largely every genius and constructive idea, any goodwill are welcomed !
Ryzom.org, the buyout plan and the Association
Q: What is Nevrax's position toward this project?
A: Nevrax France is nor linked to and does not support Ryzom.org project.
Q: What are the project's chances of success?
A: Our chances are weak but not nonexistent. In fact, the stronger your investment will be, the more the project will stand a good chance. At this time, the project's credibility is growing exponentially with time and each one's commitments.
Q: What are Ryzom's alternatives?
A: Some potentials purchasers will propose buyout plans which will be studied by the judge. Priority will probably be given to the financial offer, to the viability of the plan over the time and to the preservation of French employments.
Q: Who is actually driving the project?
A: At the moment and as a temporary situation due to an urgency context, a decision-making committee has been made up with four personalities of the community (following the 27th of November chat's decision)
* Ace: Technical (ensuring the website is running, configuring the shards if we get the code, getting new servers, etc.)
* Quim: Community Communication (ensuring the information is everywhere, writing news on the ryzom.org forums & MLs, translations, etc.)
* Thanys: Juridical (making the best proposal the judge will ever see, checking everything is made according to the law, etc.)
* Xavier : Philosophy (checking the social contract is respected, staying in touch with everyone, answering to contact demands, etc.)
NB: "These are position to serve, not to command".
Q: What about the juridical form? The Plan.
A: If the first idea was about a buyout and management by a community of donators, it ap
Contrary to popular belief, an MMOG requires a lot of logistics, financial backing and personnel to be run. It also requires a lot of users to be fun (which requires a lot of hype and a wisely-chosen release to get started). Neither of those points could really be met in an OSS project. OK, there may even be three or four people having enough time and motivation to try and understand the system, and they might even get it to run on a small scalle, supporting a few hundred players.
A lot of people without the necessary skills will start forks, which in this case is very damaging. If you have, say, fifty slight variations of the same thing (all with programmer art, or at least with the same assets and rules), neither fork is likely to ever attract the necessary manpower and player base to reach a critical mass and stay alive.
Also, realise that I used the word "release" above. This is not something OSS people are generally very good at. Unless development is strictly centralised, there will be a never ending slew of broken and incompatible client- and server versions which no user can even hope to understand. Current commercial MMOGs are extremely stable. Sure, they make changes to core rules now and then, add new assets and do other kinds of maintenance, but large-scale overhauls are rare. If such a thing happens, there usually are enough resources to update a good part of the userbase within a few days, which involves moving massive amounts of data, which, again, is not something the run-off-the-mill OSS project would be able to cope with. Generally speaking: "Massive Multiplayer Online" and "Release Early, Release Often" are pretty much mutually exclusive. So, any such project would have to be strictly regulated and changes would take very long to go live.
IMO, the FSF is just wasting a lot of money for something that can't end well.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Having all this medias to play with, will be really helpfull to zillions of open source proyects. And people can really start to make different games out of this engine + medias.
-Woof woof woof!
Topic related : I do like the idea of the "community" essentially buying the code and releasing it to the public. Ryzom did not have some neat ideas and it was a "professionally developed" MMORPG. I am only curious if there are many dependant libraries that are commercial that are required to make the code work.
On a side note, yet another game Jessica Mulligan joined that closed. She/he came about during AC2s early days with the promise of improving the game and keeping it going. AC2 closed, but only after selling its players a new expansion and annoucing that close less than 4 months after selling the expansion (they closed later that same year). Perhaps past history with computer games (Jessica's stretches back to compuserv ) is not guarantee you can help the current generation survive. Of course its hard to survive today when the behemoths are so highly polished. The bar has been raised considerably and anyone without a highly defined and functional support system is going to fall flat on their faces.
Ryzom was cool in some ways but honestly it sucked otherwise. Another game released too early and with horrid support. Most of the people I knew who played it beyond beta (I didn't go retail) dropped it quite quickly.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Daimon
It's actually considerably more challenging. First, there's the art. You need a lot of people with a lot of time to do a lot of models. Second, there's the bandwidth. Consider that a MUD could work with the bandwidth, of, say, and IRC server. In fact that's not a bad idea... but I digress. MMOs require streaming multimedia, massive patches (since not everything is server side), download-on-demand textures and maps, and so on. And the servers also need to track the exact 3d coordinates of every player, NPC, monster, and item. In short, the main reason that the only OS MMO I know of (PlaneShift) is not particularly complete is a lack of infrastructure to work with, not to mention the sheer complexity of tracking all the required information server-side.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
It'll probably have to be re-written but I'd have thought that would be a good way to design a game running over a high latency connection like the Internet.
