Archived from groups: alt.games.warcraft (More info?)
Here's an idea I've been kicking around. Others have done similar projects,
with varying degrees of success. I figure this would be a good first place
to check for input.
Gather together a team, large or small, of programmers, graphic artists,
modelers, musicians, sound techs, etc... both pro and amature, varying
degrees of experience and ability, and cobble together a small-scale MMORPG
(small-scale as in whatever hardware is available), designed to be something
new, significantly different from what's on the market, potentially a system
that others can use to create worlds of their own.
One reason to do this... it would make for a great open source or GPL
project. It's a great way to build on skills, both specific skills and
general cooperative/organizational skills, without having to make it a
commercial attempt. Also, it allows for a greater amount of manpower, since
you can allow people to do even minor work on publicly available routines.
End result is one primary development project, and a whole mess of
independant servers run by... whoever... for their own private games using
the system developed by the project. And it'd be fun.
The goal would be to build a system that is less a game, than a communal
simulation. Something that wouldn't appeal to the mass-market, but would
allow a significant minority of gamers to take part in a more intricate game
world devoted to it's own depth more than to pleasing everyone. We'd
experiment with different ideas, working under a task-driven heirarchy. The
game, ideally, would be something where there is heavy emphasis on
exploration of an unmapped (to the players) game world, dealing with hostile
environments, trying to uncover a detailed past, create new items and
technologies (as new items designed by us would be introduced through player
"inspiration" to build it once ready)... in general, our best attempt to
make a game where there is no specific goal, no endgame, no hard cap (except
the limits imposed by the player's willingness to risk their lives, and
their long but limited lifespan). Something where the interface might not
be quite up to par with what's on the shelves, and the game world might not
have that much hardware to back it up, but where most of the work goes into
fleshing out a lot of detail.
The resources I've got... a few servers of my own, each with virtually
unlimited bandwidth on high-capacity connections, I'm a professional
programmer (unix mostly) with a good bit of communications, physics
modeling, and other skills. I'm a fairly good 3d modeler (decent animator,
but most of my professional work has been realistic modeling), and I dabble
in a little bit of everything.
It would be written in C++, with the server software developed under linux
but written to be portable (something I usually do anyway), with the client
ideally an opengl interface portable to a number of system types (though a
windows interface would be a priority).
The main skill sets we'd need, to start, would be:
* general purpose C++ (everything from specific functions to the framework
of server software and clients)
* OpenGL or DirectX experience
* tcp communications code
* audio rendering and processing
* 2d graphical art
* 3d modeling (probably with our own software, or third party)
Anyone interested? Drop me a line if so. I'm not even sure I have the time
to do this, but wouldn't mind seeing if anyone else out there would want to
get involved.
Here's an idea I've been kicking around. Others have done similar projects,
with varying degrees of success. I figure this would be a good first place
to check for input.
Gather together a team, large or small, of programmers, graphic artists,
modelers, musicians, sound techs, etc... both pro and amature, varying
degrees of experience and ability, and cobble together a small-scale MMORPG
(small-scale as in whatever hardware is available), designed to be something
new, significantly different from what's on the market, potentially a system
that others can use to create worlds of their own.
One reason to do this... it would make for a great open source or GPL
project. It's a great way to build on skills, both specific skills and
general cooperative/organizational skills, without having to make it a
commercial attempt. Also, it allows for a greater amount of manpower, since
you can allow people to do even minor work on publicly available routines.
End result is one primary development project, and a whole mess of
independant servers run by... whoever... for their own private games using
the system developed by the project. And it'd be fun.
The goal would be to build a system that is less a game, than a communal
simulation. Something that wouldn't appeal to the mass-market, but would
allow a significant minority of gamers to take part in a more intricate game
world devoted to it's own depth more than to pleasing everyone. We'd
experiment with different ideas, working under a task-driven heirarchy. The
game, ideally, would be something where there is heavy emphasis on
exploration of an unmapped (to the players) game world, dealing with hostile
environments, trying to uncover a detailed past, create new items and
technologies (as new items designed by us would be introduced through player
"inspiration" to build it once ready)... in general, our best attempt to
make a game where there is no specific goal, no endgame, no hard cap (except
the limits imposed by the player's willingness to risk their lives, and
their long but limited lifespan). Something where the interface might not
be quite up to par with what's on the shelves, and the game world might not
have that much hardware to back it up, but where most of the work goes into
fleshing out a lot of detail.
The resources I've got... a few servers of my own, each with virtually
unlimited bandwidth on high-capacity connections, I'm a professional
programmer (unix mostly) with a good bit of communications, physics
modeling, and other skills. I'm a fairly good 3d modeler (decent animator,
but most of my professional work has been realistic modeling), and I dabble
in a little bit of everything.
It would be written in C++, with the server software developed under linux
but written to be portable (something I usually do anyway), with the client
ideally an opengl interface portable to a number of system types (though a
windows interface would be a priority).
The main skill sets we'd need, to start, would be:
* general purpose C++ (everything from specific functions to the framework
of server software and clients)
* OpenGL or DirectX experience
* tcp communications code
* audio rendering and processing
* 2d graphical art
* 3d modeling (probably with our own software, or third party)
Anyone interested? Drop me a line if so. I'm not even sure I have the time
to do this, but wouldn't mind seeing if anyone else out there would want to
get involved.
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