MMORPG Ryzom Released Under AGPL 117
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."
A long time comming... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Old Ryzom video showing nice art assets (Score:1, Informative)
Excellent News (Score:4, Informative)
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.
FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Can please tell me where in the AGPL [gnu.org] this "implicit right" is derived. Because I read it and I think you're full of shit.
Re:Free =/= Fun (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Ryzom stock freefalling (Score:1, Informative)
You are full of shit, Ryzom is not even the company, it is the game. The publisher/developer is WinchGatePropertyLimited, who does not seem to be publicly traded.
Interesting Story (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:FUD (Score:3, Informative)
Easy. Section 13 - it says if people connect to your program, you have to let the clients connecting to your program get a copy of your source code.
This is significantly more copyleft than a normal gnu license, where you only need to make available a copy of your source code to anybody you give your program to, and thus not to the final end users in the case of web services. It addresses a real concern that software as a service ends up relying on source code you don't have access to or control over, but it does let any of your users read your code so grandparent is very correct about code audits.
That being said, if he's worried about people reading code, he should be scared of any open source license. Grandparent appears to have a philosophical objection to the 'open' part of open source a.
A wonderful MMO (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Science-Fantasy? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:They shouldn't have bothered. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:They shouldn't have bothered. (Score:1, Informative)
It's superior only in the developers dreams. Today it only supports a small subset of the standards, it's buggy, and the output is not anywhere near as well optimized as GCC. It does compile quickly and sometimes gives more useful error messages.
Certainly it will get better— Apple is tossing millions behind this aggressive effort to get away from every piece of GPLed code.
Re:What if we created text-only MMORPG's? (Score:3, Informative)
using numbers like "4" and "7" to describe "years ago" for this is...odd. I was playing text-based mmorpgs 20 years ago.
Open source and OPEN PASSWORD! (Score:3, Informative)
When you sign up for this thing they send you an email with your username and your password (in plain text).
Nice!
Re:What if we created text-only MMORPG's? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
It is dark. You and your online friends are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Re:Free =/= Fun (Score:3, Informative)
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?