Have the client and most of the server running on the user's computer, only interacting with other machines when needed.
Deleted
If you (like me) can see the benefit of having a fully developed MMORPG that is completely open source just donate a little, quickly!"
This is starting to look a little like that email I got from the nice young man in Nigeria a few months ago, which reminds me, I need to call the post office to see if my tribal masks have arrived yet.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...The point is to create (or buy and free, in this case), a complete MMORPG gaming system. It's the MMORPG version of the Unreal Engine, for comparison's sake.
So the game wasn't that great. It's open source now, get a group of people together (a la Legend of the Green Dragon), and make a new world system based in the engine.
So it might take several servers and people to run the system. Set it up distributed, get someone to contribute the services of their 3DNS server somewhere, and now not only are you distributed, but you have geographical load balancing.
Commenters are talking about this as if the idea that a group of people on the IntarWebs can't democratically organize a large distributed server environment and keep it running the latest code and staffed with admins. I wouldn't mention that to the people at all of the various irc networks, who have been doing exactly that for years, you might discourage them and make them shut down networks that have been running for longer than a decade.
And even if the whole Massive part of the game doesn't take off, who's to say specialty environments won't crop up, with admin tools and pre-formed game world content, a la AD&D or GURPS Modules and Expansions, letting players run actual 3D immersive campaigns on a single server somewhere for relatively small groups of people. For that matter, the idea of online 3D Battletech with the whole army of people that I used to play with years ago, instead of going through all the work to build huge tables, seems like a pretty fun concept.
The fact that such a beast could be released to the public is a good thing, even if you didn't like what the front end (Ryzom) was; the backend is what's important here. It's like the Unreal engine - there's a lot of games using it. Some of them suck, some of them are pretty good, but the content, and the engine to support the content, are two separate things. Yes, the bad (in the opinion of some people) content comes with it, but so does the engine that will let people drive whatever content they want.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I was just browsing the site and forum, and I get no sense of their impending doom...at least from the stickys, unless I missed one tucked away. Is there some expected timeline for closure here?
It's pretty clear by reading the responses that people don't know that the engine is already GPL. This is to free the game.
What's the deal with SecondLife? Isn't it open source? If not, isn't there a SourceForge project building a server that can interop with its network?
Seems like $150K plus all the developer/activist interest would be better invested in extending access to an existing popular multiverse than just getting an unpopular one, which needs a new budget to compete.
--
make install -not war
The communists
are trying to snag a Proper Commercial MMO
because they're too Inefficient to come up
with a good one of their own.
Where do you che-cocksuckers think Mozilla/firefox, openoffice,
and all the other "great" open source apps came from?
They were originally projects started by capitalist entrepreneurs,
they went down hill and the communists snagged them. But they can
never come up with something good on their own, because there
is simply no incentive to under the socialist model of
software production.
Y'know... if that's where the money I donated to the FSF went... screw them. No more donations. That's like donating money to the United Negro College Fund and finding it went to buy scholarships for upper-class basketball players. A nice gesture, but -so- not what it was intended for.
I'm guessing that the "private" MMORPG's would be used for:
1) Private chatrooms for a bunch of friends, or an an organization. A school could run its own MMORPG server, so could a LUG.
2) The game master for a bunch of dedicated role-players might want one for a private campaign.
3) Developers might run one to test-drive specific ideas.
If I can quote what a friend said:
:/"
:)
"Personally it feels like a battle to "win" a game for the open-source crowd, instead of preserving Ryzom as an outstanding model of MMORPGs - which has been created through a focused and truly dedicated effort
I have to agree with that. Especially with the FSF jumping on board it seems like a grab for something just so people can say "Look, a "free as in freedom (although funnily enough not as in beer for the main server)" MMORPG on Linux with graphixzomg!11" rather than a serious attempt to preserve Ryzom and continue its development. If it were just the code being put under GPL and the art/music/etc. being put under a restrictive license so it could only be used for Ryzom, then I would feel more confident about this. I think we can kiss goodbye to Ryzom as a game and a unique (in some sense) world if this really does work out.
