Open Sourcing MMOs

The Stropp's World blog has an interesting editorial of the pros and cons for open sourcing MMOs, especially those that have "died." Stropp examines both sides of the issue and makes some compelling arguments. "So, there are some good reasons for a company to open source the game that it is soon to retire, and there are a couple of good reasons against. What to do? If opening up the client is not an option, open up the server code. This would allow the open source community to take the software, install it on a community server and open it up to the fans. Other players might want to grab the source and create their own private servers, perhaps with different rule sets for PvP and the like. The life of the game could be extended for years, supporting a thriving community."

Comments

What's the point?

[Keruo]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work.
Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that there are any particularly puzzling quests in MMOs...

Re:What's the point?

[Dave Tucker Online]

People figure all that out anyway. Those who don't find cheating fun can just ignore it.

Re:What's the point?

[oahazmatt]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work. Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Wouldn't it be less of a hassle to read the Player's Guide, if such was your goal?

Re:What's the point?

[malkavian]

Yep, those will be the guys taking up the support.
Those that just want to play probably won't be reading the source.
Besides, when was the last time one of the big games didn't have walkthroughs of all the quests within the first couple of weeks anyway?

Re:What's the point?

[LandDolphin]

People already have the ability to look up all of the answers to all of a games quests and puzzles online. This would seem to be a non-issue.

Re:What's the point?

[Loadmaster]

The same can be said of any game with cheats like Doom or Civ. Just because someone can do what you are suggesting doesn't mean everyone will, or that those who do it will destroy their enjoyment.

Re:What's the point?

[TheSubAtomic]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work. Kinda defeats the point of playing..

The point is, that people can create different rulesets, puzzles, and quests, then share with others their creations. Extending the life of the game nearly indefinitely. P.S. It's already possible to look at the game databases and learn how the quests work. It's really simple most of the time. Go to X, kill Y, Z times. P.P.S. This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...

Re:What's the point?

[VeNoM0619]

There are plenty of quest guides out there. If anything, this allows people to change the quests and make them more fun.

Re:What's the point?

[FinchWorld]

You could open up the source for the engine etc. and just provide place holder info for quests, as an example of how they may be made, and just keep the actual quest code from the releases.

Re:What's the point?

[negRo_slim]

Wouldn't it be less of a hassle to read the Player's Guide, if such was your goal?

True, but think of your geek cred man!

Re:What's the point?

[mr_mischief]

If you make the game engine flexible and put the quests and such in the data, then open-sourcing the code won't give much away.

Re:What's the point?

[christ, jesus H]

Absolutely right, it has always made sense to envolve the community of gamers for the long term health and viability of a game. This seems like a great way to do it. I think you would end up with many smaller MMO communties, but many would likely last for a very long time.

Re:What's the point?

[spyrochaete]

I agree completely with this. Not impressed by WoW and its artificially slow leveling system, my wife and I tried an unofficial shard server that tendered 10x experience and gold. The game was still too plodding for us to play for long, but it was neat to see some higher level areas with only a marginal investment in time. We each bought a $2 official trial game client at the local games store so Blizzard still got a few bucks for their trouble.

I really wish I could go out and buy the Auto Assault client (pretty despicable that stores still sell a worthless client to a long dead MMO) and play on a private server somewhere, or better yet, host my own. What could possibly benefit the publisher more than continuing to profit from game a game after the official service has been cancelled? What do they have to lose?

Re:What's the point?

[HanClinto]

What could possibly benefit the publisher more than continuing to profit from game a game after the official service has been cancelled? What do they have to lose?

Perhaps their packet encryption algorithm. Sure, it usually gets reverse-engineered, but if they have untapped extensibility built in that they could use in a newer game, then keeping their network security layer proprietary can help for future games.

Re:What's the point?

[Spy der Mann]

Um, if you can look at the source and see how the quests and puzzles work, you can write your own quests and puzzles and incorporate them into the game. After all, isn't that the point of open source?

Re:What's the point?

[AndyG314]

for most if not all video games there are online spoilers available. The point is kinda moot.

Re:What's the point?

[Carnildo]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work.
Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Do something like Nethack: the source code is available, there are extensive guides, and it's still a difficult game with a great deal to discover.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work.
Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Wouldn't it be less of a hassle to read the Player's Guide, if such was your goal?

Yeah... Digging through lines of C++ code to find "if (carrying_specific_item_in_backpack == true)" is so easy... Maybe it would make people smarter.

Re:What's the point?

[Clover_Kicker]

I wouldn't worry so much about the quests as the skills/spells/gear etc.

If you think people obsessively spreadsheet their min/max now, just wait 'till the code is out there.

But maybe it wouldn't make much difference, on a popular game people are willing to spend hours and hours experimenting with min/max theories, and come up with pretty overpowered stuff.

Re:What's the point?

[ByOhTek]

But I spent all day figuring out how to kill 20 [insert creature here]s! I mean, sure, I can kill one easy! The next one isn't any harder to figure out either, nor the next... Yet somehow, magically, it gets different when there is a concrete number posted. Even the first one is hard to figure out if that's all you need for the quest!

OK, yeah, MMO quests are easy most of the time.
kill N of [Monster]
get N [object]s that drop off of [Monster] [at a static rate | randomly]
take [object | message] to [person | thing]
go to [person | place | object]

  The only difficulty in MMO quests is finding the target (sometimes) and not getting offed by some critter in the process (sometimes).

Re:What's the point?

[Clovis42]

Not impressed by WoW and its artificially slow leveling system

Levelling is slow in WoW? I just starting playing, and I've found it to be lightning fast. Besides single player RPGs, I've only played DragonRealms and Tale in the Desert. They both featured insanely slow levelling systems. It took weeks to gain a level in DragonRealms. I was like level 14 in WoW in about 8 hours maybe. I know it will slow down as I go, but I thought that WoW got a bad rap for having a super easy quick leveling system.

Oh, and don't pat yourself on the back for buying the $2 trial. While stealing would be the wrong word for it (there's no property to steal), it's clearly immoral to use the trial like that. The cost of the game is obviously subsidized by the monthly fee to play it. You could at least drop $20 on the full version. Regardless of how good a game it is, clearly thousands of hours went into its developement. You'd at least be consistent if you simply downloaded the free trial and never paid them a cent because you don't believe in copywrite/IP, etc. I guess you would also be ok if you only played the game (on any server) for 14 days.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opening the code doesn't open the content. The quests and such aren't in the code, but in the database of content at the backend. That way you can change the quests and not have to recompile and patch all those clients...

