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Games Entertainment

Anarchy Online 122

Posted by michael from the PK'ing-we-will-go dept.
church writes "Oslo, Feb 1st 2000 - Funcom is pleased to announce the Linux version of our Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Anarchy Online. ... The game can be compared to online titles such as Everquest and Asheron's Call. However, Anarchy Online is set in a sci-fi environment 30,000 years into the future on a distant planet called Rubi-Ka." They're taking applications for beta testers.
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Anarchy Online More

Anarchy Online

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  • Fallout (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fallout 1 and 2, both very good sci-fi rpgs.

  • While it has nothing to do with Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One of the more scary thing happening in the Online RPG games is how the likes of eBay are changing it.

    Selling virtual goods has always been around, but now there are people who do this 24/7 and ensure that others cannot get the items so people have to pay for them.

    There are some who are now offering access to certain areas in the game for cash (or they kill you).

  • Bother (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From their FAQ:

    Will the game cost anything to play?
    Funcom has not decided on the pricing policy of the game yet. We will closely watch the market and decide on this issue closer to the release date. The Anarchy Online site will be updated with more information on the game and pricing, at a later date.[Back to Faq]
  • hm, the desert planet is the lone source of a mysterious substance that is used and needed by major orginizations that shape the universe....
    sounds a bit familiar there, but hey, frank herbert's dead anywho.
  • hmm, then i must be imagining perlQT pythonQT etc. yes?

  • Loki ported Civ: CTP to Linux Alpha and PPC, and Myth 2 to PPC, so hopefully this is the start of a positive trend for other third-party porting companies or internal ports :)
  • I must admit I haven't seen or played Ultima Online. I only toyed with Everquest a little and heard a friend speak on his obsession more than I cared to listen to :-) From what you say, Ultima Online sounds a lot better than Everquest. My (mistaken) impression was that these various games were pretty similar.
  • Wow. It sounds like Inferno or something, but only for MUDs. Implementing bytecode C and Common LISP and compilers? I hope this guy is using this source for something else, too. I might use it for class if it's really that fast and efficient, and maybe I'll even try MUDding someday... :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • Have you played these games? I play Ultima Online regularly. I've helped build a guild of players that has varied from 15 to 60 members, and lasted since early beta, almost 4 years ago! We've built a village complete with tower, gatehouse, smithy, tailor, training hut, etc.

    Our village attracted ruffians (other players) who wanted to drive us out of our homes and force us through intimidation to sell to them. We trained ourselves and fought them off.

    Recently, I've been building a casino there, hiring other people to deal, having events and publications, sending people out into the world to bring in new players. We've had to fend off attacks by two groups of murderers (neither on nights we were open, thankfully) as well as many thieves.

    Still think the world can't be changed? Still think you can't build anything? I can't agree.

    Zipwow
    aka Smythe,
    Cap & Dagger Casino Director (www.zipwow.net/CapNDagger)
    Vas Lor, The Nobility
    (www.thenobility.org)
  • Check out Fallout and Fallout2 for excellent Sci-Fi CRPGs.
  • Any screen shots of the controls?
  • Looking at the screenshots, it looks to me like it is still lacking in the UI... very limited poly-count (my second biggest complaint about EQ). While I want a massively-multiplayer game available for Linux, I want a good one. If Anarchy Online doesn't use a 2.5-D interface to a 3-D world it will be an improvement on EQ, but I would like to see something like the Unreal or Q3 engine interfacing to the server.

  • show me the screenshots.

  • It's a sci-fi a whole 30 years into the future :)

  • Is it just me or do the figures look wayyy out of proportion? (look at the tiny head on a few of those bodies).
  • Dammit! Extrans is eating my tags!
  • Yes, please do. Explain particularly why we should really give a damn whether you care or not.
  • Note that I didn't make any statement to the effect of how much I gave a damn whether he cared or not.
    Muah.

