Free Ryzom Campaign

[martl]

I'm not tryin to decide anyones opinion. Don't misunderstand me, i think its a great thing for everyone to just say what an amazing idea this is, but i think its more helpful to think of ways to improve this than to just say how wonderful it is and then walk away from it.

The fact is that while i'm sure those running this campaign have nothing but good intentions, and that those pledging also do, things happen and people often have change of hearts or change their mind frequently.

An online pledge has no way of really enforcing recieving the money. WHile those that made the pledges im sure made them with good intentions, some with undoubtably change their minds about it and there is no good way to enforce this. This campaign may get 100% of their pledges, or they may get 10%, there is no way of knowing until money has actually changed hands is all im trying to say and any company involved in negotiations or decisionmaking in regards to Ryzom will undoubtably understand this and take it into consideration. Banks/buisiness' realize this and it won't be taken any more seriously than an online petition (which may have some effect on some things, but will matter not to a bank/court). All that matters to creditors is cash and assets in which to buy, not pledges.

You are right, but still it worked with "Blender"...

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.html
("Ton" is the guy who drove the project, "NaN" is the name of the company who developed Blender and went bancrupt)

"In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property and subsequently open source Blender. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender." To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks"

(side note: ryzom.org reached 59k in less than a week)

[cloudy97]

The Free Ryzom's goal of 100 000 Euro doesn't seem much in this business, a serious buyer would pay much more. So I consider the project as a security for the game to continue. As a player I would prefer a strong commercial company taking over and bringing over Nevrax's staff and continue and evolve the game without downtime. I would very much like to see the story continue.

The Free Ryzom campaign is a chance that can go in many directions. I understand that the game (on the "official shards") will not be free to play but have a fee to pay servers and staff, like now, and that the software and art will be open sourced, and free. It means we might see several specialised Ryzom projects in the future, and also total modifications and Linux/Mac clients. Not necessarily a bad thing, is it?

[slay13]

You are right, but still it worked with "Blender"...

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.html
("Ton" is the guy who drove the project, "NaN" is the name of the company who developed Blender and went bancrupt)

"In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property and subsequently open source Blender. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender." To everyone's shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks"

(side note: ryzom.org reached 59k in less than a week)

Yes, blender was and is a success story in its own right. As stated somewhere earlier in this thread though (may be another but its a new post), theres a vast difference between launching a program into the stratosphere of free internet software...and launching a mmorpg.

Besides, if i wanted to just customize my own world and play it with a small group of people, which is what this seems more geared toward anyhow than being a MMO, i would just play NWN2, which is far better suited for modding your own world (or will be in the near future like NWN1) than ryzom will ever be, even with R2. Whats from stopping those that want to make skins that look like their ryzom characters now from doing so and playing in other games that already allow or encourage modding.

[uruloki]

The Free Ryzom Project is aimed to become a democratic organization.

One thing I learnt by now spending a lot of time on various MMORPG fora is that its users almost *never* agree on things, so to speak of democratic is laughable at best.

When changes get in effect people start to shout 'nerf' and boo and hiss without even having checked it out.
People seem to be more focused on their statistics and abilities than on getting their character to become a 'real' entity.
All in all this is nothing new, it has been happening in the pen-and-paper RPGs for ages now. Some of you who started that way might recognise this behaviour.
Not to mention that with the source code out in the open you will get a lot of people digging through the source to find the best ways to play the game, highest damage per second and all that crap. I, personally, cannot find any sort of attraction there.

And having earnt my spurs in open source coding long ago I can tell you that any form of democratic process will never work for the main Ryzom. You *need* a group of people that lay down a roadmap, this is something that you cannot leave to the community as a whole.

How wonderful everything might sound and how interested I am from a developer perspective that such an engine would become open source (much like the MUDs and all that I also hacked on years ago) I question the direction the "one and only" Ryzom would take from there.

[uruloki]

you can put it in GPL or LGPL, but what's behind that (c) ? IANAL. Why not put it in the public domain? etc? or the fact that there will be one server, three languages, x players.... without mentioning that one could guess no new developments in a few months / years.

Personally, the one interesting point would be having access to a full featured GPL implementation of a MMRPG worth millions of euros. but this is from the perspective of a developer. As an operated game service, the "saga" ...I am not sure this can work.

It cannot. The GPL is a viral license that forces a source code base to become open if it is intermixed with GPL source. The intellectual property (artwork, maths, and the rest of what constitutes a RPG) is what is the differentiating factor between one game and another. If all of that would be GPLd you would look at a ton of clones all subtly different but without much additional innovation. Just look at the sheer number of Linux distributions that are available world-wide.

So the GPL would force any company that would wish to operate commercially to open their source code, where's their gained advantage in the end that makes their targetted audience choose them? This is the same problem embedded developers face with the GPL.

[uruloki]

The easiest way to tame complainers: give them responsibility... when you are actually making the decisions, things look different

Hah, and precisely *that* is why I think I can a bit less optimistic. From the moment I set foot on Ryzom I've been filing a variety of bugs I spotted (just ask Sengosha for example *grin*) as well as having taking responsibility for a ton of patches for too many open software projects to list.

Not to mention that I operate in the area between open source software and commercial development.

[uruloki]

It means we might see several specialised Ryzom projects in the future, and also total modifications and Linux/Mac clients. Not necessarily a bad thing, is it?

Unix and Macintosh clients are not bad, nope.

Several specialized Ryzom projects most definitely will be as it will further fragment the Ryzom community and divide income between these projects. So if Nevrax already had financial problems imagine if you operate a server out of the good of your own heart.
Bandwidth still is not cheap. If I look at the data pushed by some people I knew as customers for the network service provider I used to work for it isn't something to become happy about. These guys specialized in game servers and the amount of bandwidth consumed is astounding. Not to mention the server hardware cost itself and the frequent upgrades. That or the time/availability to even maintain the server and its software in itself. And then we will leave security concerns outside of this all.

[naib73]

i heared SOE is going to buy the game and will adjust the game to get more subscribers... there is a huge patch planed called the "New Ryzom Enhancments" ... anyone heared that too ?

[martl]

i heared SOE is going to buy the game and will adjust the game to get more subscribers... there is a huge patch planed called the "New Ryzom Enhancments" ... anyone heared that too ?

Yep
http://www.ryzom.com/forum/showpost.php ... ostcount=6

[iphdrunk]

I'm also wondering what happens if the Ryzom source code happens to contain comercially licensed code belonging to other companies that are an integral part of the game (just guessing here, e.g. a physics system, a sound system, RapidTree, just to name a few...) ?

- Does it? .P only a lead dev can answer this I guess ) Maybe there is no need to worry, for all parts are Nevrax-works or already freely available libraries libz, libwww, libxml, stlport, openal/il/gl/foo, etc. Can the integrality of the code be released under a free license and be compiled more or less "out of the box"?

- If this was the case, would these parts need to be rewritten from scratch?