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."
Re:They shouldn't have bothered. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Free =/= Fun (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Free Ryzom pledges? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Free =/= Fun (Score:3, Interesting)
I will say the crafting system was superb, something I would love to see else where.
Re:They shouldn't have bothered. (Score:1, Interesting)
ESR uses FUDaway.
There's something decidedly ironic about this.
Re:They shouldn't have bothered. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd hesitate before making a statement like that, especially when it comes to C++.
The LLVM/Clang architecture is certainly superior, and I really do look forward to seeing a complete C++ toolchain being seamlessly integrated into editors and IDEs.
But regrettably, Clang's C++ front-end is still incomplete. It still cannot build many non-trivial programs and libraries, including Boost (and just about anything involving advanced use of templates).
Moreover, C++ is possibly the most syntactically complex language in widespread use today, and it is becoming more complex still [wikipedia.org]. It may take years for Clang to hit such a moving target and implement a fully standards-compliant C++ compiler. Even reaching parity with MSVC and GCC (both of which already have support for the major C++0x features like lambdas, "auto" and iterator-loop syntax) may be a long time in coming.