  • On this message [slashdot.org], I mention MUQ, which is a MUCK/MUD server engine intended to implement almost any type of massively multiplayer world, or at least a lot of the baseline stuff (the persistent database, the mobile code, the concurrent threads, the network IO.)

    MUQ [muq.org] is a hammer that can hit a lot of nails, like this one.

  • Cool, they have real trees. ( No cardboard cutout trees, aka 2 billboarded textures, ala EQ. )

    Cheers

    3d game programmer
  • > I don't see you complaing about QuakeC or UnrealScript and how they slow the game down so much.

    They are fine for a tiny game, 16 people, but they don't scale up to 4,000 people, UNLESS the language was designed to support that many people from the beginning.

    Cheers

    3D game programmer

  • 30? (Score:1)

    by uninerd ( 79304 )
    Hey, depending on the country- Was it supposed to be a comma, thus thirty thouand?
  • Well, I'm not an expert on this topic or anything, in fact I haven't ever played one of these types of games, but by looking at the screenshots I get the impression that this is more like a 3rd person quake (with a little less action) then a real rpg...
  • Or what about my alpha?
    It would be cool to be able to run all those 3D games my alpha machine... But when people say 'Linux' they mean Linux on x86 :-(
  • You have the right to remain silent. Anything you post as AC will not be held against you in the case of your karma. (However, if we do determine your identity, that may all change). You have every right to seek the technical (or any other advice from someone who has used and continues to use Linux as their operating system) advice from /.ers whose technical expertience and knowledge of the subjects which you have shown plain ignorance of, obviously outweighs your own. And in special circumstance their karma is high enough to demonstrate that they are reasonably sound and stable individuals whose advice may impart some practical knowledge to yourself. You have every right to post and whatever hour you may wish, but your actions may be deliberately monitored and moderated by those who view your comments as disruptive to the general population and inhabitants of the Slashdot community. If your remarks are deemed such, you may incur certain punitive liabilities and punishment as a result.

    In other words, get a clue.


    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
    www.npsis.com [npsis.com]
  • My post wasn't flamebait, it's a wakeup call, something to think about.

    Yes it was harsh but i was making a point, not starting a flame war... the posts that follow... they're flame bait.

    - - -

  • At least Im not such a wimp I post thoughless flame anonymously.

    If you really beleve what u said.. y not be a man and put ur e-mail address up there and we can talk about it.

    thats the only reson ur doing this... becasue u can.. u don't have to reep the consquenses.. ur a thoughtless, mindless little kid who dosn't really give a shit about anything and just wants attention.

    Get a life.

    When u can think up something constructive to say, tell me what a moron i am then.

    - - -

  • new zealotland?

    Oh yeah baby... crack every night... and sometimes the sheep come in and join.

    - - -

  • You're just as biased as he is. Both KDE ans GNOME have their problems. They both have they're uses as well. KDE is wonderful to give to windows users who are scared of UNIX. GNOME is great for people who want eye candy. KDE is more organized, and working on more productivity apps. GNOME is working more independently and producing more geek oriented stuff. Both have their place, and posts like your's make me sick.
  • Luckily not all the time: Civilization - Call to Power is one of the examples where the developers are actively trying to make the Linux version run on just about any flavor of Linux.

    *sigh* Ist's just so touching to hear tech support actually say "We're working on a PPC version." instead of "Sorry, we only support x86." :)

    Baumi
  • Gtk is much more plattfrom independent than Qt. First of all you have both Win32 and BeOS ports of the core C gtk toolkit. Then you have multiplattform Win, Be and Mac C++ support through both wxWindows and the AbiSource-tk. And last the VDK toolkit is also ported to Win32. In addition to that I am sure you can do multiplatfom development using the Mozilla technology stack, which in addition to the others are ported to OS/2 and Amiga. Or in other words, using Qt is paying for something that is available in better incarnations for free. That amounts to a long range of nails in the Qt casket :)
  • Only a few questions remain - will there be an exorbitant playing fee ala UO and the Anarchy servers be up to it - high pings and heavy lagged spoiled UO in non US countries

  • Hmmmmm (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "AOL" for Linux
    hehehehehe
  • Though I never tried any of them very long, those online games always stuck me as rather boring as well. I think the problem with them is that they are only a small step above Quake et. al. when it comes to doing constructive.

