Last Chance to Help Free Ryzom 280
An anonymous reader writes "With the consistent influx of MMORPG's in the last few years it was obvious that many would fall by the wayside, one of those to fall is Ryzom, as you might be aware it is now going to be up for sale, and in an enterprising move for open source there is an initiative to buy Ryzom and put it under the GPL, much like Blender was in the past. However, time is short, apparently "Pledges must be made within the next few days, since the deadline for the final bid is expected sometime before Wednesday, December 19th". Already there is over 150,000 Euros donated and the FSF has donated 60,000!!
If you (like me) can see the benefit of having a fully developed MMORPG that is completely open source just donate a little, quickly!"
Suckitude? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It has a +4 bonus against goblins or dwarves (actually, it has nothing against dwarves but it is too stupid to notice the difference).
When struck with an unholy bastard sword of doom it immediately vanishes leaving its treasures behind, but you don't gain any experience.
Really... it is for game balance.
(Style blatantly copied from Steve Jacksons Munchkin series)
Re:Suckitude? (Score:4, Funny)
Exemple:
Player 1 : Meh, got a gray item this is gay.
Monster : *Pouff* *chop* *chop*.
Player 2 : Ha ha! pwned ROFL LMAO!!111
Monster : *Pouff* *chop* *chop*
Re:Suckitude? (Score:5, Informative)
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Or, more to the point, who has the money and interest to keep their own Operating System running and in development, and who will use it?
Hobbyists will benefit, of course, but so will the community at large. It can never hurt to have code from a tested engine floating around.
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Google for personal Ragnarok Online servers. Or Neverwinter Nights persistent world servers.
Private servers (Score:2)
1) Private chatrooms for a bunch of friends, or an an organization. A school could run its own MMORPG server, so could a LUG.
2) The game master for a bunch of dedicated role-players might want one for a private campaign.
3) Developers might run one to test-drive specific ideas.
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When you're talking gaming that isn't actually much of a limit but I grok what you're saying.
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My monster would drop as soon as you see it, and drop 2^1000 gold (needs a bigint patch)
But I decided it was easier to just make the game say that I win, and not play at all.
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Inflation. With such monsters gold becomes worthless in player-player transactions very soon. And you can't just make the monster drop more gold ad infinity, since even Bigints have numerical limits.
Simply scale the prices of computer-controlled vendors by median gold income of the players who are buying that item. That way the law of supply
whos going to host it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Last I checked it still cost money to put a cluster of computers on the internet.
Peer 2 Peer/distributed processing (Score:2)
Have the client and most of the server running on the user's computer, only interacting with other machines when needed.
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Which I think is how Guild Wars can afford to scrub the monthly sibscription model and make its money selling (standalone) expansions packs.
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You might get areas hosted by companies as adver
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Re:whos going to host it? (Score:5, Funny)
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I am awesome. I'm also pretty rad.
Can you save a sinking ship (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, I do see some advantages of having an engine like this open sourced, so I guess just for having this bit of code out and about, that could be a good thing.
RonB
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Imagine one young girl saying to another "It's like Second Life, except you don't need to pay a bunch of mo
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So where is the money going to come from to run the game? Either it's funded by ads, subscription or _____. The first two already exist - I'm interested in what you think the third would be.
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Basically you have free development and deployment and only have to pay for bandwidth and servers.
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I don't think the point of this is to save the game; I think the point is to open the code, so others can learn from it and use it for their own projects.
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OSS won't do anything to change that situation, really.
The one thing you HAVE to pay for is land, but land happens to translate to server resources, so o
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So does that make my game not worthy in your opinion? I'm not pretending that Ryzom is the best game in the world but it certainly doesn't fit your 'not worthy' tag.
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JK, though it is theoretically possible to make a game like that semi-open and make money off it at the same time.
1) Provide an open server architecture so that anyone can run a server who wants to.
2) Release a small part of the game open.
3) Sell expansion packs to server operators for a percent of profit.
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You seem to imply that because this game has failed once with a certain development cost and subscription model, nobody should ever waste their money or time with it again. That's not how the market works. Now, with the bankruptcy, somebody else has a chance to a
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That the FSF has made a joint bid suggests it is moving from the open market environment to a charity or a political cause.
