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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!
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
You mean like gcc, bash, make, etc? ;-)
And the FSF's position seems like some strange ideology... until you actually get burned in the proprietary world. Then a lot of what they're saying starts to make a lot of very practical sense, in a very real world way, very quickly.
In Soviet MMORPG, ideology frees you!
I can't wait to be a level 80 GNU/Linux Zealot with the +3 ability to explain why Ubuntu is basically the same as Windows because it bundles £apitali$t non-free software.
The Stallman Wizard casts Halitosis +1! He is unstoppable.
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.
OTOH sizeable number of people would never call WoW "fun".
Heck, "free" could as well be actually an impediment - who knows how many people value their MMORPG, at least partially (but enough for it to be significant), because it costs them.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
If you have any commercial software in your office, you may rest assured that the same terms appear in license agreements you're already bound to.
The time to complain about this was about 30 years ago.
You need to cite your FUD. I may not have a law degree, but I do have a dictionary and a copy of the AGPL which do not support your statement, not to mention the only semi-relevant link Google dragged up was a proprietary software company that threatened to audit you if you used Affero-licensed software on the same system as theirs.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
I actually enjoyed WoW for a long while, since 2004 off and on. I'm trying LotRO right now and having fun. To me free is better if it delivers a comparable product but Ryzom just isn't. The one thing WoW had going for it (and eventually against it) was the ease/simplicity of playing the game and their add-on system. Ryzom was cumbersome to do many basic tasks such as attack and loot.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
You mean like gcc, bash, make, etc? ;-)
Not sure about bash and make, but gcc? Definitely. GCC specifically avoided sane layering to discourage code reuse. If you've ever wondered why Visual Studio is able to use the same parser code for syntax highlighting and error reporting in the IDE that it uses for compiling, but Free Software IDEs can't, you can thank the GCC team. They intentionally made it difficult, because the FSF thought someone might use the GCC code in a non-Free IDE if they made it modular.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Too true. Game design is one of the things open source does not do well. Open-source clones are often superior, purely on technical grounds, but fully original open-source games tend to be less fun than commercial ones.
Why is this? Simple. Game design is an art, and a complex one at that. Open-source works well for technical tasks. The Linux kernel is one of the most stable ever, Apache is the best web server I know of, and Firefox is my preferred browser. Open-source fails at artistic tasks simply because the end result is designed by a committee, not a single vision.
I'm working on a game myself right now, and I fully plan to release the engine code as open-source. I will not, however, be making it an open-source project, because then, instead of one unified artistic direction, there will be dozens, pulling the game in different ways.
Game design is not, as most people imagine, a simple task. It takes experience and judgment, knowing not only what to add but what NOT to add. When making Wolfenstein 3D, they originally implemented things like dragging corpses into corners and searching through pockets. These were cut not because they were themselves bad, but because they conflicted with the other elements of the game. If you were to open-source a game without a strong player base with strict ideas of what belongs in the game and what does not, you will end up with a jumbled mess of ideas.
Perhaps, however, an MMO could be made to work. If you limit most contributors to only making new quests and dungeons, it might work. Large-scale balancing and other major changes should be limited to a few people, less than a hundred.
A wild SCO appears.
ESR uses FUDaway. It's super effective!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
No, but it will be when i'm done stripping the artwork of clothes.
A free Massive Multiplayer Online Really Pornographic Game, the trees and clouds may be textured with ads but that's not going to stop you from playing it now will it?
If anything this might lead to development of MMO middleware which might help to curb the enormous costs of developing one of these games.
OTOH sizeable number of people would never call WoW "fun".
That's because WoW is actually several games bundled together.
- Quest & Farm - this is actually work, if you think about it, and you need to do a lot of this to get to the interesting part
- Economy - Buy low, sell high, and you can avoid some or all of the above after a while; the auction house is basically economic PvP, with your progress measured in cash flow
- Kill the dragon with your friends - most fun for most people, progress measured by your equipped items; probably most successful because you show off your progress at all times
- E-Peen Hunting - all of the above: achievements, non-combat pets, mounts, titles, etc. Basically collecting random stuff you can show off.
And then there are the people who make their own games in it. Most people don't see past the farming part.
Yet, it is probably the most used compiler. Congratulations on missing the point.
Let me toss up an analogy: Imagine a thousand Morrowind modders all constantly pushing their mods into one big ol' shared install.
Now, imagine trying to maintain a coherent artistic style. Imagine trying to keep the game's economy and progression balanced. Imagine trying to ferret out and shut up all the backdoors and logic bombs the cheaters and griefers are dropping into the game logic. Heck, imagine trying to keep the game stable on multiple platforms. It blows MY mind, anyway.
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.
Must be an interesting game.
It is.
As with any game, some like it, some don't. The primary strike against it at the moment is that not enough people play it. Over and over I hear, "If there were more people playing, I'd love this game." There's an obvious remedy, of course...
As may be, I have rather enjoyed playing it for a few years now, off and on. (more on than off) ;-)
Much more so than other games which released the same year.
The client is a free download, and there's a generous free trial period, so give it a shot, if you think you might enjoy it.
WALSTIB!
Your'e overthinking it it. The obvious reason is that quality developers and artists expect to be paid for their work. There's no incentive for someone with a lot of talent to slave away on some boring but necessary part of an open source project for no reward when Blizzard will happily pay you to model those Stormwind streetlamps or program the boring bag interface code. Even Linux development is funded by large corporations whose business depends on Linux. Once again, capitalism reigns.
There's not a whole lot to strip, especially from the Matis characters.
I expect to see your drafts later this week.
WALSTIB!
No, you.
My Linux system is totally pimped out with Nvidia drivers, closed source software and the complete font set from Windows 7. Ain't no bitches gonna tell me I can't listen to mp3s because the codec is patented.
Yeah, that's right, Stallman, you commie bastard. I'm using your free software in a way you don't like. So stick that up your "gnu" you barefooted twat.
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.
I will say the crafting system was superb, something I would love to see else where.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
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.
Ryzom has been bought by at least two different companies that have gone bankrupt. There is nothing technically wrong with the game it's just that the MMO industry is difficult to make a profit in.
Level cap was very low?
There must be over 30 different skills, branching out from the five basic ones, each of which can go up to level 250. And it was like this since the open beta AFAIK.
Or perhaps you just never made it out of the beginner/tutorial island, where the skills and equipment available are restricted?