    I think constructive games are much more fun -- games where you make something, or design something. Civilization has always been a favorite of mine because of this. In Quake you build nothing -- everything lasts only as long as you stay alive. In the RPG games you build your character, becoming more and more powerful.

    But the worlds themselves are just as static as in Quake. They can't be changed, if you kill the creatures they all come back eventually, and it gives the feel that nothing ever accomplishes anything.

    In a game where you could build fortresses, develop inter-player politics, etc., would be much more fun. I think the emphasis on 3D graphics has held back the genre. 3D graphics are fine and all, but are technically difficult and bandwidth-hungry. With tile graphics you would be able to work a lot harder on the other parts of gameplay.

  • I just spent the last several hours looking at this all, and I must say I'm very impressed. I didn't get the impression that MUQ was quite at the point of making real worlds/MUDS, but the infrastructure looks really good.

    The documentation, I must say, is very good for the first public release. The author definately seems like he wants this to be used and understood by others. The docs put most systems to shame.

    Also, compared to many open-source game efforts, this is the product of a very mature programmer. Nothing against the young and enthusiastic, but they make many mistakes that have been made before -- I know I would. For building a strong infrastructure this would not do. And MUQ is all about infrastructure. I think he mentioned that he was the original author of the Citadel BBS system -- so it should be apparent that he's been around a while now.

  • All of the current cast of MMRPGS suck because of their fantasy and sci-fi plots. What I am really looking forward to are things like massively multiplayer flight sims with some good WWII historical settings.

    mmmmmm

  • Screenshots [anarchy-online.com] Looks kinda sweet.
  • I didn't see any, but I didn't dig too deep.
  • GUNK [gunk.net]?

    Kind of something along the lines of this anarchy online thing.
    The development process is a great deal more open, at the least.
  • I'm sorry if this offends any of you, but I've always felt that Slashdot shouldn't be allowed to become a mere mouthpiece for announcements and press releases pertaining to the Linux world. We're a tech site, and we should stick to that. Seeing this shameless plug for a game - a proprietary game, even - on the index page really sickens me, and goes to show how times change.

    If michael and the gang really want to post this kind of crap, the least they can do is put them into a "Press releases" category so that I can uncheck it in the preferences page.

  • Hmm.. platform independencem, ease of poring... QT.. Another nail in the GTK casket.

    Perhaps you're not aware, but GTK [gtk.org] is platform independent as well. It has already been ported to the Win32 platform [user.sgic.fi]. And as long as we're flinging FUD around, I might point out that GTK is also language independent, while Qt is limited to C++.

  • ...only 60 times slower than C! ^_^

    No offense, it looks like a pretty cool text-based MUD engine, but it is not going to be competing with any of these commercial real-time 3D massive multiplayer systems any time soon. To manage a real-time 3D environment, you need raw speed.

    To be honest, it looks to me like it's just trying to do too much. It leaves things so open you might as well just start from scratch.

    The value of a MUD engine is that it has a certain basic functionality, and you define the variation from that functionality and specific data that fits within it. If you make a MUD engine that you can do <i>anything</i> with, you haven't really gained anything over just picking the language of your choice and the OS of your choice and going from there.

