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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.
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.
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.
The same thing could have been said about Netscape. The point is that this gives people a point to rally around, and something to improve. It's classic Cathedral&Bazaar stuff.
http://outcampaign.org/
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'?
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?
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
This game DOES have a small fanbase, and (from what I remember from beta) is fairly well-programmed. Unfortunately, near the end of beta, they made a greed-based design decision with the skill system and the game took a huge dive. They never realized why, and so that decision stands.
I pledged a donation because if this goes open source, the first thing I'll do it work on reversing that decision and making the game fun again. I'll have a rogue server, and probably only a few friends on it, but it'll be fun. Maybe my change will even make it back to the regular code-base and I won't even have to run a rogue server.
This differs substantially from FOSS MMOs that were free from the ground up in a few ways:
I can't figure a way to make them fun.
They don't have artwork that was paid-for. (Like it or not, graphics can make or break a game.)
It's got a fanbase of non-developers.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
...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
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.
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.
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'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.
Think about it a bit more:
;-p
- if the game, all of it is free, people can go and do whatever they want, which includes finding a way to keep the current players happy. If there are enough people who are happy with the game there will be a way to continue it. If a company buys it you can be sure it won't be thinking first about keeping players happy, it will be thinking about making money.
- why do you think it's "funny" that the server won't be free? Didn't you just say you wanted Ryzom to continue? How they heck do you see that happening without earning some money somehow? Of course, it _might_ work, like somebody mentioned before people have been operating networks of servers for things like IRC for ages. So _if_ somebody comes up with a way to run Ryzom in a way that doesn't cost any money you won't have to pay. Even so, you can do whatever you want, just run a server and offer your services for free!
- I don't see what good it would do to restrict the graphics/sounds to Ryzom. You'd still have a project that is dying and no incentive from anyone to help fix the problem. I certainly won't put any time in a project if I can't do what I want with it.
- It's when the company gets bought by another company that you can kiss your unique game goodbye because it's obvious that _something_ has to change, just throwing more money at it is not going to solve the problem when your competitor is a hugely successful game as World of Warcraft. Or it must be a company with very deep pockets whose CEO just loves playing Ryzom and wants to keep it just the way it is (improving it of course, but keeping the spirit). I just don't see that happening.
- Yes you are lazy
- All there is now are PROMISES of donations, no refunds. When the judge says they can make a real offer they'll contact you to get your money.
It's really not as hard as you make it out to be (though that doesn't make it easy either.) You have other, randomly selected nodes (with an endlessly changing cast) doublechecking the results from the other clients. The server's job is then just to decide what to send to each client to prevent them from having enough data to cheat intelligently.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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.