Re:What's the point?

[ericrost]

If their "SUPAR SECRET" network encryption algorithm needs to be "SUPAR SECRET" to be secure, then its not. Security through obscurity != Security.

Re:What's the point?

[Skuld-Chan]

Server emulators really only re-create about a 1/10th of the game though.

I've found none of the spells work properly, none of the encounters work properly (unless you count a boss who either stands there or just auto-attacks working), npc's are missing etc.

I feel bad for someone who judges the game based on a "private server", however one of the things I discovered setting up my own emulator was just how much game state is controlled by the server - quite a bit it turns out.

Re:What's the point?

[HanClinto]

It's never going to be secure as long as you give a somewhat intelligent client for the user to run. The DRM fiascos have taught us this.

The most an MMO can do is hope to stall the crackers for as long as possible. The only way to make your game secure is to not give the players a client. As soon as you distribute a client, you have no security, and obscurity is all you've got.

Re:What's the point?

[vux984]

It's already possible to look at the game databases and learn how the quests work. It's really simple most of the time. Go to X, kill Y, Z times. P.P.S. This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...

Everquest I, in particular would be a great counter example. Sure nearly all the quests were documented on the various sites, but the information was often sketchy or even outright wrong. Often it would say 'go to an area and kill everything that moves for a while and eventually the named will pop', but in reality the spawn was triggered elsewhere. Other times, the spawn you were interested in only popped from one particular place, or lots of mobs named X spawned in the area, but only the ones that spawned at (x,y) dropped z. So if you needed 5 z's you could spend hours killing all the mobs named X, until you had 5 z's... or you kill them until you get 1 z, then rush over to (x,y) and kill everything that respawns from that point, and get your 5 z's MUCH MUCH quicker.

A few quests -were- documented to this degree by people who had done the quest dozens of times, and -really- understood it. But far more quests exist where the sort of information you could get from the source code just isn't available.

Hell, in everquest, even some of the most basic mechanics weren't well understood for years. For example, whether the mobs spawned with loot, or whether it was generated on their death -- for -YEARS- people swore up and down that they had better drop rates of x if they had y equipped when they killed it.

This information is also available in a quest log of sorts...

Another feature EQ1 didn't have. (To its detriment really)

But there were elements of EQ1 quests that were really quite brilliant -- Its one of the few games that actually required the community come together and solve quests as a group. For one quest you needed two coins -- one on a high stump in a dark forest that was only somewhat safe to enter when the quest was level appropriate... and even then only during the day, the other in at the bottom of a frozen river, where you had to enter a hole in the ice.

The quest giver gave almost no direction to finding these coins, and a player playing 'solo' really had no chance in hell of ever completing the quest before he had levelled FAR beyond it... unless he communicated/collaborated with other players -- one of whom might have discovered the first coin while levitating through the forest, and another who discovered the 2nd coin exploring under the ice.

It was truly brilliant when playing it 'back in the day' when those quests were still being solved; sure after it was solved the locations and screenshots of where to go were up on the web, but many of the quests even today are only partially documented. People have reported you can get an X here or a Y there... but often there are much better places to get X's and Y's.

And any longtime player has lots of insights into the game that simply aren't documented.

New MMO's have really 'dumbed it down'. In WoW you just run from question mark to question mark on your map.

Re:What's the point?

[Lonewolf666]

It would still work for PvP-heavy games like EvE Online. Because the fixed quests/missions are less important. Much of the game dynamics comes from player interaction (to a large part in the form of players trying to take others' territory).

Not that I think CCP will open source EvE soon... they are still making a nice amount of money as it is.

Re:What's the point?

[ichigo 2.0]

Sounds like you've never played an MMO...

Services like thottbot are what makes the crappy quests tolerable.

Re:What's the point?

[mweather]

You can't ignore the inflation it causes, or the deflation of crafting prices if the quest reward is craftable. A simple gold or item dupe can completely destroy a MMO.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not impressed by WoW and its artificially slow leveling system

Levelling is slow in WoW? I just starting playing, and I've found it to be lightning fast.

Leveling got a boost several patches ago so it now takes about 30% less experience per level to level up. Combine this with rested XP and you can fly through the levels pretty fast. Even when you run out of rested XP it proceeds at a fair pace.

Before this taking your first character to 60 could take quite a while. Taking alts to 60 was fairly tedious as well. Going from 60 to 70 was pretty speedy as well but doing it again for all your alts, once again, got tedious.

The boost to leveling was nice for long time users as it made alt leveling easier. It does help newer players to get up to the big leagues a lot quicker but they miss out on what long time players had to go though. And new users will never, ever get to experience and enjoy world PvP as old timers did in the days before battlegrounds.

Re:What's the point?

[snuf23]

Level 20-60 got a boost. In this case the parent said he was level 14 which is the same xp rate as before:

2.3 patch

"Experience: The amount of experience needed to gain a level has been decreased between levels 20 and 60. In addition, the amount of experience granted by quests has been increased between levels 30 and 60."

Levels 1-10 have always been really quick so you can get an initial feel for a class. Compared to other MMOs overall leveling has been pretty quick in World of Warcraft.

Re:What's the point?

[Herak]

Wow, thanks for reminding me of all the reasons why I hate EverQuest :)

Re:What's the point?

[agendi]

Yeah but you might level up your programming skills in the process. :)

Re:What's the point?

[ShakaUVM]

Yeah, EQ was pretty terrible like that.

AoC does it right, I think. If you have a "find the missing boy" quest, instead of wandering aimlessly through an entire zone, or looking online for spoilers (which is how WoW works), it highlights a circle on your map, so you only have to look around in a restricted area. Makes it much more fun.

Re:What's the point?

[Lonewolf666]

The best an MMO can do is to keep as much as reasonably possible on the server, on the assumption that the client will be hacked but the server is reasonably safe from the users. In particular
-the item database and the transaction logic for acquiring and trading stuff
-the hit and damage calculations. This may be difficult for FPS-type games that require a lot of CPU for ahalfway decent ballistics simulation.

Re:What's the point?

[vga_init]

That's not really true because the quest and puzzle data could just be proprietary data/modules/content/whatever that they store on the server and keep separate from the open source implementation of the game. That means anyone can be free to develop free content and create a game of their own based on the free code, which has already been done quite spectacularly with a number of games such as Quake.