But hey, maybe I'm just pessimistic. One question which I haven't seen the answer too (probably because I'm lazy and don't search), if this 'project' fails... everyone who donated gets a refund right?
I don't care about MMPORGs so much since those tend to require huge fanbases and a Microsoft operating system. However, I think it would be awesome to have a F/OSS VR engine ala the "Metaverse" of Snowcrash or the "Matrix" of Neuromancer.
Some applications of such:
1. Training simulations. Emergency response, medical procedures, aviation, driving. All of these require learning how to coordinate with other people.
2. A VR space for business meetings.
3. A permanent VR space (ala Metaverse). Transfer files by "picking up a card" from another user.
4. A VR space grafted onto the real world as "enhanced vision".
A F/OSS engine + some initial usable artwork that could grow with more CC-licensed artwork could get the ball rolling for the Internet as sci-fi envisaged it twenty years ago.
The 200k Euro will be initial funding for a new company to develop, run and maintain the game. Not just to free the software and arts (the software is actually already free). They will start with the current user base.
The French bankruptcy law is different from American, a judge is deciding for which plan for the company is going to win, and he will take into consideration such issues as keeping French jobs. Not just paying the debt.
Most of the player base is French, and seems to be large enough to keep the game going. The company went bankrupt due to some bad business decisions.
There are a few MMORPG engines in development that are FLOSS. Aside from the fact that this one is functional at the moment as a game, what distinguishes it against these other engines? Would a similar amount of money aimed at getting these other engines in a releasable state be better than buying code that is essentially sight unseen (I've seen some impressive looking apps that had a completely dead end code base more than once)?
Wow. Not only do 90% of the commenters miss the point, they are woefully uninformed as to the goals and the outcome of the project.
First of all, the FSF did not just mail the Free Ryzom project a cashier's check for $60,000. The *pledge* has conditions: mainly that the software and artwork be released under entirely free licenses. Many commenters seem to be particularly confused as to what is free and what is not: let me clarify. The goal of the Free Ryzom project is to license the client, the *server*, and all of its related content, code and technology under free software licenses. All of it. The entire thing. Ryzom's Social Contract is modeled on Debian's, with slight modifications - including the assertion, which is rather revolutionary as far as MMORPGs are concerned, that the avatar belongs to the player.
This would be an entire commercial MMORPG - client, server, libraries, artwork, models, etc - entering the free software realm. People who can't understand the utility in this need to have their heads examined. As another commenter put it, I'm sure a bunch of other people said "What good is Netscape, anyways?" many years ago.
The project proposal would create a French non-profit that will function as the caretaker of the existing Ryzom shards. The players will determine how Ryzom will evolve as a game. And, again, 90% of the people commenting are missing the big picture, and why the FSF made its pledge: this will enable anyone to build MMORPGs using the Ryzom engine as a base. The FSF sees this as a stellar opportunity to push the advancement of free software gaming - a typically neglected arena. This is also a wonderful opportunity to bring the tools for making MMORPGs back into the hands of the users, and allow anyone to set up a world and modify it however they like. The FSF feels that this donation will encourage, in time, a vast collection of unique worlds, all based around the same basic toolkit.
An auxilliary effect will hopefully be to help advance the cause of free software drivers. After all, complex 3D applications are pretty good for testing, eh?
I like how Slashdot's way of showing support for the project is by reducing the server to a smoldering pile of wreckage.
"Flee at once, all is discovered."
I've flirted with a few MMORPG's and they've all left me flat. They've got pretty pictures, but they're essentially just graphical MUDS. You kill stuff, you get gold, you buy items, you level up, rinse, repeat. The better ones at least have some faction based intrigue beyond just bragging on who cleared the new expansion dungeon first.
The thing is, those old text based games evolved beyond all this hack & slash dungeon crawling stuff. On DuneMUSH if you got into a violent altercation it means that you were either fighting a duel or you had seriously blundered somehow. At its peak it had hundreds of users with characters, factions, and settings spread across a dozen or more factions on multiple in-game worlds.
GarouMUSH is still running after all these years! They are extremely exclusive as to whom they accept as players, to the point that you have to submit an application with a character concept for approval before joining. They would often reject them at first draft and offer suggestions on how to make the character more three dimensional and "real." While there were occasional moments of ultraviolence (it was a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game, after all), most of the time you were just interacting in character, researching mysteries, tribal politics, mentoring cubs, whatever.