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I don't know, raising what works out to $144,000 (not including the FSF money) is a pretty good sign that people like what they see and are not wanting it to go away. That is a heck of a lot of money for a game to be completely crap, particularity one that wasn't marketed a lot. Besides there are a heck of a lot more ways then simply h
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Also, it begs the question: if the bazaar model is so great, how come the only games that it's produced are cheap knock-offs and clones of popular five or ten year old closed source games?
Open source development of abandoned commercial games doesn't even seem to achieve much: WarZone 2100 was open sourced 2 years ago [sourceforge.net], and all that's been achieved in that time is a POSIX port, plus the addition of some crash bugs.
This kind of pokes the argument that open source promotes diversity in the eye with a sharp
Don't Donate! (Score:2, Funny)
meh (Score:2)
there's a reason why its going out of business.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes... I guess that's true if your intention is to motivate the horse... but if you just like kicking horses... well you can kick them for quite a long time, dead or otherwise.
I'm in for $10... (Score:2, Interesting)
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benefits? (Score:3, Insightful)
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As a pure money-making enterprise, PC game development shops focus their dollars on the platform most likely to provide a return
Nerf! (Score:2)
Just as an afterthought.. what would happen if Blizzard would GPL their software? Obviously they would remain in control of the artwork and such, so nobody can start running their own little World of Warcraft. But what would it mean for other MMORPGs out there?
It's not such an insane idea really... lo
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However the support for the server side would be aweful, on the other hand your clients would have a plethora of mods to choose from. We would need to take a good look at the success of BF and NWN2 to see how well it would work for Blizzard.
Quake as an example (Score:3, Interesting)
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hmmm (Score:2)
Surely (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more.
Now the game has already been written, so I'd have thought dev expenses would currently be minimal - so not too much saving moving it to OSS.
The first load of expenses are fixed(ish) and have to be covered, so either OSS as a whole is going to have to pay for other people to play - or people themselves will have to pay to play - and we can't let everybody run about compiling in their own stuff...and the more people come in, the more it's going to cost to run..
And it's not even as if the damn thing is covering it's costs at the moment - hence the sale...
The whole concept seems bizarre.
Seemingly there is something that is losing money, so OSS thinks it's a good idea to buy it?
Imagine this were some failed Microsoft product - would the OSS community all start bouncing on their chairs clammering to take it over and give up on this 'Linux thing'?
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Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more.
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Actually, a lot of OSS peole would LOVE to open source some MS projects. The only problem is that MS won't do that for many projects because of their IP centered business plan. They can afford to sit on old IP in hopes that new value can be found - like what they tried to do with FAT. (I know, it was a patent issue - not exactly the sam
The plan is too keep the servers running (Score:4, Informative)
The French bankruptcy law is different from American, a judge is deciding for which plan for the company is going to win, and he will take into consideration such issues as keeping French jobs. Not just paying the debt.
Most of the player base is French, and seems to be large enough to keep the game going. The company went bankrupt due to some bad business decisions.
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I recognise the "everyone compiling their own hacks" issue, but if the game ran in a specialized P2P client, perhaps it could be set up to disallow illegitimate clients, or to compartmentalize players depending on which set of "allowed hacks" they're using.
A reason to donate (Score:2)
However, by adding this game class of game to the open source arsenal, we increase the overall attractiveness of open source systems like Linux to people (especially kids and young adults) who are sitting on the fence. I may donate for that reason, rather than from having a personal attraction to the game.
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Yes.
Of course.
Because it is the development model and the code which draws players into a game.
Not the game play. The story. Art and animation. Vocal performance. Music. Oblivion sells poorly, because it demands bleeding-edge performance.
It does a driver for sales of the XBox 360. Dual cor
There used to be plenty of OSS role playing games (Score:4, Insightful)
What surprises me is that no one has written an open source 3D graphical MUD (which is all MMORGS are) from scratch yet. I realise its difficult but when has something being difficult stopped many projects before?
Daimonin (Score:2)
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Is the textures, art, models included? (Score:4, Insightful)
A large library of free 3d-models with textures would be incredibly useful as a starting library for other open-source engine projects.
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Way to help (Score:2, Offtopic)
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What *is* the reason? (Score:2)
Contrary to popular belief, an MMOG requires a lot of logistics, financial backing and personnel to be run. It also requires a lot of users to be fun (which requires a lot of hype and a wisely-chosen release to get started). Neither of those points could really be met in an OSS project. OK, there may even be three or four people having enough time and motivation to try and understand the system, and they might even get it to run on a small scalle, supporting a few hundred players.