Re:What's the point?

[ebolaZaireRules]

Levels 1-10 are so quick, they can be a single session. It takes longer to get to 20. Since I've only been there since 20-60 got the boost, I don't know how slow they were, but they aren't quick.

Must have been tedious before. I really should buy some more game time...

Re:What's the point?

[schrom]

If you open source the game, anyone can read from source how all the quests and puzzles work. Kinda defeats the point of playing..

Ah, so that's why nethack never became popular?

Re:What's the point?

[Omegawar]

Was WoW your first MMORPG? WoW has the fastest start to cap leveling in any MMO I've played and that was before the 20-60 Exp reduction.

Re:What's the point?

[HanClinto]

I wasn't just talking about duping items, or making super-hit weapons -- many of the other problems include things like creating bots to grind the game, creating map hacks to display where all of the monsters are (possibly with what loot they have), where hidden players are, hilight hidden trigger points, setting textures or clip buffers to let the player see through walls or around corners, etc. All of these issues that I've listed are very real issues in online games, and unless you want to render each screen on the server and stream it to the client as video, you're going to open yourself up to at least some of these attacks being possible (clip buffers and corner-peeking probably being one of the first to fall).

Sure, be an idealist free software communist, but the fact of the matter is that games are about presenting the player with fun and challenging rules and limitations. Open source is about allowing people to remove unwanted limitations -- in a multiplayer game like an MMO, there are many points at which these ideals can come into conflict, and "map hacks" is certainly one of them.

Re:What's the point?

[spikedvodka]

You mean like PlaneShift does?

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

ATITD (A Tale in the Desert) probably isn't a good metric to measure MMO leveling to.

ATITD's 'leveling' system was put in amidst much griping from the older user-base that were around for a few tellings(tellings being basically a reboot/restart of the world with changes to make older tasks feel new, among other things). Basically added to make it feel more like other MMO's so that there'd be a common interface to the MMO world, rather than having almost everything open to learn if you have the materals to pay for learning.

Unlike other games where you just grind away to level infinity, they made leveling based on subsets of the in-game "Tests", which are analogous quests in other games. Some grinding can be done if the test involves building an obelisk, which requires N bricks and N other materials that you can just work on (or get supplies from others) to build. But to level in other tasks involves either a bit of luck (finding things in the wild) or competing against others in events that can vary in occurance from daily to once a month.

DragonRealms is a bit different in its leveling as well, from what I remember. You didn't level just by killing things. You trained up skills, which had individual levels, and when you hit certain points in a set of skills determined by your class, you could then gain that level. It's definately not in the same league as Warcraft, where both normal slaughtering and quests just toss points at you to level up, with more points being given in proportion to the level at which they're rated.

There are two game-design bonuses to WoW that do benefit the player. One is the 'Rest' system, which basically gives 2x experience up to a set amount while offline or in cities/inns. The second is that there's a lack of a 'penalty' to dying, as far as experience. Some games knock you down a % of experience, among other nastiness. In WoW you have a choice of penalties: damage to your equipment or the time taken to manually trek back to your body, but you don't lose the progress you've already made.

Re:What's the point?

[ericrost]

That's an issue of design not "security". The whole backwards concept of security against the user is what DRM has illustrated very nicely doesn't exist.

You can simply design things such that information is only revealed to the client when is appropriate. Any time you start giving the client info that should not be displayed to the user you open yourself up to these hacks.

Again, not security, design.

Re:What's the point?

[HanClinto]

You can simply design things such that information is only revealed to the client when is appropriate

Simply eh? Alright -- tell me how I can "simply" and feasibly make it impossible for a player to peek around a corner in a 3d MMO, or prevent him from seeing through a wall, or make enemies more visible by changing their textures to bright pink. I'd love to know how to do this without calculating the clip buffers for every client with every potential object in the same zone as him (which is of course O-n^2 complexity). I addressed this very thing when I wrote:

unless you want to render each screen on the server and stream it to the client as video, you're going to open yourself up to at least some of these attacks being possible

I both agree and disagree with you. I agree that the problem is design, but I disagree by thinking that the solution of not giving the user one iota more of information than they need is "simple" (nor that it solves the texture-replacement hacks).

If Blizzard and Sony and Big World and others have budgets in the millions of dollars (and have had them this high for years), then I think they might have solved it by now if it was as "simple" as you propose.

I don't think you understand the full scope of how hard this kind of thing is.

Re:What's the point?

[ericrost]

Visual hacks can't be avoided. Knowing the loot on the monster certainly could. At the end of the day, no matter how hard you try, I can still spend enough effort and black box engineer a client that looks identical to you. So every piece of data you send me, you send me. Obfuscating it doesn't change that fact. Its in ram somewhere, and will be read.

That's exactly my point is that its a design issue not a security one. So there are things you can't avoid. Make the payoff low and it really won't matter.

Re:What's the point?

[HanClinto]

By keeping the client closed, you can raise the cost of cracking, and thereby make the cost/benefit payoff ratio of cracking lower. It's all risk ratios, and the ratios are more in favor of the companies if they don't release the source code.

I'm not saying that these risks and costs can't be offset by the increase in brand loyalty that such an act of goodwill could create (the way many people are grateful and give respect to id software for GPL'ing their engines when they get old), but I just want to express that the decision to open-source old software (and particularly as hack-sensitive of software as MMOs are) is not as open-and-shut-case as many free-software fanatics on here seem to make it out to be.

Re:What's the point?

[rtb61]

In reality for MMO's to work and survive over the long term they need to be supported and promoted by ISP's. The benefit for an ISP is keeping off network traffic to a minimum if the MMO is limited to the ISP's own user base.

Of course all the ISP's can share a part of the continued development of the MMO and the cost would be paid for out of some of the off network traffic savings.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you've played any free or eastern MMOs. WoW has gotten nothing but more casual and time-thrifty friendly since inception. "Plodding"? After the XP changes?

What were you expecting, really? A level every 10 minutes?

Re:What's the point?

[Lonewolf666]

Alright -- tell me how I can "simply" and feasibly make it impossible for a player to peek around a corner in a 3d MMO, or prevent him from seeing through a wall, or make enemies more visible by changing their textures to bright pink. I'd love to know how to do this without calculating the clip buffers for every client with every potential object in the same zone as him (which is of course O-n^2 complexity).