In both cases, they had such depth for two reasons. One, was that everyone got to build items and to some extent environments using a simple C-ish language. You could even code special attributes and behaviors on to your own character to some degree. The other (and more important) reason was that the games were ROLEplaying communities. I don't just mean having a message board and giving advice to newbies. I mean that everybody (at least the ones who stuck around) was invested in making the game an rich world full of interesting characters living out engaging stories. Most of the time you didn't break character except in the chatroom areas and nobody built areas (at leas In-Character areas) that broke with the setting.
Second Life is approaching and in some ways exceeding the versatility, but that's not exactly a game. Because MMORPG players are customers/renters, they (in general) have a very different attitude than volunteers/owners. The scale required to run one of those things profitably (coders, designers/artists, admins, servers, etc) beans they have to go for the lowest common denominator dungeon-crawl play style that appeals to a mass-market. WoW is amazing, but it's still all about dungeon crawling and leveling-up.
What would be amazing about a working Free Software MMORPG engine is that you could have a small, comunity based game. Imagine a close knit community where you trusted your fellow players enough to create your world together. Worldforge has been trying for years to make this happen, but for as far as they've come it always seem sjust around the corner. Dropping a fully functional world, physics, object library,game engine, etc into the wild would free creators from having to develop software, and let them start developing worlds.
Planeshift is a very capable GPL MMORPG. If you're looking for a 2D MMO, The Mana World is great as well (even though it is not fully developed yet).
the fact that no one has noticed......
Draw your own conclusions, I guess.
Not only this article is a dupe, it is also a fund raiser for a failed project with little redeeming qualities, be it IP or code, that is not feasible as an Open Source. Money you donate are better spent elsewhere.
So.. you didn't donnate to the FSF to promote free (as in birds) software?
Look, the ideal here is to create a new culture for the MMORPG community that matches the idea behind all the other open source projects - let you build your own system to your own specs for your own goals, without putting in all the dev time and work it takes to get the foundation down. MUDS have survived for decades on the idea that anyone can write a persistant world where people can come and play.
This is to be the MUDing of 3D worlds. Every person who wants to design a few meshes and work up a couple maps can create a world for their buddies to come play in. With a bit of additional development the community could produce a product which creates "small worlds" for people to get together in. Perhaps even taping some of the other potential uses of MMORPGs, like conducting on-line confrences and visible databases. There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Can't imagine how that would work? Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library. just as a quick example.
-GiH
How's an open source MMORPG going to stop cheaters who have the source code to presumably both the client and server software?
I don't know if anyone else is in the running, but you'd think that it would be terribly useful to them to know just how much someone else is prepared to offer for the source code. Even if there is nobody else willing to pay for it, people who wind up companies are bound only by the duty to get the best offer for creditors; the fact that this is a community offer counts for nothing. It certainly would be useful to them to know how much cash is available, to make sure that they get most of it. Tough if there's nothing left for running the system.
So if I was the people putting together the community bid I would shut up about how much they have gathered and how much they will offer.
Information doesn't want to be free; it wants to be used.
The original company should pay both for the running cost, and interest on the development cost in order to be viable. The development cost for a MMORPG of the class of Ryzom is huge.
With the new company, all the dept is gone, so only the running cost has to be financed. The original investors have lost their money (almost all of it, apart from some fraction of the 200000 Euro), but to continue running the game may be viable for the new company.
How about a MMORPG that, as an option from the character creation screen, allowed users to create a max-level avatars with any items and stats that are possible to achieve in the game?
Then the only players who would go through the low level content would be those who thought it was fun to build a character by playing the game.
A free Ryzom would make it easier to try out new concepts like that.
Why not Web 3.0 it? Lets make it all smart and stuff... with AI and whatnot... I mean, that's never been done before...
Wednesday is the fucking 20th. Fuck, how about some fucking editing from editors! FUCK!