A lot of people without th
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The same could have been said about websites 10 years ago, but that didn't stop tens of thousands of people from giving it a try. And... some succeeded. Or at least made a living at it, and the number of people just trying made the Internet a better thing to connect to.
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It is infinitely easier to create and run a website than to run an MMO. Just have a look at the number of successful "open" MMOs. I know of only one that got to the point of having a few dozen players and was actually halfway self-sustaining, in contrast to the numerous amateurs that try to start one and then just have to give up because they lack the skill
Interesting result (Score:2)
On a side note, yet another game Jessica Mulligan joined that closed. She/he came about during AC2s early days with the promise of improving the game and keeping it going. AC2 closed, but only af
The point isn't "Free Ryzom"... (Score:3, Insightful)
...The point is to create (or buy and free, in this case), a complete MMORPG gaming system. It's the MMORPG version of the Unreal Engine, for comparison's sake.
So the game wasn't that great. It's open source now, get a group of people together (a la Legend of the Green Dragon [lotgd.net]), and make a new world system based in the engine.
So it might take several servers and people to run the system. Set it up distributed, get someone to contribute the services of their 3DNS server somewhere, and now not only are you distributed, but you have geographical load balancing.
Commenters are talking about this as if the idea that a group of people on the IntarWebs can't democratically organize a large distributed server environment and keep it running the latest code and staffed with admins. I wouldn't mention that to the people at all of [undernet.org] the various [efnet.org] irc networks [freenode.net], who have been doing exactly that for years, you might discourage them and make them shut down networks that have been running for longer than a decade.
And even if the whole Massive part of the game doesn't take off, who's to say specialty environments won't crop up, with admin tools and pre-formed game world content, a la AD&D or GURPS Modules and Expansions, letting players run actual 3D immersive campaigns on a single server somewhere for relatively small groups of people. For that matter, the idea of online 3D Battletech with the whole army of people that I used to play with years ago, instead of going through all the work to build huge tables, seems like a pretty fun concept.
The fact that such a beast could be released to the public is a good thing, even if you didn't like what the front end (Ryzom) was; the backend is what's important here. It's like the Unreal engine - there's a lot of games using it. Some of them suck, some of them are pretty good, but the content, and the engine to support the content, are two separate things. Yes, the bad (in the opinion of some people) content comes with it, but so does the engine that will let people drive whatever content they want.
Did anyone tell them? (Score:2)
Buying In (Score:2)
Seems like $150K plus all the developer/activist interest would be better invested in extending access to an existing popular multiverse than just getting an unpopular one, which needs a new budget to compete.
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There may be but not one that I can find doing a search of "SecondLife". Linden labs sells collocated servers that you can lease though but that is hardly the same thing as having the code and artwork.
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The FSF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Buying a new culture. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, the ideal here is to create a new culture for the MMORPG community that matches the idea behind all the other open source projects - let you build your own system to your own specs for your own goals, without putting in all the dev time and work it takes to get the foundation down. MUDS have survived for decades on the idea that anyone can write a persistant world where people can come and play.
This is to be the MUDing of 3D worlds. Every person who wants to design a few meshes and work up a couple maps can create a world for their buddies to come play in. With a bit of additional development the community could produce a product which creates "small worlds" for people to get together in. Perhaps even taping some of the other potential uses of MMORPGs, like conducting on-line confrences and visible databases. There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Can't imagine how that would work? Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library. just as a quick example.
-GiH
Screw MMPORG, try OSS VR engine (Score:2)
Some applications of such:
1. Training simulations. Emergency response, medical procedures, aviation, driving. All of these require learning how to coordinate with other people.
2. A VR space for business meetings.
3. A permanent VR space (ala Metaverse). Transfer files
What about other FLOSS MMORPGs? (Score:2)
How about some facts with all this FUD? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the FSF did not just mail the Free Ryzom project a cashier's check for $60,000. The *pledge* has conditions: mainly that the software and artwork be released under entirely free licenses. Many commenters seem to be particularly confused as to what is free and what is not: let me clarify. The goal of the Free Ryzom project is to license the client, the *server*, and all of its related content, code and technology under free software licenses. All of it. The entire thing. Ryzom's Social Contract is modeled on Debian's, with slight modifications - including the assertion, which is rather revolutionary as far as MMORPGs are concerned, that the avatar belongs to the player.
This would be an entire commercial MMORPG - client, server, libraries, artwork, models, etc - entering the free software realm. People who can't understand the utility in this need to have their heads examined. As another commenter put it, I'm sure a bunch of other people said "What good is Netscape, anyways?" many years ago.
The project proposal would create a French non-profit that will function as the caretaker of the existing Ryzom shards. The players will determine how Ryzom will evolve as a game. And, again, 90% of the people commenting are missing the big picture, and why the FSF made its pledge: this will enable anyone to build MMORPGs using the Ryzom engine as a base. The FSF sees this as a stellar opportunity to push the advancement of free software gaming - a typically neglected arena. This is also a wonderful opportunity to bring the tools for making MMORPGs back into the hands of the users, and allow anyone to set up a world and modify it however they like. The FSF feels that this donation will encourage, in time, a vast collection of unique worlds, all based around the same basic toolkit.
An auxilliary effect will hopefully be to help advance the cause of free software drivers. After all, complex 3D applications are pretty good for testing, eh?
Who needs a Massive, just give me a world engine. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've flirted with a few MMORPG's and they've all left me flat. They've got pretty pictures, but they're essentially just graphical MUDS. You kill stuff, you get gold, you buy items, you level up, rinse, repeat. The better ones at least have some faction based intrigue beyond just bragging on who cleared the new expansion dungeon first.
The thing is, those old text based games evolved beyond all this hack & slash dungeon crawling stuff. On DuneMUSH if you got into a violent altercation it means that you were either fighting a duel or you had seriously blundered somehow. At its peak it had hundreds of users with characters, factions, and settings spread across a dozen or more factions on multiple in-game worlds.
GarouMUSH [garoumush.org] is still running after all these years! They are extremely exclusive as to whom they accept as players, to the point that you have to submit an application with a character concept for approval before joining. They would often reject them at first draft and offer suggestions on how to make the character more three dimensional and "real." While there were occasional moments of ultraviolence (it was a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game, after all), most of the time you were just interacting in character, researching mysteries, tribal politics, mentoring cubs, whatever.
In both cases, they had such depth for two reasons. One, was that everyone got to build items and to some extent environments using a simple C-ish language. You could even code special attributes and behaviors on to your own character to some degree. The other (and more important) reason was that the games were ROLEplaying communities. I don't just mean having a message board and giving advice to newbies. I mean that everybody (at least the ones who stuck around) was invested in making the game an rich world full of interesting characters living out engaging stories. Most of the time you didn't break character except in the chatroom areas and nobody built areas (at leas In-Character areas) that broke with the setting.
Second Life is approaching and in some ways exceeding the versatility, but that's not exactly a game. Because MMORPG players are customers/renters, they (in general) have a very different attitude than volunteers/owners. The scale required to run one of those things profitably (coders, designers/artists, admins, servers, etc) beans they have to go for the lowest common denominator dungeon-crawl play style that appeals to a mass-market. WoW is amazing, but it's still all about dungeon crawling and leveling-up.
What would be amazing about a working Free Software MMORPG engine is that you could have a small, comunity based game. Imagine a close knit community where you trusted your fellow players enough to create your world together. Worldforge [worldforge.org] has been trying for years to make this happen, but for as far as they've come it always seem sjust around the corner. Dropping a fully functional world, physics, object library,game engine, etc into the wild would free creators from having to develop software, and let them start developing worlds.
Let the cheats begin! (Score:2)
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I pledged a donation because if this goes open source, the first thing I'll do it work on reversing that decision and making the game fun again. I'll have a rogue server, and probably only a few friends on it, but it'll be fu
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so far, they collect pledges, not donations (in order not to have to refund everybody). What I wonder is what percentage of pledges they expect to be actually donated if the bid succeeds.
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- if the game, all of it is free, people can go and do whatever they want, which includes finding a way to keep the current players happy. If there are enough people who are happy with the game there will be a way to continue it. If a company buys it you can be sure it won't be thinking first about keeping players happy, it will be thinking about making money.
- why do you think it's "funny" that the server won't be free? Didn't you just say you wanted Ryzom to continue? How they he
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