Against the wallhacks you'd need a server-side visibility calculation. I guess it could be somewhat simplified compared to the full calculation (occasional false positives would be tolerable - in those cases the wallhack would still work), but it would still be O-n^2. If this is doable is an interesting question:
In the mid-90s, games like Doom and Duke Nukem pulled it off with much weaker hardware for single player, which means a complexity of O-n. So if modern hardware is n times faster, it could work.
On the upside, you could save some bandwidth from not transmitting positions of hidden objects.

Against the changed textures I don't think there is a 100% hack-proof software solution. Game consoles with serious hardware based DRM might be able to prevent it, but nothing else.
I guess that Open Source MMOs will end up with things like built-in target highlighting and auto-aiming, just to give the honest players the same advantages as the cheaters. Sad but inevitable.

Re:What's the point?

[drsquare]

If their "SUPAR SECRET" network encryption algorithm needs to be "SUPAR SECRET" to be secure, then its not. Security through obscurity != Security.

Then I hope you don't obscure your password when people ask for it.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already dozens of sites which give you a complete walkthrough to every quest in whatever game you happen to be playing. You can't have "puzzles" in MMOs (or single player games for that matter) that need to be figured out. People will try to figure it out for 2 minutes, then go off to their favourite fansite, get the answer and solve the puzzle immediately.

OSS MMO = Free Leet Gear!

[gblackwo]

The sword of 1000 truths is mine!

Re:OSS MMO = Free Leet Gear!

[philspear]

Yeah, well sword of Yx1000 is mine (where Y = your gear).

Re:OSS MMO = Free Leet Gear!

[Loadmaster]

Ha, Ha! I parry your sword of 1000 truths and strike back with my Bushian Flail of a billion duhs.

I really like this idea for an open source MMO. Seems like fertile ground for political/social commentary.

Re:OSS MMO = Free Leet Gear!

[Behrooz]

The sword of 1000 truths is mine!

I'd rather have the sword of 1000 dares, based on my teenage experiences.

Myst Online

[tsa]

It would be great if Cyan open-sourced Myst Online. They are now in the process of resurrecting the game for the second time. Myst Online has a crowd of almost religious followers who would be very happy to be able to keep the servers running after the games final death.

Re:Myst Online

[Skrapion]

Well, they're planning on releasing binaries for the MO server, as well as binaries and source for the content creation tools, so users can create their own content. Cyan will still be running central auth and avatar servers, though, so you don't need to start from scratch on each shard.

All this and MORE (pun intended) is discussed on the Wikipedia page.

Re:Myst Online

[644bd346996]

I'm pretty optimistic about what Cyan's doing with MORE. They're moving to a very open model, even though they aren't (probably can't) open-source the actual game code. And for a game like Uru, it seems that community participation in content development is a lot more important than in software development.

It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to imagine Cyan eventually open-sourcing most of the game code, and allowing the community to fill in the gaps left by the proprietary libraries they've used. It seems to be a logical next step if MORE is successful.

Re:Myst Online

[darguskelen]

Join us in Cyan Chat: http://cho.cyan.com/chat/

Why on earth would they do that?

[kellyb9]

Why would they want to extend the life of their game? They want you to buy the new one!

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[negRo_slim]

Buy a new one? Not really, they want to do just enough to keep you paying that monthly fee. Bringing out new games tend to splinter any established player bases a game might have.

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[kellyb9]

TFA says to open source games that are no longer supported. Thus, they aren't being played anymore.

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[dk90406]

And patents. Patents also exist in MMO's. Open Sourcing would potentially give make those worthless (not that I approve of SW patents, mind you).

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[argent]

I'm amazed the author of the article didn't have this obvious insight. :)

Or maybe the whole article is making a rhetorical point?

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[moderatorrater]

Who's more likely to buy Doom 4, someone who hasn't played any doom game in decades or someone who still plays doom 1 & 2 regularly using different mods? Communities build up, buzz is generated through the grassroots, if the community's any good it may even grow and spread, which would make your next game even bigger.

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[vux984]

TFA says to open source games that are no longer supported. Thus, they aren't being played anymore.

Thus most of the players are playing something else, and paying for it.

Thus open sourcing the no longer supported game will attract players from existing paid games, reducing their profitability.

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[kellyb9]

Exactly my point, they will attract PAID players away from your PAID games.

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[vux984]

Who's more likely to buy Doom 4, someone who hasn't played any doom game in decades or someone who still plays doom 1 & 2 regularly using different mods? Communities build up, buzz is generated through the grassroots, if the community's any good it may even grow and spread, which would make your next game even bigger.

Maybe. Maybe not. And once the game is OpenSourced, you can't put it back in the box if it doesn't work out.

Plus subscription MMOs are different from other games in that most players won't play more than 1 or 2. So by open sourcing a game, you are creating competition for your other games.

Suppose Sony were to say, shut down and then OpenSource EQ1, nevermind the loss of revenue from EQ1 [lets say they were going to shut it down anyway, regardless so that revenue is gone either way].

But by opensourcing it, and giving it a life of its own, it could also have the net effect of actually pulling subscribers AWAY from their other paid MMOs like EQ2 and Vangaurd, etc, without any gaurantee that it will help subscription rates of their 'next mmo'.

Re:Why on earth would they do that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, few companies seem to appreciate the power of the community, take EA for example, they buy game studios and drop all support for everything they made before the purchase.

UO?

[Rinisari]

Didn't they do this with UO?

Oh, wait, they reverse engineered the protocol, made a ton of implementations of the server, and the game is still played. There was even a new official client version in 2007, according to the Wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online

I'd love to play Galaxies or Matrix Online, but I'd never pay for them, just like I never paid for UO, yet played it religiously for three years.

Re:UO?

[RingDev]

The question that pops into my mind after reading your post is:

Would you shop at "Ye Ole' Nike Blacksmith"? Would you venture forth to save Prince Sony? Would you have the intestinal fortitude to sit at an inn with architectural features and iconography identical to that of a Pizza Hut?

If there were integrated marketing merged into these free games, would you still be willing to play them (for free of course). Knowing that your viewing of integrated advertisement would be offsetting the server side costs?

-Rick

Re:UO?

[IdeaMan]

The open source MMO business model should be similar to Linux.
A commercial company similar to RedHat can use server fees to fund development of engine improvements which are then contributed back to the open source development. They shouldn't have to contribute back all the artwork or the data sets.