    For a good case study of this effect see <a href="http://www.verge-rpg.com/">VERGE</a> (the main site's down, but there's a link that'll let you into the community). VERGE is a console-RPG construction kit. VERGE 1 had a simple scripting language that didn't give the programmer a whole lot of freedom, people complained, but they made lots of games with it (well, lots of demos; I don't believe I ever did see a VERGE game completed). To "fix" these problems, VERGE 2 was created. It allowed a whole lot more and included a "scripting" language that's really an interpreted C variant. The problem is, making a VERGE 2 game was a whole lot more complicated than making a VERGE 1 game. In fact, people would probably have been better off with just a good C library for tiled graphics with sprites and a few special effects, keyboard, and sound handling. So VERGE has more or less died off, with the occasional demo still popping up, but most of the projects having died a slow death when people who chose VERGE because they couldn't program tried to move from 1 to 2.

    My first impression of the discription was that it was talking about a tightly coupled operating system/programming language like Oberon or Forth. When you step back a bit, MUQ looks a lot like some LISP or Forth variant running on EROS. Not a bad platform for a MUD, but why go to all the trouble of rewriting it in C and running it on top of another OS?

  • Yeah, the page is down, like I said. It crashed a few weeks ago and hasn't come back up. There's a link at the bottom...

    Anyway that's kind of the point. It went down and the people running it haven't brought it back up (but surely next time it will come back bigger and better! - so they dream). Giving the developers more freedom killed it because, no longer limited by the engine, they all had these grandiose visions of incredible games which they really couldn't finish.

    Anyway, back on topic, I mentioned EROS [eros-os.org](seemingly also down...), because one of its big things is persistent store. Instead of having a filesystem, it just has the most incredible virtual memory system you've ever seen. Efficient multithreading is also really the OS's concern; it can do it so much more efficiently with special code.

    As for QuakeC, a massive multiplayer RPG is much more complex than Quake. Imagine trying to track everything you do in a MUD while running a Quake match between 400 people.

    Also, for your primitives to do most of the work, you need to have a very close idea about what your going to be doing with those primitives, meaning a very specialized and limited engine. I don't dispute that scripting languages in games can be valuable tools, but there's a big difference between a specialized scripting language you use to define the top level interactions and a "sky is the limit" wide open general purpose interpreted language that you use to place the scales on a dragon's back.

    You've gotta wonder, is it worth all that effort to put another layer between the implementor and the hardware?

  • Yeah, of course speed will be a problem. But you aren't being completely fair about it.

    The minimum speed is 1/50 that of C, but if your primitives do a non-trivial amount of work, then it will be a lot faster.

    Like any interpreted language, if your primitives are small, the overhead of interpretation is the bottleneck. If the primitives to a lot of work (matrix multiplication, geometry transformation), then the time spent in the primitives masks the overhead of the interpretation.

    I don't see you complaing about QuakeC or UnrealScript and how they slow the game down so much. :) Those games and our god, Carmack, include those scripting languages because they offer signifigant runtime flexibility and high-level control over the underlying engine.

    MUQ lacks the 3d environment primitives right now; MUQ won't turn into the Unreal or Quake engine without a lot of work, but even with simple primitives for representing objects in a 3d world. (OpenGL display lists.) you still have the opportunity to do some 3d stuff and still keep most of the low-level computation on the C-side and can do the higher level stuff as scripts in MUF/MUC. As for what services MUQ will offer for representing a 3d world-model in the future, who knows.

    I looked at your case study, but all I saw was a splash page underneath. I looked around a little but didn't see anything usable.

    Your perspective on MUQ is pretty accurate. Its an interactive programming system, like a FORTH, LISP, TCL, OCAML, SML-NJ, or HASKELL runtime. (I don't know Oberon, so I wont comment). Unlike those, it offers a few useful services like a lightweight persistent store and very lightweight multithreading, which none of those other interactive systems really have. Unlike a MUD or MUCK, it isn't complete in that it has a world-model builtin, but it is a programming language/system in which such a world-model could be built relatively easily.

  • Anyone care to explain to me how that managed to get marked as a troll?
  • From their website:
    Their huge success is without any doubt based on the Nano-Tek® technology the company patented 25,000 years ago!

