No free Ryzom; what next? [LWN.net]

One month ago, LWN looked at the Free Ryzom Campaign, which was trying to raise enough money to buy (and free) the source to the Ryzom game in bankruptcy court. The Free Software Foundation got into the game (so to speak) with a $60,000 pledge. On December 21, however, the bad news was posted: another bidder had come in with a better offer. The campaign was left with a pile of pledges and nothing to buy.

Whenever a project gets that sort of energy and resources together, it is a shame to just let it all fade away. So the campaign organizers have been discussing possibilities for achieving their goal by other means. One of the immediate outcomes is the creation of the Virtual Citizenship Assocation, which is essentially the Ryzom campaign with the brand names removed. The organization is still soliciting pledges on the chance that the source for an interesting game may come available from somewhere else. One expects, however, that the number of pledges is unlikely to grow quickly until prospective donors can see what the organizers would like to buy.

There is a real chance that a game platform could be obtained this way. The history of free software projects starting with freed corporate code is long; Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, and InterBase are just some of the more prominent examples. The online gaming market is tough, with many failed offerings. Perhaps one of those proprietary failures could yet be turned into a free software success. Beyond that, the possibility of an open-source Second Life is still real.

The history of corporate code offers other lessons, though; among them is the fact that such code can often require a great deal of work. Mozilla treaded water for some time until it decided to simply toss much of its Netscape legacy and start over. It would be a shame to put a large pile of donated money into a code base which, in the end, needs to be thrown out and rewritten properly. It might be better to just start over from the beginning and do it right.

Except that starting from the beginning would not be necessary. The NeL library - the engine at the core of Ryzom - is already free software. Arkhart is a project to develop a GPL-licensed engine and game. The Planeshift engine is also free software - though the associated artwork is not. The WorldForge project has been working in this area for a long time. Other interesting projects exist as well.

There are a couple of conclusions to be drawn from this situation. The first is that we do have the interest - and the ability - to create game engines which can implement compelling virtual worlds. The code and the developers are out there; we don't have to buy that code from a failing company. The other side of the coin, however, is that code is only part of the problem. Top-quality online games need top-quality artwork, sound effects, music, storylines, and more. If our community is going to create a great online virtual world, we must do a better job of soliciting and integrating contributions from artists, writers, and others who are not software developers. Without them, all we have is a pile of code.

So there are a number of challenges to the creation of truly successful, completely free online worlds. But our community has always been good at overcoming challenges. This one, too, will fall, and we will, eventually, have our free online worlds. Your editor's kids think it can't happen too soon.

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No free Ryzom; what next?

Posted Jan 4, 2007 13:32 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Top-quality online games need top-quality artwork, sound effects, music, storylines, and more. If our community is going to create a great online virtual world, we must do a better job of soliciting and integrating contributions from artists, writers, and others who are not software developers.

It seems to me that the process of making such a top-quality game is more similar to the process of making a big budget movie than to the process of developing software. The rolling credits after the last mission could go on 5-10 minutes and very few of those persons are software developers - for example, a lot of actors are needed to give their voices to the characters.

Bye,NAR

Don't forget about ...

Posted Jan 6, 2007 7:19 UTC (Sat) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Crystal Space, it has been around for years!

And in a somewhat different vein, id software (and some of their "derivatives," like crack.com and Ravensoft[?]--whoever did the Hexen series) have a very long history of releasing their code under free/libre licenses. Xdoom, quake/quakeforge, quake2, hexenworld, Abuse...good stuff, even if a bit dated by today's standards.

(If I'm not mistaken, I think even Descent was eventually released by its publisher. Other than flight sims, it was the only fully 6 DoF game I ever played...ah, the memories. Ah, the dizziness. :-) )

Greg

No free Ryzom; what next?

Posted Jan 7, 2007 16:02 UTC (Sun) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

It can be worth nothing that Second Life took an approach where this is just false. They only provide the server, where the engine runs, and the client, which is the tool to access and create the virtual world. All the contents (the world itself) are user created, and they essentially charge the users "renting" the virtual "barebones" real estate (think "acres of land").

The idea behind thes is that they rent the portion of the server that hosts the user's portion of the world, which is reasonable IMHO, and could be a sustainable model even if the game code were Free Software. After all, after we have a Free (as in speech) virtual world game, and it gets popular, somebody will have to pay for the huge server farm needed to host it: IIRC Second life is growing at a rate of 300 servers per month, it is only fair that the users pay for it!

Anyway, my point was just that in a true "user centered" virtual world experience, content creation needs not to be centralized, it is quite the opposite. The project should only care to provide friendly authoring tools, the users will do the rest.