dev.ryzom.com— Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming--Ryzom Announces Full Release of Source Code and Artwork, and a Partnership with the Free Software Foundation to Host a Repository of the Game's Artistic Assets.
May 6, 2010View in Crawl 4
=(“I was hired as an engineer on Rizom 7 years ago to work on the tools to create the world (I remember seeing my name in some of the sources), but I quit after one month.The real problem of such large games is that there should be a guy who is able to create a universe and be able to communicate his view to his team.However, there was nobody like that (or perhaps nobody communicated about it ?), and I sensed that there was no clear direction.I was a very experienced game programmer at that time, and I was able to quickly understand when a project was viable or not.Also, the large team behind Rizom was clearly only interested into the technical parts, and after one month of writing tools, I realized that they were never going to release the game, since it was not their priority.Giving the project to the OSS community won't change anything, since nobody has a clear view how to create a universe that is both logical and fun.It's pretty sad to see a project die after such a long amount of time and work.”/eulernet (Slashdot)<a class="user" href="http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/MMORPG-Ryzom-Released-Under-AGPL" rel="nofollow">http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/M ...</a>=)“The front end of an MMO is relatively canned.DAOC\Warhammer uses Gamebryo (same front end framework that Civ4 uses).The real detail is in the backend, which is largely proprietary.The basics of an MMO, front end or backend are rather simplistic.The real dirty work is in the optimizations of data storage and hard core mathmatics in optimizing game logic for execution efficency.Case point:(In full disclosure, I have been working on a MMO from a design standpoint for about 3 years). One of the algorithms I have been working on researching is a random city seeding algorithm (I am interested in procedural MMO world development) that takes either a pre-generated world map or procedurally generated world map and scores the "desirability" of terrain.Using that heatmap, village markers are deployed then a series of passes are made that merge nearby villages into town, towns into cities, and cities into capitals leaving behind unmerged locals (somewhat like evaporation).I grabbed ArcEmu (a wow emulator) as well as EQ and a few other emulators and stitched a basic randomly generated map in there to test out the algorithm.Now based on how the two engines worked my map either took up 6 mb of ram or 12 mb of ram.The algorithm itself was brute force.A math geek friend of mine rewrote it from a mathematical point of view and reduced the map generation time from about 4 hours to 2 1/4th hours.Not bad.With a full commercial release, it allows people to view the strengths and weakness of a particular implementation and see what optimizations can be made.CCP right now with Eve Online has one of the most exotic database architectures I've seen to date; I can only imagine the code behind it.Sharding is easy, 1 concurrent world...mind boggling the data reduction, data isolation techniques needed.Seeing their code is not only a technical education on their architecture, but you can see the results that a commercial development process had on the code base versus say an emulator like ArcEmu or any open source driven backend.Perhaps this may give those aussies a run for the money now...”/kenp2002 (Slashdot)<a class="user" href="http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/MMORPG-Ryzom-Released-Under-AGPL" rel="nofollow">http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/M ...</a>
bboyjkangMay 6, 2010
=(“I was hired as an engineer on Rizom 7 years ago to work on the tools to create the world (I remember seeing my name in some of the sources), but I quit after one month.The real problem of such large games is that there should be a guy who is able to create a universe and be able to communicate his view to his team.However, there was nobody like that (or perhaps nobody communicated about it ?), and I sensed that there was no clear direction.I was a very experienced game programmer at that time, and I was able to quickly understand when a project was viable or not.Also, the large team behind Rizom was clearly only interested into the technical parts, and after one month of writing tools, I realized that they were never going to release the game, since it was not their priority.Giving the project to the OSS community won't change anything, since nobody has a clear view how to create a universe that is both logical and fun.It's pretty sad to see a project die after such a long amount of time and work.”/eulernet (Slashdot)<a class="user" href="http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/MMORPG-Ryzom-Released-Under-AGPL" rel="nofollow">http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/M ...</a>=)“The front end of an MMO is relatively canned.DAOC\Warhammer uses Gamebryo (same front end framework that Civ4 uses).The real detail is in the backend, which is largely proprietary.The basics of an MMO, front end or backend are rather simplistic.The real dirty work is in the optimizations of data storage and hard core mathmatics in optimizing game logic for execution efficency.Case point:(In full disclosure, I have been working on a MMO from a design standpoint for about 3 years). One of the algorithms I have been working on researching is a random city seeding algorithm (I am interested in procedural MMO world development) that takes either a pre-generated world map or procedurally generated world map and scores the "desirability" of terrain.Using that heatmap, village markers are deployed then a series of passes are made that merge nearby villages into town, towns into cities, and cities into capitals leaving behind unmerged locals (somewhat like evaporation).I grabbed ArcEmu (a wow emulator) as well as EQ and a few other emulators and stitched a basic randomly generated map in there to test out the algorithm.Now based on how the two engines worked my map either took up 6 mb of ram or 12 mb of ram.The algorithm itself was brute force.A math geek friend of mine rewrote it from a mathematical point of view and reduced the map generation time from about 4 hours to 2 1/4th hours.Not bad.With a full commercial release, it allows people to view the strengths and weakness of a particular implementation and see what optimizations can be made.CCP right now with Eve Online has one of the most exotic database architectures I've seen to date; I can only imagine the code behind it.Sharding is easy, 1 concurrent world...mind boggling the data reduction, data isolation techniques needed.Seeing their code is not only a technical education on their architecture, but you can see the results that a commercial development process had on the code base versus say an emulator like ArcEmu or any open source driven backend.Perhaps this may give those aussies a run for the money now...”/kenp2002 (Slashdot)<a class="user" href="http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/MMORPG-Ryzom-Released-Under-AGPL" rel="nofollow">http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/05/06/1518251/M ...</a>