I already commented at length within the Ryzom forums that I believe a better license would be a BSD license. Unfortunately, everything, including the artwork, will be under the GPL. First off, this doesn't make it impossible to make money from. You can keep the server code proprietary for your version, since you don't distribute the server code, although you would have to make the client code available to the public, since you distribute it for your game. Not a horrible thing, since you could get user communities interested in customizing their client/UI, leaving you to better develop the server and core code. Secondly, you can add BSD modules to the game, if you wanted, that operate with the GPL core engine. This could handle physics engines, etc., that you may not want under a GPL. My recommendation in the forums envisioned having a BSD cycle with something like an MMORPG, where the investors would primarily be a community of MMORPG developers. Suppose an MMORPG company has a choice of buying a physics engine for $50k, or donating $10k to make the same engine open sourced under a BSD license, where multiple MMORPG companies 'chip in'. They all get the raw code of the engine they are using, to customize as they wish, and they pay less than they paid before. In return, when they made sufficient changes and feel they have enough differences to still put them ahead of the competition, but would like to make a bit of change, they could 'sell' their changes where the others in the community chip in. Here's an example. Let's say I release a raw physics engine, similar to that in Oblivion, City of Heroes, etc, that includes base ragdoll physics. Everyone chips in $1-10k, and buys out the BSD license so anyone can use it, including themselves. One company doesn't like how some animations end up 'stuck' on certain parts, so they fix almost all of the 'stuck' conditions, and auction up their changes in a few years, after they notice noone else has quite gotten it right. Others chip in for the fix, and more changes progress. It'd be very interesting (to me) if things worked like this, although I'm betting there are business reasons against it. But as a huge plus, anyone getting into the MMORPG market would have all of the code the other communities have invested in and bought out, which gives them a great start. Although those MMOGs that have been using it would probably be more familiar with the code, and would need less 'up to speed' time.
The game looks interesting, but I think that you should save your money, and just use planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html which is already open source, uses the crystal space game engine (also open source) and is available for free NOW.
Then again I'm not really into MMORPH's so maybe there is more to Ryzom then I'm seeing.
There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Other than as a virtual meeting place, not really.
Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library.
Other than the keyboard shortcut to bring up the search, why do you think this is any better than a well done web front end of a library in a web browser? The reason that 3D languages such as VRML fail is because it's a really poor metaphor translation that gives you the worst of both physical and virtual realities. Why would I want to spend time downloading and rendering room information when all I really want to see if the metatdata of the book, perhaps images of the cover, and text from inside the book. The 3D metaphor adds nothing but slows down the process and make it more annoying. The power of computers is that they mean we no longer have to walk down the stacks of a library to find a book and reach out and pick it up to read the dust jacket. Why would we want to bring that back in a pretend world?
It's the sort of thing that a small subection of HCI geeks love and the public has uniformly rejected again and again.
this already exists. and coincidentally, it comes from the ryzom guys http://www.nevrax.org/
one way in which the purchase / open-sourcing of ryzom would be of GREAT benefit to the open source (gaming) community would be the instant availability of a library of pro-grade 3d models and textures.
Anyone who has worked on the dev team for an open source game knows just how hard it is to come up with quality artwork. especially quality 3d models and textures! If one can find artwork to use, it is almost always licensed under a (non GPL compatible) CC license.
Having the library of graphics for a whole world would do outstanding things for MANY MANY open source projects. I dont think it can be understated how difficult it would be for the open-source community to develop this mouch content on its own. there simply (currently) arent enough artists with the time and talent developing open source models.
I dont think that it would mean that all the games would look the same either. Many artists/developers who dont have the ability to create these models and animations from scratch by themselves, COULD modify the Ryzom models to fit th need of their project.
so... in short... this would go a long way to making a lot of open source games look a lot better. which is one of the biggest areas in which open source falls short of commercial.
What you are missing here is that the purpose of most servers is to perform some kind of accounting system to do two somewhat different tasks:
Now I've seen IRC-like clients done with P2P systems like Freenet, so the player interactions are at least potentially possible in some ways. Certainly you could have a "client" that would "know" who is in a given room/area and you could set up some sort of P2P system that would exchange this basic interaction information. To be efficient, it would be advisable to make this some sort of "custom" P2P engine, however and ignore the security layers of things like Freenet, unless that was also an explicit design goal.
The permanent database issue is IMHO much harder to overcome. While there are indeed some semi-permanent distributed storage systems available, most of this is for public data that is deliberately "pushed" around depending on the demand for the information. For a smallish community like was found on a typical MUD from back elsewhen that had only 50-300 players, it might be semi-reasonable to have everybody to have "copies" of just about everybody else who is or has semi-recently been playing. That also implies an element of "trust" among those in the community to not screw with other people's accounts, even if it is security by obscurity.
