Thanks for a reply, sorry if that sounded a bit harsh, but it was just the impression of a casual first exploration.
No problem, the site can be quite intimidating at a first glance! We do find it very useful however, and have created a number of tools to improve our communications infrastructure (news, upload tools, irc bookmarks, databases, etc. Unfortunately some of them are down currently as a result of our recent website move). We think good communication channels are important for a net project. Making it more easily accessible for newbies is also important, and something we are working on.
I guess what I meant by lack of a central plan is that you seem to be working on several different things at the same time, which seems to be a tough road to hoe.
That is true, but as this is a Free Software project that people are contributing to in their free time, they will work on what most interests them. We have divided the different products up in manageable chunks, so that a small team can work on a client or server module more or less independently. So we utilize the parallel development that is a strength of Free Software projects - we have many developers, but each developer doesn't have that much time to spend,
and the turnover rate is higher than in a traditional software project.
Best of luck, I'll be keeping track. Is there any plan to solicit donations for server maintenance?
Thank you. As for donations, we can always use new ftp mirrors, website mirrors and irc servers, but what we need most at the moment are more game servers.
Actually, on a serious note, I think that there are plenty of people out there who are not sexually repressed, and I think that an open group may also be a group mature enough to handle the subject matter.
That's an interesting point, and one that has been discussed on our IRC channels. We see no reason to not implement sex, and are planning on implementing sexual reproduction in the final game. If somebody does not want it in their game world, they are always free to run a server with sex turned off. Whether to display anatomically correct models would be up to the clients too.
I realize it's a development project and not a finished product, but I think they need to present a more coherent website. There are dozens of projects listed and it's very difficult to understand what one should download and install if one wants to observe their progress.
We are aware of the problems with the current website, and are working on a new website with better structure.
However, keep in mind that www.worldforge.org is a developer website. Using Wiki allows team members to keep the website pages related to things they work on updated. This also means that they can be a bit less organized. In the future we intend to set up www.worldforge.com as a page for players, and www.worldforge.net as a portal to existing servers.
I would love to see WorldForge succeed, and I might have been a part-time contributor, but there doesn't seem to be any clear direction or central motivation. Ultimately, they're going to need some to make a decent game because MMORPG's are huge productions.
We do have a very clear Master Plan. The basic idea is to implement successively more complete games, until we get to our goal, a complete fantasy MMORPG taking place in the Dural world.
We also have instructions for new developers, and there are always friendly people that are ready to answer questions on our irc server, irc.worldforge.org, channel #lounge. Feel free to drop in!
Cheating, hidden codes, and advantageous bugs will be plentiful in this game, and so nobody will play it. It will be a failure of the Open Source model. And let's not get into the idea of them trusting client-side programs to be run. You can't even trust Diablo client-side, so why would you trust something with open source?
We do not trust the clients. That is actually one of our basic design principles. The server does all the world and character related calculations. The clients are of course free to use prediction, but the server always has the final say.
Slashdot Mirror
No problem, the site can be quite intimidating at a first glance! We do find it very useful however, and have created a number of tools to improve our communications infrastructure (news, upload tools, irc bookmarks, databases, etc. Unfortunately some of them are down currently as a result of our recent website move). We think good communication channels are important for a net project. Making it more easily accessible for newbies is also important, and something we are working on.
I guess what I meant by lack of a central plan is that you seem to be working on several different things at the same time, which seems to be a tough road to hoe.
That is true, but as this is a Free Software project that people are contributing to in their free time, they will work on what most interests them. We have divided the different products up in manageable chunks, so that a small team can work on a client or server module more or less independently. So we utilize the parallel development that is a strength of Free Software projects - we have many developers, but each developer doesn't have that much time to spend, and the turnover rate is higher than in a traditional software project.
Best of luck, I'll be keeping track. Is there any plan to solicit donations for server maintenance?
Thank you. As for donations, we can always use new ftp mirrors, website mirrors and irc servers, but what we need most at the moment are more game servers.
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.
That's an interesting point, and one that has been discussed on our IRC channels. We see no reason to not implement sex, and are planning on implementing sexual reproduction in the final game. If somebody does not want it in their game world, they are always free to run a server with sex turned off. Whether to display anatomically correct models would be up to the clients too.
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.
We are aware of the problems with the current website, and are working on a new website with better structure.
However, keep in mind that www.worldforge.org is a developer website. Using Wiki allows team members to keep the website pages related to things they work on updated. This also means that they can be a bit less organized. In the future we intend to set up www.worldforge.com as a page for players, and www.worldforge.net as a portal to existing servers.
I would love to see WorldForge succeed, and I might have been a part-time contributor, but there doesn't seem to be any clear direction or central motivation. Ultimately, they're going to need some to make a decent game because MMORPG's are huge productions.
We do have a very clear Master Plan. The basic idea is to implement successively more complete games, until we get to our goal, a complete fantasy MMORPG taking place in the Dural world.
We also have instructions for new developers, and there are always friendly people that are ready to answer questions on our irc server, irc.worldforge.org, channel #lounge. Feel free to drop in!
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.
We do not trust the clients. That is actually one of our basic design principles. The server does all the world and character related calculations. The clients are of course free to use prediction, but the server always has the final say.
--
Hans Häggström, WorldForge developer.