The WorldForge Project Celebrates Three Years!

cyanide writes "Well it has been three years since The WorldForge Project was first announced on Slashdot as an effort to develop open source Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORG ^? ). Back then we were calling ourselves 'Altima', but since then we've released our first game, Acorn, and are now working on our next release, Mason. The project really is thriving now, and I'd love to see some new blood join us. "

Re:cheating

[Patoski]

I would point you to MUDs which have been around and open source for many many years yet cheating in the mature MUDs are quite low. Generally things are massively exploited at the beginning and then the holes are closed. I suspect WorldForge will be much the same way.

-Pato

Re:development pace

[SpeedBump0619]

...just plain glacial.

Yep, huge, slow, steady, and relatively unstoppable. Good description.

...dozens of tiny servers to manage each part of the protocol stack...

hmm...I think you may misunderstand the reasons for those "dozens of tiny servers". I won't dispute the WF has created many servers, but most of them are developmental. As I see it, once everything is in place a world will be made up of 4 servers:
1) a metaserver (so you can find the game you want)
2) a media server (providing all the graphics in your chosen game)
3) the game server (you know...the thing that actually does something)
4) the AI "server" (which looks like a client to the game server, running the NPCs)

all of these can be colocated if you choose, but we are developing with a goal of distributed world processing, so it makes *sense* to do some subdivisions.

...no one is really certain what's going to be done and how it's going to get done.

This is really only half true. We *do* have a good idea of what is going to be done. I suggest you look at the documentation on the Mason game. All of that is planning, determining what needs to be done, and what *doesn't* need doing (yet in some cases).

Sadly, I do have to admit to not knowing how it's all going to get done. As I've never done it, or anything like it, previously this is new territory. I find that part of it's appeal, the exploration of something new.

...the success or failure of most open source projects can be directly correlated to the amount of obsession some central figure...

This is close, but not quite correct I think. Who is the obsessive figurehead behind Mozilla, Linux, Gimp? Maybe they do have one, but my guess is on something more fundamental: Vision. The developers of all successful open source projects have a common vision, and that vision is what binds and drives them. Sometimes that *is* one inspired person, and at other times it is a community vision.

-SpeedBump the verbose