Overview
Looking around for opensource RPGs I saw a LOT of starting projects but only few of them passed
the planning phaze even less were actually playble and non that I could see which was in same league
of commorcial ones.
Looking into It I found few things which I think prevented them from succeeding.
Too specific
To develop a game in the commorcial world take several years of intensive work that includes
programmers, designers, graphic people and so on. Opensource projects usually don't have those resources
and only have developers working on it part time job.
That means a long time before anything playble comes to life, which make the programmers which need to do
a lot of hard work before seeing results to give up. it also means that the graphic people and game designers
which are not programmers have little to do in projects in the early stages and give up very fast in the middle.
Another problem is that each project need to redo all that job as very little code can be duplicated to other projects.
Too general
Some projects tries to provide a framework for games but being very general they tend to grow bloat and complicated
to use, Some just write the graphic engine and things like network which still leave the people using it with a lot of
work and hard learning curve.
Good game designers are not always good programmers
and the other way around for that matter...
Goals
The goals of the project can be splited into 2 fields and try to address the problems I raised above.
UI and Framework
Dmrpg would try to provide easy way for creating adventures in MMORPG group playing and single player.
in the UI field it aims a lot to what never winter nights did. The diffrance would be that it won't
be system specific and would try to make it easy to use diffrent systems like groups d&d and so on.
I don't know if nwn supports things like scriptable magic adding new monsters making new charecters and skills
but we sure would try.
The framework would be for more complicated games which need to enchante the existing code,
It would have as modular interface as possible for adding features on all aspects of the game.
(The idea is to be able to add things from mass battles to ship battles to rules for advantures in space).
why opensource?
The advantages of opensource game developing are many,
For example when was the last time you read a game review which said
This game is so great only pitty they forgot this and this feature or small thing here and there,
opensource allow continues developing you won't need to wait for version 2 of the game in hope it would be
better, the game programmer or any other for that matter can write the code that fix the bug or add
the needed feature.
Shorter release cycles you wont' see games only a second before they are finished but be able
to add and contribute to them while they are being made.
Sharing of resources contributing to the framework from one project would be able to be used by the whole
community.
community
The second big goal of the project and as important one is to create a community of gamers.
players, modules creaters, artists, game programmers who want to try out new weird features
are all welcome. And the more creative your ideas are the better.
The project itself would be very community oriented we have plans for things like
sharing of graphic (the editor would ask servers to provide it with graphic images they use).
Sharing of scripts, sharing rules set, monsters infromation and whatever else you might think.
That would provide a rich enviourment for game and advanture making.
(just brain storming: moving charecters between worlds,scriptable magic,making new weapons,very realistic mass
fighting, rich AI and so on).
Help?
YEA! we need help! this is a huge project but we believe that with the help of a community we can do it.
and even if we get to only part of the goals we set I think it would still be a big successs.
(webmasters/programmers and people with game programming experiance are the most needed at the moment)
Links
Forum
Sourceforge page (also
e-mail address is there)
Link to wiki soon to come...
We thanks sourceforge for hosting our project:
