f13.net

http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html

You get what you pay for.

Buckets of morons.

I've seen better 3d modeling out of first year graphics students.   Holy crap those models hurt my eyes.

Of course, I shouldn't expect quality graphics from a community of uber geeks.

Yeah, it's shitty....But....I'll give them credit anyways. I wish I could code a little. I wish all of us here could.

It's kind of pathetic, because everyone here or at other Lum-related websites has at least one good idea that would break the trends. And for some reason, a significant number of the people who actually have the skills to do it are either retarded as hell, know jack and shit about fun and games, or at the very least, seem to have a knack for repeating mistakes.

I hate people who think that just because they have an idea, it must be a good idea.

Oh wait, wrong thread.

Under the guy's XP bar there's a thing that says "progr. points."  I misread it as "pregger points" and started to hope the game was going to have fetuspults.  Ah well.

Ok, I may be stretching it by saying "everyone", but still, the lowest common denominator is much better than what you'll find at the Vault. Point is, if this community actually could do something, I believe they could make a good game. Despite their differences.

I like the juxtaposition of the last 3 posts:

- We all have ideas
- Ideas aren't always good
- Example


And that game looks like ass. I'm not a graphics whore in that I need high polies or flashing effects, but what you DO have better be high quality. If you only have X polies, make models that look good with X polies. Ass-tastic is never justified. The textures are all so bland too.

Whoa, they are still doing this? I think I tried this one time earlier. If I did, it felt like my spleen was being pulled through a sausage maker.

In about 5 years it'll be good enough to be a shitty MMORPG.

One one side, I would say that it doesnt look all that bad for amateurs. On the other hand, I say it looks crummy as far as comparing it to games I would pay money for.

On their good side, they are trying. On the bad side, it looks like they are copying the same old standard interface, graphics, RPG style that has been done a million times since the late 1980's.

If you are going to try it yourself, why not take it in a less travelled direction? If it were me, you would not see one Orc in my entire game. Nor dwarves, halflings, cave trolls, or anything else like that. WAAAAY too many great games out that already covered those bases.

C'mon, these are Open Source/Linux geeks. Originality? You're asking for too much.



Definitely.

I'm surprised no one has made the Wild West yet...Or something with more of a fantasy twist: Deadlands. Imo, it's a perfect fit for an online RPG.

I'd welcome a Fallout or Mad Max-type setting as well.

On a lark I installed the client and messed around with it.

Log follows:
-Client hardlocks my computer twice in a row simply loading itself.
-Character creation dialogs randomly don't display stuff, making it take 3 attempts to make a usable character.
-Program crashes or simply closes itself attempting to load the starting area.
-5 attempts later, I finally actually log into the game.
-Game is still exceptionally ugly. My character's walking animation is so slow it takes 4 steps every 100 yards. Not that it matters since the animation glitches about 10 seconds in and starts going backwards.
-I moonwalk around for 5 minutes marvelling at the absolutely horrid interface, most of which isn't readable since the text is black on green.
-I uninstall the client.

Did I say 5 years? Make that 10.

They don't gots the money for high end graphics. That usually means (ie, to those with talent/vision) they find a different hook, something that hasn't been tried before, something that doesn't have to be done because the corporate suits say it needs to be this way because they've got a jillion dollars and need to guarantee a jillion^^ in sales to turn their necessary profit.

Unfortunately, they appear to want to master the tools everyone else is using first, spending so much time developing they lost site of actually designing.

What an open source MMOG needs to be is really just a set of development tools for creating content and a set proceedure for including it in the game world.

I mean ALL content.  They should create a modular engine that does nothing but display 3-d models and runs scripts that allow modification of parameters.  Let the community develop the world a piece at a time as it is needed in the world.  Look at the thousands of mods out there for morrowind.  There are plenty of people willing to contribute in thier own ways.  Just make the tools and methodology available.

Bah.  The elephant in the living room is the White Wolf World of Darkness license.  Solo angst?  Werewolf vs Vampire PvP?  Print money.

http://www.wildwestsim.com/

There are plenty of frameworks out there, but I don't think anyone's really made a 'MMO-in-the-box: just add art!' software. Probably because it's fairly complex.

However, you could certainly use OpenSource components to make an MMO:

 - backend/network client: MASSIVE-3 (http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/research/systems/MASSIVE-3/)
 - Client UI: any opensource DX/OpenGL engine: Genesis3D (http://www.genesis3d.com/), OGRE (http://www.ogre3d.org/), CyrstalSpace (blah)

Heck, you could use the Tribes 2 Torque (http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=home&page=news) engine if you wanted (only $100) or Auran Jet (http://www.auran.com/jet/) (indie friendly), with changes to the network architecture or implementation with MASSIVE-3 or any of the other opensource server/client systems, though MASSIVE-3 is made specifically for these kinds of things. Auran Jet has a GUI creation tool which is kinda cool.

NWN2. You'll probably have to pay Fileplanet to host the world though :)

More than a few dozen people at a time though.  I'd like to see the world built by people as they play.

"Hey, the trees are kind of bland.  I'm a good modeller and an arborist I think I'll add lots of realistic trees to the game."

"Hmm, mountain orcs aren't aggressive enough, I'll add a script to tailor thier behavior against elves."

etc..., there are people out there with those skills who will add things in bits and pieces given a competent framework.  Hell two or three groups of people have completely redone all the character models in Morrowind, thats not a trivial task.  I'm not saying thier all going to be pure gold, but if you have a fair and understandable method for getting stuff accepted into the game it should'nt go too far off into suck-ville.

So you want a graphical MUD kit, like MUD-OS.

Meh, don't listen then.

Hiro Protagonist in SnowCrash is a developer on exactly the sort of thing I'm trying to describe.

Ok, in SnowCrash, the "outside" part of the virtual world was controlled by, I believe, the government.  The only dev-stuff you could do there was change your avatar - that's it.  Now that club they had, the Black Sun I think (?), was proprietary and you could do stuff there, like the sword fighting.  So you're left with either building your sandbox from scratch (brush up on your C++), or using a existing framework such as MUD-OS, or whatever SnowCrash equivalent.

I'm not so sure you know what it is you want, or else what MUD-OS is (or was).

As far as I recall, once you claimed a portion of real-estate in the Metaverse, you could do what you wanted with it.  There was alot of stock code available, in fact Hiro mentions that the sword-fighting code he wrote for the Black Sun got adopted by most of the Metaverse, which is why chasing people down the street swinging his katanna actually was effective.  The Metaverse seems to work exactly like a 3D MMO version of a MudOS/LP-MUD, where anyone could get permission to code for a specific sub-area of the Metaverse, set the rules to whatever they want, even set up a shop to sell bits of code to other people.

Murgos seems to want something like that, with a group that can supervise additions to the overall Metaverse.

Alkiera

The Snowcrash virtual playhouse was just TinyTIM or LambdaMoo with a graphical front end.  They existed 10 years ago.  Think Second Life with better graphics.   You can make an avatar that looks like a dancing monkey in Counterstrike, which IIRC was the most impressive feature of Stephenson's version.  The problem isn't that these things don't exist, the problem is that people aren't as cool as you want them to be.  You can't script insight and creativity.

If you really want to work on a generic MMORPG engine, join the WorldForge project.  They might have something ready in a decade.

There were MUDs that did operate like that.  There were various requirements for becomming a coder, and limitations on what code could affect, either by policy or code-enforced rules.

emphasis mine.

Were and MuDs being the operative terms in there that I seem to be having trouble making you understand that they don't mean Now and MMOG.

Reason being an issue of complexity.  Source for the MudOS engine is 80,000 lines, around 2 million characters, in C.  Enough LPC to start the engine and let people log in, with no security, and chat with one another in the one room is about another 120kB of code.  The code libraries that do useful stuff tend to be several megs in size, and that's just functionality, not much 'content', in the way of items or areas to move around in and explore.  LPMud was written by one guy with contributions from others, MudOS was based on it, with modifications by 20-odd people.

Now, to get something that will handle the backend of a 3d world, is much much more difficult.  WorldForge has already been mentioned, they've been at that for a long time now, with not a great deal to show for it.  Last I knew they were Isometric like UO, not really 3D.

And that doesn't even begin to address the content problem.  While the 'let others make and upload models as they feel like it' theory sounds good, how many people will play it?  99% of those who play MMOGs would log into such a place, say 'Gah, this looks like crap!', and go back to EQ2/WoW/SWG/ClicheQuest...  and tell their friends 'Hey, I tried that free MMOG thing, and man, it looked like crap.' Thus, the very few who do log in will be the creators, the people who want to make stuff... and who will be too busy doing so to actually consume content, or do anything other than sit in the world trying to debug their widgits.

Alkiera

As noted, Second Life is a graphical game that has a similar premise.  It's not the only one, either.  NWN allows it, and I thought it allowed you to link worlds across PCs?  The point of bringing up MUDs is to note that this is OLD.  It's been done.  

The main reason we don't have anything like what is in SC isn't because it's this fantastic sci-fi deal (well, except maybe the 3d laser glasses), it's because no one is really that interested in such a thing.  It wouldn't be nearly as cool as you think.  (1) People are assholes, much more so than Stephen made them out to be, (2) content is hard for people to create, (3) people good at making content are usually spending their time making money with their skills.  GOOD vol projects are a rarity.

Hence, its open.  People do it at thier liesure.  There is no rush, no need to "Make Profit Now!".

As far as the skills required bit, there are more people out there with the neccessary skills than you think.  And quite a few paid professionals contribute to mods on thier own time.

3-D modeling is not actually that hard (I have created several models in 3DS Max and imported them into games - just for kicks.  It only takes a few days to figure it out).  3-D animating is a bit tougher but with the right tools still not impossible for the amateur.

If a framework is available to place your work in hassle free enviroment then people will probably use it.  The idea is that it will have to start slow and small but be expandable and extensible enough to grow with the needs of its community.

Any word on how they will patch, because I would love another game that uses BitTorrent!

Ressurection FTW!

Anyway, so I was browsing around my favorite torrent site and turns out there's a massive intrest in this game, 27 000 people if I count seeds and leeches. From my understanding it's a free game and I'm as of now downloading the fairly small client. I didn't check this stuff out around the time this thread was created but the graphics seems fairly acceptable for being indy as of now. The URL remains the same (http://www.planeshift.it/main_01.html).

I was one of those players once. The game is a piece of shit. hell, it's not even a game.  Also, engrish.

Reading the "About" link hurts.  Looks terrible.  Might as well download for some yucks since, you know, I have so much free time and so few hammers and testicles.

If you're interested in getting a real job in the industry, it's better to try and fail than to just sit back and bitch.

For those not interested though, all bets are off :)

Counterpoint: Wish & Horizons.

Those guys are fucked.

I wasn't talking about quality of experience nor execution. I was talking about the people doing the work. Not the decision makers, but the grunts building code and art. They have learned, and while were part of failures (though Tulsa Games hasn't closed up shop), the experience they received will open doors to new opporunities.

There's many points of entry into the industry, but also many points within to transition between.

I like the job I have.  It pays well and I can bitch about things on the internet.  Also, I don't have to be a programmer.

Try and succeed works better.  The lead on Lazarus, for example, got a job making games, and I doubt that it was coincidence.

Myself, I've quit trying to get hired into the industry.  I don't have the stamina to tolerate the conditions at a good dev company, never mind an EA sweatshop.

I got the feeling from some docs and other projects that Crystal Space was actually pretty good.  Saw one video demo'ing specular lighting, for instance.  Not commenting on the implementation with Planeshift, just curious if this condemns the Crystal Space engine as well.

It doesn't really condemn the engine at all. The engine is only as good as the artistic assets and the people optimizing it for whatever purpose. At worst the engine just isn't suited for a MMOG without some rewriting.