LWN: Comments on "The Free Ryzom Campaign"

The Free Ryzom Campaign

piman — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 17:29:29 +0000

Game engines involve lots and lots of software licenses. RenderWare, Unreal Engine, SpeedTree, Novodex, often some kind of proprietary database... One of the reasons Second Life is notable is because they use free software when possible for such things. Most other games do not.

Does anybody know any S. African bazillionaires??

pbardet — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:14:52 +0000

Apparently, it's not a user well proven design since the company is going bankrupt. Looks like users did not like it that much... Remember that it's the developpers themselves that started the process of saving the code.

That's the reason why I'm questionning the fact that a billionaire would be interrested by such piece of code. Especially when he's already busy with another major piece of software. But since I'm not him, I've no idea if he wants to get it or not.

I'm not questionning the fact that other people (individuals) could be interrested. Anyone can do whatever he wants of his own money.

"They may be the only place where we'll be able to find our children."

smitty_one_each — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:18:56 +0000

Moderation, moderation, moderation.

The Free Ryzom Campaign

dion — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:43:11 +0000

My guess is that those claims are mostly lies.

Does anybody know any S. African bazillionaires??

ekj — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:15:20 +0000

Since there is no Linux-client for this, or any other decent MMORPG, it would be 5 times as important to get this code.

It's going to be a lot of work to port the software, but odds are it's still an order of magnitude easier than writing it from scratch -- plus here you have a well-tested proven design.

Does anybody know any S. African bazillionaires??

bkoz — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:17:25 +0000

Other free software companies have acquired code that didn't work on linux and then put in the effort to make it work. There seems to be some interest (but little actual work done?) in this "universe" supporting free systems at the client level. Ie, game players on linux.

In any case, the server code only runs on linux. So, that seems worthwhile.

But, I agree with the other comment. Definitely better to build a community through individual donations instead of one fat check. It looks like 76k euro raised already!

Does anybody know any S. African bazillionaires??

pbardet — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:03:12 +0000

Since there is no Linux client, it may not be that interesting to pick up this code. I'm not really convinced that the Linux problem is a "little" one.

It's funner to pay your own way...

error27 — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 11:03:02 +0000

If this works out I'm going to chip in 64 eur. If someone donated too much cash in one shot they'd steal the glory from the rest of us... :)

Does anybody know any S. African bazillionaires??

bkoz — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:24:40 +0000

Maybe he likes to play games? Has a penchant for free software? Wants to make a user friendly desktop, and put the kibosh on the gamer whining?

Purchasing this software asset would seem like a perfect way to do this. Maybe some ubuntu person can forward this link to him!

Plus, it would probably cost less to buy, and employ some of the hackers, than a hypothetical monthly shipment of moon dust for his cereal.

ps. full disclosure: I've never played this game.

The Free Ryzom Campaign

vondo — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:42:56 +0000

We've heard with other companies that consider releasing their own software that often they can't do it or it takes a lot of effort due to code licensed from other companies. Have the boosters of this project looked into this and verified that this isn't going to be an issue?

Croquet

jebba — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:27:43 +0000

"Clearly, we need some good, free virtual world infrastructure."

http://www.opencroquet.org/

Croquet is designed by some of the folks that brought us such things as "graphical user interfaces", "UDP", and "URLs"... It's no where near as pretty as the FPS out there today, but has far more potential.