The biggest problem is resistance based on the perceived lack of cheat detection/prevention. The current thinking on this in commercial MMOs is firmly in the security by obscurity camp, and we all know how thoroughly that has been debunked.

This model would allow those who wouldn't pay to play, and those that wanted to show off their investment in a recognizable manner to do so. If cheating and the economy are not managed, you will lose the second group.

Re:UO?

[Travis Mansbridge]

This is how free Anarchy Online subs work (for the most part), and that's a decent system. Great game, no monthly fee (but you miss out on expansion content, etc.)

Re:UO?

[Rinisari]

I should add that I do pay for City of Heroes/Villains at the moment, but I've not played much lately. However, school is done, and now I'll have a lot more time.

Hit the nail on the head

[Shivetya]

The simple fact is, its volunteer work and as such it is not a priority for those doing it.

Lets throw in a few other issues.
1. Differences. It is very hard to have a leader over a project like this in an environment where a dissatisfied group can up and fork their own
2. Feature creep.
3. Boring crap. All the graphics needed for the client. This collides with issue #1. Designers want X but available artists deliver Y.
4. Time, time to deliver something playable isn't quick if they want a lasting product. Linux didn't spring up overnight.
5. Mindset. Too many would come at it with the mindset that "if only game X did this". Well see #1. Everyone can't agree and many lock into a pattern of wanting to do X because either they liked X or didn't.

Really I don't see any large scale MMORPG like those given. I can see a contribution based one where the approach is modular like Never ending nights yet that still would require a good deal of client and server work. Yet the base framework could be created to allow people to sub the art in and if the scripting language is good enough to build their own. I am sure there are many examples of this already but it probably comes down to #1 again. Differences.

Re:Hit the nail on the head

[jeiler]

Really I don't see any large scale MMORPG like those given.

"Large scale" may be over-rated for open sourced, formerly-commercial MMOs. Post-market MMOs are going to be run on a hobby level: very few hobbyists can afford the bandwidth or servers necessary to make a post-market MMO a truly "large-scale" experience.

If the game will translate to the smaller-scale of the hobbyist, then it's a win-win situation: the players win, because they can keep playing; the company wins with customer goodwill. If it's a game where they can still sell the clients after open-sourcing the server, then the company wins twice.

Security trough obscurity

[jfclavette]

I'm willing to bet most MMOs trust the client to some extent, in order to reduce their load. Open Sourcing them might not be such a good idea.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[fractic]

I believe you are right about this. This would explain why hacks work. They basically change something clientside and then convince the server to accept the change. Clearly not all communications get checked serverside.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Chris Mattern]

I'm willing to bet most MMOs trust the client to some extent, in order to reduce their load. Open Sourcing them might not be such a good idea.

You massively overestimate the power of security by obscurity and massively underestimate the power of reverse engineering. Just about every instance of server-client gaming where the server trusts the client has resulted in subverted clients to cheat using that trust. Modern MMOs (and any other server-client games) do *not* trust their clients.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[phantomlord]

It's been a couple years since I played EverCrack, but there were definitely tools that allowed you to do things because the server assumed the client was telling the truth. For example, you could instantly warp around to anywhere on a map, even if you couldn't run that fast, even if it was an inaccessible location, etc.

It also allowed you to see all the mobs in any given zone. Once upon a time, the server even told you what the monsters were carrying, so you knew exactly what to hit to maximize your farming. Even though they "fixed" that by not telling the client what the mob had until it dropped, SOE still never fixed the rest of the problem.

And, yeah, it was a problem. I've seen people leap deep into raid zones while we were raiding them to take out the top named mobs long before we could get to them. Nothing like being 4 hours into a 6 hour raid only to see a few hardcores come into the zone, warp ahead of you and take out your loot and progression mobs (think an Anguish equipped group (when that was the top zone) warping in while you're doing VT and taking out all the good loot mobs or warping around SRo's Tower to take down the named so you can't get people into the EPs).

These tools still worked as of spring 2006 when I quit playing, I don't know if they fixed them since. However, whether or not you want to classify EQ as modern seeing as it still sees development, despite being released a decade ago, is up to you.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Chris Mattern]

No, EQ is not that modern, being over nine years old. The way its client got hacked was an object lesson for those who came later. It is worth noting that EQ was released on March 16, 1999. Before the year was out, ShowEQ was available to hack it. So much for security by not releasing the source code.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

FF11 Online trusts the client only to an extent. Network data is encrypted so we cant see when things will spawn easily, however all of the code for fishing is loaded on the client side every time you fish. As a result myself and numerous others found ways to guarantee automated 100% fishing success. What we've found is the client is 'trusted' but GMs will check logs for things. There are GM tools that can alert them if someone is forcing their movement speed faster than normal, or position changing, so you can cheat, but you wont get away with it for very long. And on a side note, I've never released my source, and I never will.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the server does not trust the client to make important decisions, there are still exploits that can be done on the client-side.

Glide is a great example of this: it allows player to play WoW without having to grind. Open sourcing the client would make it much easier to write programs like Glide.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[vertinox]

I'm willing to bet most MMOs trust the client to some extent, in order to reduce their load. Open Sourcing them might not be such a good idea.

Trusting the client is what got Ultima Online into buttloads of trouble in the early days. You don't need open source to hack the client. You just need a smart guy who knows how to read memory dumps and TCP/IP stacks.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is it that you can teleport at will in WoW by faking position updates from your client?

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Ghost429]

Alot of WoW's code trusts the client, including things like positioning and checking whether you're allowed to cast spell X or not when you mash the button each time.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Stray7Xi]

MMO's *DO* trust their clients for some things. Such as movement, where latency can cause serious problems. The servers do put limitations on this however.

Suppose I have a hacked client and I simulate 2 seconds of packetloss, how far can I travel in one second? I can potentially report to server that during that 2 seconds I was traveling west the whole time or east the whole time. The server realizes 2 second of packetloss is reasonable and trusts the client. Everyone else sees me teleport to the position I reported.

Now suppose I simulate 30 seconds of packetloss (meanwhile my hacked client passively receives data, waiting to see if the Barbarians will invade from the east or west). When I see the alarms coming from the East Gate, I have my client report that it had been traveling east for the last 30 seconds. The server will recognize this as deception and rubberband me back.

So if I recognize that 5 seconds is the threshhold for trust. I could have my client constantly hiccuping packets for 4 seconds (only while I'm standing still) and as soon as I want to move, I can give myself a 4 second teleport in that direction.

