The MMORPG Ryzom goes open source!

[Yumeroh]

This is a great news and we are proud to be able to announce it today:

Ryzom is now the first commercial MMORPG completely Open Source and the Free Software Foundation joins us in this initiative. If you don't know what open source software is, you'll find an explanation on wikipedia.

The whole source code of Ryzom (client, server and tools) is now under the GNU AGPLv3 Open Source license.

But we go further! We have also made available all the Ryzom art (textures, 3D objects, animations, particle effects) under the Creative Common Attribution-Share Alike license.

For you as a Ryzom player, nothing changes. The game continues to be pay-to-play to help pay for the cost of development and running of Ryzom. Your financial support is essential for us and it's only thanks to you that Ryzom is still alive today. The game will continue to be developed by the same team as today.

If you are a developer, you can now take the source code and/or the art assets of Ryzom to make your own MMORPG or any other project.

Ryzom free art asset portal
Ryzom free development portal

We rely on you to spread this news as widely as possible around you, on blogs, forums, digg, Reddit, facebook, ...

You can read the full Press Release here.

[murmadog]

yeah, that is best news in last 5 days... i can't stop laughing... yep, this is exactly what we needed now and what we want to see today...

[kerozcak]

Best news in last few years!

[hemera]

well since you deleted my other post, did anyone from the brains trust, google the words, WoW private server??

we wouldnt have more then 2000 subs, making it open source imo not a very smart idea..... most people's loyality is with the game and not the company..
Every patch you add, can be added to any private server..

so as homer would say, DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH!

[gcaldani]

I don't know what will be the impact on the game.

Generally i like the idea of "free software" and, the fact the FSF is under this decision too can't be a bad thing.

UO have thousands of private servers, and possibly most other MMOs have them, so what's the point? UO is still up and running for the joy of its community, so the other MMOs.
At the end, it's all about the friends and the quality of your gaming experience.

Also, the cost of actual Ryzom is very low, and they assure you some tech support most probably you will not see in private servers.

I don't think anyone here would change Arispotle to another server just to save 8 euros per month!

Last thing: I hope the free software community understand the importance of this release. There is nothing on sourceforge that can match Ryzom code in terms of quality, performance and professionality. Don't forget how many euros and years it costed to develop.

I suppose we'll get some population increase because of the people that wanna "study" the game before going to work on the code.

[subox]

I don't think open source means private servers for instance all games that have a private server running aren't open source (except for some games).
they posted on their blog that they don't share any world data or level data so all that would have to be rewritten to make a private server for ryzom and i don't think that's gonna happen soon, since most games where you can find a private server for are running on stolen data or are reverse-engineerd (This can be done by analyzing the data stream with the original server, or by disassembling and analyzing the game client which is available.)

[kerozcak]

I agree with SuBoX. Making "private server" won't be so easy, unless you want to create completely new world.

If you want to run your own server for the game, you have the software to do that, but you won't really have any world data—information about geography, special places, characters, quests, items, and so on—to run it with. Winch Gate Properties, the company that currently holds the copyright for all game materials and runs the official server, has decided not to release that data, to avoid causing disruption for their current player community. People who want to run their own server will need to develop their own world to do so—only a small test world comes with the code.

[final60]

It looks like they haven't released any part of the ryzom game as it has been developed here. The test server just consists of a small silan island with 3 npcs and yubos, just to show what is possible for coders. It would be dificult and time consuming for someone to reconstruct everything..

[ffxjosh]

so, hypothetically. If we make things using it as open source, can we ask for it to be added to Ryzom the game?

[final60]

In order to engage and foster growth in the Ryzom project, Ryzom will have a group of community managers who can manage patch submissions and feature requests.

press release