Alextreme.org

Besides hacking Morphix, I've also been looking at a few free MMORPG's and 3D engines this weekend. I still have this itch of not wanting to play WoW anymore, but I would like to hop on and help out one of the Free ones.

Worldforge has, after 7 years, still not gotten further than pigfarming. It's amazing how much time and effort has gone into a framework, and how little time has gotten into making something FUN! Gimmie my two-handed axe!

Once is based on the same WF framework. Their client is a tad more stable/useful, however the same applies: nothing fun to do yet. They seem to only have started coding this year, so I guess they deserve some slack.

Planeshift are a tad further. Last time I played it, you could already kill and level. One nag: although their code is open, their art, graphics and the rest of their game are under an anal license, which goes against nearly every FLOSS principle. Their code also was very hard to get working correctly.

Daimonin is up to now still the most successful FLOSS MMORPG. Alas, it's an isometric game. Lots of fun though.

So in short FLOSS has been rather a let-down in the MMORPG arena. I'm not sure if it's due to over-designing, lack of content or lack of developers. On the other hand, there aren't that many FLOSS-game succes stories alltogether. Maybe I'll just ignore the itch and play bzflag...

On the 3D engine side of things I've been giving Raydium a try. Got really weird stuff in there (PHP bindings? Augumented Reality? WTH?) but it's pretty easy to set up from source and play with. The engine is in C, compared to C++ with Ogre and Irrlicht. Features some nasty global variables you need to use. More like a messy hack than a library. Like the 'retrieve-content-automatically-from-an-online-repository' feature though. Most of the stuff is in French. All in all: if you're going to use C for your nice shiny engine, don't blow your foot off with it and code properly :)