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MMORPG Ryzom Released Under AGPL
acemtp writes "Breakthrough for Free Software gaming. Ryzom announces full release of source code and artwork, and a partnership with the Free Software Foundation to host a repository of the game's artistic assets."
Coming soon to the web: the first MMO with more developers than players!
I finally heard about this game. Was it a success?
After years of limbo and changing hands, with initial attempts by an open source community to raise money in order to BUY Ryzom, it's about time it went open. It's been in the eyes of open source after the original developers announced they were selling it. I once payed to play it but since development, and player base, was essentially dead there was no incentive to play. Now, maybe, it might gain something like a new life.
Awesome.
Eat sleep die
http://tinyogg.com/watch/Y5hLZ/
We all know anything tied to the FSF is going to be way too bogged down in ideology to be worth bothering with.
Affero is a scary license, it gives an implicit right of audit to people's offices and servers. Stay way from it! Unless you want bailiffs inspecting your servers.
I tried Ryzom about a month ago. It was not something I would call a fun game to play.
Hopefully some of the really creative developers out there can use this code as a base for creating some really fun games.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I think this is great, if only from an academic standpoint. I don't see someone creating an FOSS WoW entry level game here with it, but I do see this being a big boon to developers looking at the code to learn how to code something like this. It could actually spawn a lot of specialized mini-mmo's too.
Kudos to whoever was involved in making this happen.
This is a really good news. For what I remember, the whole 3D part / textures of Ryzom is of really high quality. This will be a huge boost for many independent developers who can't access quality 3D models easily.
Now, just have to fire up my install of OGRE3D, and check if I can load those models in it :)
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
Isn't that actually Second Life?
Can please tell me where in the AGPL this "implicit right" is derived. Because I read it and I think you're full of shit.
Is there an actual game anywhere in there? I don't see one...
Or is it like a giant tech demo with nice graphics... but nothing to actually PLAY or DO... Unless you want to be a dev...
Yay! parts you could maybe use to make something?
Already lost 90% of its value since yesterday. I guess that's what happens when you kiss goodbye to your income!
I'd be more interested if they were releasing the sound assets. Open, free to use sound effects are hard to come by.
If anything this might lead to development of MMO middleware which might help to curb the enormous costs of developing one of these games.
That sounds like Metroid ... the Chozo combined magic and science, and all the enlightened races in the Prime series (Chozo, Luminoth, Bryonians) eventually learned to do so as well. The Bryonians were least fortunate, only one individual learning to do so after a war caused a separation between those interested only in technology and those only in magic.
These considerations, I find, are interesting. Too much fantasy is all magic, where people haven't thought to work in the raw physics of the world at all and instead rely entirely on bending physics with magic. Too much sci-fi is all science, where no special power is used-- only hand-waving about advanced quantum physics we can't yet understand.
Must be an interesting game.
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http://media.ryzom.com/?query=ball&start=320&asset=96ad7f2ea3fb55b77c0e6ba849717ea7
Some things are just begging to be modded into TuxRacer... :-)
The front end of an MMO is relativly canned. DAOC\Warhammer uses Gamebryo (same front end framework that Civ4 uses.)
The real detail is in the backend which are largely proprietary.
The basics of an MMO, front end or back end are rather simplistic. The real dirty work is in the optimizations of data storage and hard core mathmatics in optimizing game logic for execution efficency.
Case point:
(In full disclousure I have been working on a MMO from a design standpoint for about 3 years)
One of the algorithms I have been working on\researching is a random city seeding algorithm (I am interested in procedural MMO world development) that takes either a pregenerated world map or proceedurally generated world map and scores the "desirability" of terrain. Using that heatmap village markers are deployed then a series of passes are made that merge nearby villages into town, towns into cities, and cities into capitals leaving behind unmerged locals (somewhat like evaporation).
I grabbed ArcEmu (a wow emulator) as well as EQ and a few other emulators and stitched a basic randomly generated map in there to test out the algorithm.
Now based on how the two engines worked my map either took up 6mb of ram or 12 mb of ram.
The algorithm itself was brute force. A math geek friend of mine rewrote it from a mathmatical point of view and reduced the map generation time from about 4 hours to 2 1/4th hours. Not bad.
With a full commerical release it allows people to view the strengths and weakness of a particular implementation and see what optimzations can be made.
CCP right now with Eve Online has one of the most exotic database architectures I've seen to date, I can only imagine the code behind it. Sharding is easy, 1 concurrent world... mind boggling the data reduction, data isolation techniques needed.
Seeing their code in not only a technical education on their architecture but you can see the results of a commerical development process had on the code base versus say an emulator like ArcEmu or any open source driven backend.
Perhaps this may give those aussies a run for the money now...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
My son and I each had ~level 235 (max:250) characters in Ryzom, there is a lot there that is wonderful.
The Good:
The mobs are great, and very aggressive. I see something in a lot of the Aion mobs that reminds me of Ryzom.
The harvesting is the most complex and interesting of any MMO I have played, between gas, explosions and ticking off the local kami, it will kill you quickly if you aren't on your game.
The Mixed:
Very, very few meaningful quests, which meant the goals were largely tied to hunting, harvesting and crafting.
Travel is dangerous, really really dangerous. Moving between zones can require a full group of high level folks. There are often groups that will "trek" lower level folks to other zones to buy transporter tickets, but until you catch one of these you are stuck in your starter zone.
The Bad:
There are significant issues with who controls the best resources, with player-bases in one time zone scheduling attacks on Outposts owned by players in another timezone during times the defenders could be expected to be at work.
Healing will make you nauseous IRL if you get dizzy easily.
Kippis NEED a new sound. It's a car crash, you spend a lot of time around kippis harvesting, meaning, you have to listen to constant car crashes. Love the Kippi, fix the sound.
I perused the project website, and was pleased to see that they hope to have native clients for OS X and GNU/Linux by year's end.
I'm happy to see efforts in this direction, and hope that it might lead to more gaming options on those client platforms.
More details on these specific plans here: http://dev.ryzom.com/versions/show/15
WALSTIB!
I've already got an idea to create a text-only MMORPG. I mean, without the graphics, the overhead will be cheaper and we won't have to charge people to play. It's a simple but elegant idea, and you all have me to thank for it. It could really take off too, if everyone else follows my lead. You can thank me for the idea later.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... when it's so bad it ends up open-sourced.
Does this mean that the pledges/donations from the former Free Ryzom project have now been called in?
I was not a donor and the Free Ryzom project's forums are down so I'm unable to verify this but it would be very interesting to know, since the amount raised was impressive--the total was about $255,870 USD.
When you sign up for this thing they send you an email with your username and your password (in plain text).
Nice!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.