And this gets us to how modern MMO's trust the client. They trust the client but they also recognize where the risks are. They make audits built into the system to try to identify suspicious behavior.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[P51mus]

I know the WoW servers trust the client for positional data (and I figured this out back in beta....). This allows for things like speed hacks and teleport hacks. Also causes that really annoying blinking that lagging people do when they move fast. I *think* they did something to help them against such cheaters, but the client is still trusted for positional data.

As a contrast, CoH's servers don't trust the client for position (I'm not completely sure about this, but I think CoH's servers sanity check EVERYTHING), which means you can rubberband when lagging.

CoH also has this bug where you and the server can desync. On your screen you see your character moving around, but on the server you're doing absolutely nothing. If on your screen you move a certain distance away from your real position, you see scenery but no characters (server only transmits data for enemies/other players to you a certain distance away from your position). Also using powers away fails if you're too far away from what you're targeting, even though it looks close enough on your screen.

They've tried to fix it a lot, but it keeps popping up. A /sync command was added in as a workaround solution (resyncs you with the server).

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAMMOD (I am an MMO developer) and no, nobody trusts their client. Players are way too devious for that.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[TimboJones]

Most likely they check on both ends. The client check allows the UI to update properly but the server check actually determines whether you can perform the action.

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Psychochild]

I am also an MMO developer, but I disagree: people still do trust the client on occasion. It's usually for one of three reasons:

1) Newbie developer mistake, and they didn't think to ask an experienced developer.
2) Those times when trusting the client makes sense (benefits outweigh negatives).
3) A buggy check on the server-side.

I will agree that developers are better about it now than back in the bad old days. The game I own and administrate, Meridian 59 (a one-time "dead" game that lives again) had an amusing situation where the "Hold" spell was just a command sent to the victim's client to disallow input. Yeah, that taught the original development team a quick lesson. More recently, there was a dupe bug where people hacked the client to offer the same object twice in the secure trading window, creating lovely dupes. After figuring out the problem, I put a check in (but didn't actually prevent the cheat for a few days, heh heh) and then banned people who abused the bug. The funny part is this bug was probably in the game since launch, but it took about a decade for a player to figure it out.

My thoughts,

Re:Security trough obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

FFXI, an MMO with still a few hundred thousand subscribers has a really retarded PC client. There exist all sorts of speed/teleportation hacks for that game since the server offloads a lot of trust onto the client (it was originally designed with the PS2 in mind after all.)

and carried further

[way2trivial]

thus they don't need to be open sourced..

Re:and carried further

[AllIGotWasThisNick]

thus they don't need to be open sourced..

That assumes the subscription fee was $0. Are you familiar with Price elasticity of demand?

NbG people, we all know the rules . . .

[christ, jesus H]

The only thing they have to lose is in rereleasing the "new" and "improved" version in the future (many people will stow file cabinets worth of stuff in thier basement for 20 years hoping it will be "worth something one day", instead of letting people enjoy it for free). I dunno if they really lose this but certainly most people are terribly nervous about thier IPs being used outside of thier control.

I can see thier argument to some degree, but once the game is "officially dead" they need to put "need before greed" and let the community have it. Like the great Jerry Garcia said about people taping dead shows; "Once Ive played a note, Im done with it. Let the fans have it."

The article shows the difference.

[Trojan35]

Because the reasons to play a FPS (most updated graphics, best new gameplay features) aren't the same reasons to play a MMO (building a character, seeing time invested result in virtual properties). The 5-year old MMO can compete very well with recently released MMO's (Warcraft vs AoC).

This is why MMO's aren't OS'd, and probably won't be.

Re:The article shows the difference.

[chubs730]

Warcraft OS! And I thought I spent too much time on my computer already.

Economical problems

[Spy der Mann]

How do you support a website with bandwidth usage comparable to youtube?

My solution is to let various MMO game apps running on a cluster of servers, and add a subscription and/or advertising to that cluster.

This would be an extension of having shared forums in a single machine. The owner of the machines doesn't have to deal with game user accounts - that part is controlled by the game masters.

MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[rotide]

MMO means it is a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Open sourcing would be decentralizing the servers. But that also means that each time you run a new instance, you split the player base. World of Warcraft already does this with Realms, but this is a hardware limitation issue. You can't squeeze 10 million players on one box, the CPU would simply die. But if 100 people want to "keep a game alive" by running their own servers, you now effictively split the populace 100 ways. Stops being Massively Multiplayer really quickly.

Games such as Quake, Counter-Strike, etc, work just fine because they are meant to be split into 8 or 16 or 32 player chunks. MMO's are meant to be played by literally thousands of players. How do you group for an instance if only 100 people even have accounts? You certainly can't raid. How do you do large scale PvP battles? You can't. How do you have an economy when only 1 person is selling something and the other 5 people don't want it?

My second point is this..

BANDWIDTH!

WoW takes about 2-4KBps per person of bandwidth. Multiply that by lets say a minimum of 100 people we're talking 200-400KBps dedicated and this doesn't allow for growth. Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps. I don't want to think about paying for a business class line to let people play a dying game for free.

There is a reason MMO's will stay corporate, it takes a lot of money to keep them running. Yes, you can have offshoots, just like people run private WoW servers, but those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[christ, jesus H]

"Yes, you can have offshoots, just like people run private WoW servers, but those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join."

I agree this will never work for the "masses", thats one of its greatest strengths in my opinion.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[rotide]

Then, again, it stops being a Massively Multiplayer Online game. One rich with many quests, group dynamics, PvP, raids, and an economy. Those are all things that pretty much define a good MMO.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[christ, jesus H]

True the experience would end up much different (certain dynamics would be less viable), but I can see how much fun could still be had with a group of friends and an entire MMO to explore.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

those aren't MMO, they are toys, novelties, something the masses will never join.

There are dozens of open source, privately run Ultima Online servers out there that have thousands of accounts and 300+ players active at any given time. Exactly how many players do you have to have active at once before it's "massive"?

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[evilWurst]

And yet, I could entirely see people running private WoW servers for a playerbase of just 10... that's perfectly fine if you're not huge into PvP and have some kind of script to populate/simulate the auction house. That's enough for those ten players to each have two accounts (one alliance, one horde) with a few characters on each... basically exactly one guild on each side and that little group of friends explores the world together.

