![]() Kill with magic and you get magic points. Kill with a melee weapon and you gain Combat points you can use to upgrade skills and buy new types of skills. Instead of being necessarily class-based, you have several categories your skill points go to, fueled by some basic abilities. Ryzom is set in the far future, with multiple playable factions competing and cooperating for territory, against each other and against the indigenous creatures of Atys. Load times are also longer than what I'm used to elsewhere, but thankfully you'll only have to deal with that when launching the game, and a little bit when your character dies. Unfortunately, while having so many creatures and non-combat characters running breathes life into the game, it does seem to play havoc with even the fastest Internet connection. Lots of polygons, particularly with the character models, weather effects including snow and rain, shiny spell and water effects, lots of foliage and beasties-in fact, Ryzom is one of the most heavily populated games I can remember. I've heard otherwise, and I can only assume that these people aren't maxing out their settings, because it's pretty easy on the eyes with a Radeon 9800 Pro. However, almost as soon as the game went offline a mysterious message was posted on the main site stating that " Ryzom will be back soon." Now Winch Gate Property is the new developer behind Ryzom composing of several members from the original team and continues to provide solid support for the game by releasing updates as well as patches for bugs.Let me say off the bat that Ryzom is a pretty game. The first terrible news was the announcement of bankruptcy by the original French developer Nevrax, followed by the game being shut down shortly afterwards. The Ryzom development team and the game itself have seen several hardships after the game's launch in September 2004. By having a larger community base there will be more individuals scratching an itch, to turn a phrase, the community and Ryzom game players will begin seeing features and functionality that a traditional game company may not have the time or desire to implement such as native Linux or Mac OS X support." "By having more eyes on the source code and being more transparent in the development process there will be fewer bugs and security flaws. Instead of profit and revenue, Winch Gate is looking for recognition from their product. ![]() ![]() This, also allows the developers to track any bugs or glitches still in their game's system by allowing users who use Ryzom's source code to report it on the team's project webpage where they can review, assess and fix the problem. So why open source you might wonder? By open-sourcing the entire game it "encourages" the adoption, and integration, of its code into many other projects, thus turning it into a widely used platform. And it makes sense too, as the game is currently subscription based, thus forcing players to stay subscribed with the official game if they want to get their fix and not on a clone running on a free server. ![]() Of course, while the data of the game remains private, the models to which the information pertains to would be available to the public. Information such as weapons, or monster stats that form the core of the game and its intricate system is likely an investment any company would want to retain exclusively for themselves. We can only speculate that the data being withheld is probably the data that makes Ryzom, Ryzom. Interestingly enough, developer Winch Gate plans to keep certain data of the game exclusive only to their official servers. The signal of the MMO becoming open-source does not mean the end nor shutdown of the game's current official servers. "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." ![]() While it may take some time for the team to finish the project, for anyone who cannot wait they can now access the original unedited source codes and game assets here. The team behind Ryzom wants to bring its engine to a higher level by beginning work on a project to convert and streamline as much of the game's source code into a more "generic" and "reusable structure" for easier development and use in any project. But, in either case, developers always will run into engine limitations, either system-wide or system specific, creating obstacles extremely difficult to move around. It has been a known practice in the industry to create entirely new games off of an existing game engine, and many gamers in the communities have also developed alterations to the games they play, known as mods. So far, there are few commercial games that have gone open source in the gaming industry, much less entirely developed MMO's. ![]()
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