Ryzom MMORPG goes open source

[DanielSefton]

http://dev.ryzom.com/news/13

http://www.ryzom.com/

Winch Gate is now releasing Ryzom under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Affero General Public License.

All of the Ryzom artistic assets will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike to ensure that they and any derivative art will be available to all free software projects.

The source code released totals over two (2) million lines of source code and over 20,000 high quality textures and thousands of 3D objects.

So this is great news for free projects, especially in terms of art - we all know how scarce free art is on the net.

The code will be good for educational purposes I guess.

It uses it's own proprietary 3D engine, and CEGUI for GUI.

[Kojack]

Looking at the media site, there's around 7472 3dsmax files.

Cool.

[madmarx]

I was forced to develop with that.
I hope this project to be buried forever, and never hear about it anymore.
IMO, they only made a somewhat decent 3dsmax exporter for animations.
I lost too much of my years on this...

[Jabberwocky]

What's the issue with it? Bad leadership? Crappy code base?
From just browsing the site, I was actually impressed with how far along they seem to have gotten as an indie MMO.

[madmarx]

What's the issue with it?

Me + I don't like many pieces of the design and the code. The lead is ok.
As bad experiences were accumulated (sorry for my english), I suppose I have become quite biased on this topic.
To make it shorter, I 100% hate it, that's all .

[jacmoe]

They based it on NEL, which is interesting - and which also means that they didn't write everything from scratch. It's based on a MMO framework.
So it isn't their own engine, strictly speaking.

[jjp]

At the very least the free art should be interesting for some projects

[Azatoth]

They based it on NEL, which is interesting - and which also means that they didn't write everything from scratch. It's based on a MMO framework.
So it isn't their own engine, strictly speaking.

I had the impression it was the other way around: when creating Ryzom some years ago they separated out the engine part into the NeL project.

[jacmoe]

I stand corrected!
http://dev.ryzom.com/projects/nel

In which case, going GPL makes perfect sense - and they did in fact write everything themselves.

I actually did check out the NEL project multiple times - they've got some interesting code in there.

<edit>
And I see that you're working together. Did they get any GSoC slots?
</edit>

[jacmoe]

I guess the confusion is that I thought it was Nevrax who was behind NEL, but they were apparently acquired by Ryzom last year.

[jacmoe]

One thing I am very excited about is the asset repository.
I am looking forward to seeing it being converted to open formats, Blender especially.

[Kojack]

I was almost hoping the 3d assets were going to be in a custom game format so I could write a batch converter.
Loading 7400 meshes into Max one by one sounds a little more annoying.

[jacmoe]

Some of them - lots ? - are in the NEL format.

[Kojack]

Ok, I didn't know the *.shape files were nel.

There's 7472 max files and 370 shape files.

Cool, they have all the assets in a 1.4GB torrent.

[Marc]

This is interesting. Has anyone converted the content for use in ogre yet? Is anyone working on it?

[BTolputt]

No-one to my knowledge is working on the Ogre format explicitly, though there are a couple of references to people converting them to Blender (which can then be exported or used "as is" in GameKit).