For many people, it's the huge persistent world full of things to do that serves as the foundation of the game, and your friends that play it cooperatively are what keeps drawing you back in. We could call it a... hmmm... Modestly Multiplayer Online Game, and keep the MMO acronym just as it is.

For a max of 10 concurrent users, it wouldn't require all that beefy a server or all that much bandwidth, and since cable/fiber connections are relatively common these days... hmm. Actually it might be possible to make a game explicitly designed for small persistent servers. I can see the market for a dual-mode game like that... the client comes with a server, you can pay monthly to play on the huge company servers, run your own miniserver for free. Maybe it'd even have a middle option of paying a small monthly licensing fee to run a mid-range userbase server (100ish concurrent users)? Anyway, the idea of a game that scales from single-player all the way up to many-thousand-player is kinda neat. It'd still make the company money at all levels, since the singletons still buy the box like a normal game and the hardcore still pay the monthly official server access fee...

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[WeirdJohn]

Unless of course clever OSS hackers decide that a distributed server could work, then all the central server does is compute checksums of the various nodes. Would it be easy? No! Could it work? I don't see why not. Some kind of spanning tree algorithm to tie together those "closest" in the game world, and crippled IRC to handle the chat.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps.

Poor guy. Bredbandsbolaget.se, 10Mbps upstream per client. I think you get five IPs, so just pop five NICs in your server and you've got 50Mbps for 320Skr ($54) a month.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

My second point is this..

BANDWIDTH!

WoW takes about 2-4KBps per person of bandwidth. Multiply that by lets say a minimum of 100 people we're talking 200-400KBps dedicated and this doesn't allow for growth. Pretty sure my upstream on my home connection is capped at 64KBps. I don't want to think about paying for a business class line to let people play a dying game for free.

I guess my consumer-class ADSL with 10mbps down and 1.5mbps is making you feel kind of inadequate now M4 64kbps man, or should that be boy :)

Get with the 21st Century

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[dwarfking]

Actually it might be possible to make a game explicitly designed for small persistent servers

Which is what the original Neverwinter Nights from Bioware did. They provided the tools to create your own world, and server code that runs on both Windows and Linux to host it. Servers can set the max number of players.

For NWN there are hundreds of modules available, and a large community built around creating new content for them (Community Expansion Pack).

Bioware didn't actually open source the system, but they did document most, if not all, of the content data files which is what allowed the community to grow. And it has been around since 2002.

Contrast that with NWN 2 (created by Obsidian, published by Atari). They used a new middleware based on Granny with proprietary model formats and built the system using DirectX (planning for a console port that never happened) instead of OpenGL like the first, so there is no Linux or Mac client.

Because of this, there is no where near the community for NWN2 that NWN1 enjoys.

NWN1 provides just the type of small persistent world servers you mention, if you take the time to create the world. Or use a pre-built one.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

400KBps will cost you ~75 USD/mo on a low power dedicated server at a data center. If each of your users donates/spends 1$/mo on average, I can't see this being a problem.

On the other hand, if you object to paying for a thing on principle, then good luck to you.

Re:MMO = Massively Multiplayer

[FunkSoulBrother]

This can also be especially fun, as the world gets a hell of a lot more dangerous when there are 10 to 100 people in a world designed for a few thousand. I played on some private EQ1 servers for kicks once, and its amazing how spawned full of monsters some zones will get when there is nobody knocking the monsters back down.

There is a fine balance with user created content

[gblackwo]

I've seen many games thrive on user created content, and it is going to be seen more and more often. Games like Counter-strike started out as a modification of another game (halflife). Now Counter-strike itself has mods. (Mods of a mod if you will) In terms of MMO's, In World Of Warcraft, I don't know any guild that doesn't require several certain add-ons for raiding. The add-ons are of course not made by Blizzard but by the community. Instead of making the game incredibly complex by offering every utility built-in that a player might want (not to mention the work involved)- They've opened up to allow players to create the add-ons so the players can pick and choose how to play. They've even gone so far as to allow complete customization of the GUI.

Bots

[b4thyme]

Wouldn't this make it incredibly easy for bot writers as they would know all of the anti-cheating countermeasures built into the game?

Not to say that this is a bad idea, I feel that a lot of times MMO companies fail because they do not listen to their users, this would simply be taking it to the next level if implemented well.

Same problem with opening ANY large project

[Drogo007]

They don't open source old games probably for the exact same reason any large legacy project isn't automatically open sourced - licensing issues. There are probably large swathes of code they don't have the right to release in such a manner. Game companies very rarely write all their own code from the ground up. Instead they take some basic building blocks (graphics engine, sound engine, network engine) and build around that.

In some cases, they simply take an existing game engine, license it and add their own content. Interestingly enough, one of the few game companies that has a reputation for opening the source on their old games is also one of the few game companies with a reputation for completely rewriting the engine from scratch every time (a.k.a. ID Software)

Even if you somehow wave your magic wand and make all the licensing issues in the engine code disappear, you're still left with the same issue for art assets: There are often a large number of licensed art assets (textures, music, etc etc) in a game as well.

Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project

[christ, jesus H]

Its a good point and likely very accurate. If you cant, you cant. But if you can, then you should.

Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project

[jfim]

Indeed, a lot of games use third party libraries/middleware, such as Bink, Miles Sound System, Renderware, Gamebryo etc.

It wouldn't be very useful to have the game without those libraries. The middleware systems are usually quite extensive and producing an open source version of those would be quite hard, especially since a lot of games depend on very specific versions and configurations of the actual middleware --- or even modifications to the actual library code! Since the middleware handles pretty much all the graphics/sound/etc. and leaves only the game logic to the game developer, it is quite unlikely that the game would ever get to a playable state without a significant effort from the OSS community.

Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project

[xhrit]

and that is why i am still waiting to play ut3 on linux.

Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is the case and I agree it is, then copyright law is wrong. The intent was to encourage people to publish stuff by giving them a limited monopoly, after which the public could use the stuff however they wanted. It worked great with books and even music, but I don't see how it could ever work with software. Not to mention the fact that object code isn't like a book at all.

Re:Same problem with opening ANY large project

[christ, jesus H]

No question that copywright and patent law is a complete mess and does far more the hamper innovation then it does to help. Frankly its about as obvious as gravtity. I cant really think of anyone who is moderately expert on the subject that thinks otherwise (outside of lawyers for whom the current system works very nicely thank you).