    Not only do we fail to fix the patent system in the next 30,000 years, but it gets even worse. Patent lifetime is now 25,000+ years!
  • In Europe (this is Oslo....), a comma is a dot, and a dot is a comma. Thus 3 million would be 3.000.000 and 8 and three quarters would be 8,75 ...

  • Beta-testing May Be Windows-Only (Score:3)

    by CrusadeR ( 555 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @08:52PM (#1301618) Homepage
    As the beta-testing sign-up was announced well before the Linux version was, its not guaranteed that this round of testing will include the Linux client... just a word of warning.

  • Splendid! (Score:3)

    by Simon Carr ( 1788 ) <slashdot.org@simoncarr.com> on Saturday February 05, 2000 @08:38PM (#1301619) Homepage
    I'm all for RPGs... All too often though RPGs are the domain of the standard issue Tolkien-esque universe... Fireball spells, long-swords, skinny hats. Never been my bag, but I always participated because I loved the multiplayer aspects of MUDs.

    Well I'm out of the closet now. I loathe mixing regents, I hate kings, queens, dukes, elves, hobbits, pretentious frickin' bards, preachy knights... I dislike chain-link armour.

    Now, an argument can be made that if one wants sci-fi type multiplayer adventure, they should be playing Half-Life, or UT. I say nay! I wanna build a character who can weild dual pulse-cannons or whatever!

    Back it up, mage boy, I got me some killer robots to smash.

  • [Open Source|Free Software|whatever] MMORPG (Score:4)

    by Kalana ( 5423 ) on Saturday February 05, 2000 @09:14PM (#1301620)
    Think all the current MMORPGs suck? Want to play from Linux
    (and on alpha, ppc, sparc, mips, arm, whatever. *BSD or commercial
    unix, windows, anything you can get it to compile on, too)? Want to
    run your own world? write your own client? Then free software is the
    way to go. Check out Worldforge [worldforge.org],
    a project to create an open source MMORPG.

  • Just a FYI, there's a lonely geek who's been working on a server designed for just these types of games for over 6 years, it just entered beta two months ago. Its been GPL'ed since the beginning. So go check out MUQ, located at www.muq.org. [muq.org]

    Muq is a MUCK/MUD server engine (secureity, network, database storage, and job support) that has (so far) 3 language frontends to it: a FORTH-like (MUF), a lisp-like, and a C-like (MUC). The C-frontend was created in a couple of weeks. Or you can create your own compiler front ends. It has a very optimized inner loop and is intended for huge databases of small objects. So all the internal operations are very very lightweight.

    It also has an OO scheme to die for, as it shamelessly stole CLOS from LISP... I think it even has a partial implementation of MOP. (Meta Object Protocal, lisp-heads will know that this lets you completely redefine your OO system if you need to.)

    I checked out the new version from 4 months ago and almost blew chunks, no muck server engine should rotate the OpenGL teapot as part of its self-tests. :) It's gotten better since.

    MUQ has exportable encryption support. (twofish and diffe-hellman, I believe) It is turning into the emacs of MUCK-servers. With luck, somebody may even implement emacs on top of it. :)

    It has an implementation of a distributed-world packaged in the distribution, but that is still buggy and highly undocumented. But you can implement your own world on top of the core engine, up to and including OpenGL.

    Eventually, when it gets GTK/QT integration, you'll run it as both the server and client, one batch of interpreted software runs on and implements the world-server, or the world-server farm, and another batch of code runs locally, integrating with OpenGL and GTK/QT interfaces to run the GUI frontend.

    As with most opensource projects, and especially one with a scope this big, as big as emacs, it needs volunteers and support. And the author deserves some gratification as his child has been in developer-releases for 6 years before last december's beta-release, with his work almost unknown for that entire period.

    So grab the source, and design your own giant world on top of MUQ [muq.org]

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