Of course that defeats the purpose of calling it "MMORPG" as it really isn't that "massive" in terms of numbers of people involved. Keeping track of thousands or even millions of other players simultaneously would IMHO be defeated rather quickly. There might be some ways to work around that issue as some P2P networks have done with distributed storage systems, but it still isn't going to be easy. Keeping information syncronized would be a virtual nightmare, and is something that a central server does much better than a distributed storage system.
Essentially think of what it would be like to have a distributed network version of an airline flight reservation system, and the issues here are almost identicle. You have thousands of people each changing significant pieces of information that have to be syncronized simultaneously and updated nearly instantaneously for everybody else to see what is going on (such as canceled, full, or new flights).
By far this accounting system is what causes all of the difficulties and expenses, requiring a true database with record locks and advanced database concepts to simply keep track of all of the information. A central server deals with most of these issues so smoothly that trying to hack some alternative is far more effort than is worth it. This isn't to say that in some abstract theory something like this might actually be possible, it is not going to be an easy task and is something that by itself would be a software engineering marvel to even have running at all. There are reasons why this isn't done at the moment.
The advantadge of library research is that keyword selection ceases to matter. You don't need to know what your looking for in specific, only a subject or a single text can lead you to volumes and volumes of information - information you would never search for explicitly but would gladly consume if it came to your attention. A simple wed front end (text) is default limited to a certain set of presented data. If you place the entire text on a single page the site becomes jerky and unresponsive, takes forever to access search or alter, and generally dosen't perform well. When you want to enter new data into a standard system (wikipedia) you must create the page and hope you've used the proper title so that it gains linkage. With this kind of format you would go to the "shelf" create a "book" and insert it in the proper section of the library.
The advantadges in my suggestion are admittedly narrow - but as I said, it was just a quick idea, not a final and solitary use for the proposed tool.
One strength of free software is getting the power to innovate into the hands of the public. Maybe this idea sucks, it certainly won't change the way we live anytime soon - but what if it leads someone else to start creating digital theater, new tools for physics and engineering experimentation, or just a whole bunch of freely available entertainment.
As a final comment, I don't find the comparison to VRML compelling - that software was clunky, the enviroments were not compelling in the mode of modern MMORPGs, and the systems of the time couldn't run VRML code at reasonable speed - it was an idea far before its time that was poorly implemented and baddly marketed.
-GiH
Yeah, and it sucks, you beanbag-sitting, pepsi-drinking, propeller-hat wearing nerd!
COCKSUCKER!(!!)
Lots of points to ponder, for sure.
:)
As you say, P2P-based would be more suitable for smaller groups. Which makes me wonder if those smaller groups could in turn interact, perhaps by creating "border areas" where players would be seamlessly shifted from one P2P network to another. You wouldn't get the whole universe at once, but in its composite pieces it could be as large as the number of subnetworks present. The individual subnetworks wouldn't need to keep track of one another, except at those points where they overlap. -- This would probably be more suitable for a scenario involving, say, interstellar events, where each planet is a single network, rather than "everyone all in the same forest at once".
As to the database, maybe some form of encryption with public and private keys could be used. The system would have one key, and the user would have another, with both keys needed to alter data.
I'm neither a gamer nor a coder nor an encryption expert, so I may be making up bizarre and impossible concepts. But I find it an interesting problem.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I've always thought it'd be a blast to work on a mmorpg chatbot/ai. But there's never been a game that has the level of freedom needed to really get something like that in motion. The closest so far being second life, with a bot stumbling its way around and sending requests to an http server. Fun for a bit, but not really the kind of autonomous, mistaken for a human, creation that would be really fun to create. This sounds like it might actually allow for something like that, at least in theory.
Haven't heard of Ragnarok Online?
With an open-source server emulator, there are hundreds of private servers for that MMORPG, very few that charge anything(those that do could easily get sued by Gravity, the sellers of the main server access.)
I imagine an MMOG that I can serve without any fear of contradiction or repurcussions. Heck, I could even charge money if I wanted.
They want a DONATION in order to make a BID?
Making a BID is free. Paying an accepted bid costs money.
What I'm saying is that it seems they should be asking for COMMITMENTS to donate, rather than for donations.
Anyhow, it's still neat...I hope they get their bid together and make it work.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I don't mean to throw water on it and have never used RYZOM, but I think Second Life is planning to be GPLd one day when things cool off. Don't know how they compare.
Blizzard wouldn't do it. They couldn't even stand the idea of somebody emulating their Diablo servers so that people who bought the game could play it somewhere other than battle.net.
See: bnetd