There are already some out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Planeshift, a project I worked on for a short while, is an independent open-source MMO. I was only involved for a year, but it's been around since the 90's I think, and is still going pretty strong today. Pretty amazing. Open-sourceness doesn't seem to be a negative thing for them, as many developers come and go to support it. Just thought I'd mention it, even though TFA seems to be talking more about commercial ventures.

Re:There are already some out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because the code is open source doesn't mean the assets are. Have a read of the art asset license and then try and tell me it's 'open-source'.

Furthermore you aren't allowed to use said art assets with a non-PS approved server (Ie you can't legally run your own without replacing *ALL* datafiles.)

Auto Assault!

[Anonymous Coward]

Auto Assault was great. Sure, it failed, big time, because it wasn't really the kind of game you want to pay $15 a month for, but it was still a fun casual game. If it was buy-once-play-forever, I think it would have done much better. When they killed it off, people begged for some kind of lifeline. I just wish they would let people run independent servers, or Sony or NCSoft would pick it up and add it to a "play all our games for $x/mo" type of service.

Re:Auto Assault!

[broeman]

yeah, I also liked this fast paced mmo, but was a bit disappointed of the empty cities I entered.

Tradewars 2000 (...Wow, I'm old)

[TheGrapeApe]

Just mentioning this shows how "Get-Off-My-Lawn"-old I am...but anyone remember Tradewars 2000 - the old BBS/Doors game. I think they did open the source for that game...granted, it was text-based, but it was still a really great (and in my opinion, the "first great") MMO.

They still have some sites that host the game, I think.

Re:Tradewars 2000 (...Wow, I'm old)

[Reapman]

I actually BOUGHT Tradewars to run on a BBS I never started.. but a friend has a BBS he's running through Telnet, gave him the license.

However I'm pretty sure it has not been open sourced, although if it has I'd love to see the link. Last I remember there was a telnet version or something, and it cost $.

Ah the joys of colonizing planets, buying big ships, and having it all gone in a turn when you accidently go to an unknown sector with some dudes planetary defense cannon, or if you had the add on, the borg :P

I miss the BBS days :'(

Won't happen....

[Anonymous Coward]

OS MMO? You mean like World Forge?

Worldforge

[JSBiff]

There is an Open Source MMO project, launched over ten years ago (I remember it was announced on Slashdot) called WorldForge. It, so far, has failed to really go anywhere. Don't get me wrong, it has stayed alive, and they do have some tech they've built. But nothing that's really much of a game. They've had various things that I would describe as 'prototypes' or 'tech demos' - I check in on them every year or two to see what they have.

      WorldForge has it's developers, but for whatever reason, it never seemed to reach that critical mass where there were a lot of developers, artists, writers, etc who really jumped in and started building a true MMO with it, that I can tell. It's interesting, but for whatever reason, it seems like an MMO is just something that, at least so far, doesn't seem to work well as an Open Source project.

Re:Worldforge

[Ksempac]

I don't know about WorldForge, but there is another open-source MMORPG which is slowly growing : Planeshift http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaneShift

Re:Worldforge

[broeman]

The framework of an MMO is not that easy to build: chat (ircd), items db (rendered with good fps, something many MMOs fails), client/server (clusters) ...

As many gamer nerds, me and some friends are playing with the idea of making our own MMOG, and doing some methodology brainstorming atm. But doing the programming behind it all is a big challenge. Seeing the code from "professional" MMO programmers would be interesting.

Re:Worldforge

[JSBiff]

Well, you might want to take a look at Worldforge, then. Like I said, they do have some tech, and you're right - there is quite a bit of tech that has to be developed, fairly complicated tech, in order to build an MMO. As far as I can tell, WorldForge looks like it's done a somewhat decent job of creating a game engine for building an MMO, there just doesn't seem to be any actual game that's been created with that Tech yet. Might be a good time for you and your friends to jump in and contribute.

Err, forgot to link

[JSBiff]

WorldForge

Project Darkstar

[LarsWestergren]

Sun has the Darkstar engine which is open source -
http://projectdarkstar.com/

Why should they?

[KlausBreuer]

If the company is large enough to create a successful, large MMO, you may be assured that they are exclusively interested in making a profit - no matter what their PR claims.
Opening their code will not cause profit, probably causes licensing issues, and might distract from their latest game.

Simple.

Why open the source?

[Clomer]

I don't think it would really be practical to open the source of a dead MMO because of all the non-source assets in such a game: the art assets (textures, models, sounds, music, etc.). Plus, any open MMO will have rampant cheating, which will kill any real interest that a larger community may have.

I think the best thing that can happen to a dead MMO, meaning after they have pulled the plug and shut down the servers, is to release the server software to the public. Not the source, mind you, but the software as a closed-source package so that the community can take over and at least run the game in its final state.

Anyone have any idea how much computing horsepower and bandwidth it would take to host a single, fully populated WoW realm? Of course, after the death of WoW (which will probably not happen for a few decades), a lot of the interest in private servers will be for small groups to get together and not a full-blown realm (though the possibility of a few privately owned full-blown realms does exist).

Open Source World Editors...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I guess that a great company who want to create a new buisness model could:

1- Create the software.
2- Host de server.
3- Get a community driven game content creation.

Like Linus, the Company act has "accepting" or not the new content on the server. The company can "blur" the cards, by changing coordinate or the X,Y,Z factor for the sake of secrecy. So the CIE is the integrator.

So, while it's not open source on the sense of the software, it could use all the great concept of community driven creations to content. (so a lot of new content each week for the player base = WoW cannot compete here)

The only problem with that, is the majority of MMO don't get the proper game content editor for their own staff. Vanguard for example, didn't get editor... all the stuff was directly program into the 3D world. (don't try to understand why it has crumble under a deluge of bugs)

Jourdelune

Re: Packetloss

[Lonewolf666]

Nice example, and some games have far more drastical limitations:
In Day Of Defeat: Source (a HL2 mod) admins can set a "maximum ping" in the millisecond range.
I often see messages like "Player X was auto-kicked for breaking the 150 ms latency limit".

You are not quite right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, all the MMOGs that trust the client have been subverted and people can cheat in them. They still do it anyways though. Look at wow, you tell the server where you are, and it trusts you. This is why people can teleport anywhere they want in wow. Rather than fixing this, the idiots at blizzard (who made this same mistake before in D2 btw) added extra code to detect people teleporting and ban them.