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Ryzom goes Open Source... finally

By volsung on May 7, 2010 10:51 PM

The Saga of Ryzom.jpgThe Saga of Ryzom was an MMORPG developed by Nevrax, a French studio that launched the game in 2004 after four years of development. The game wasn't exactly a success, and the company went broke in 2006, leaving the project to Gameforge AG, a German web-browser games publisher. It was quite a famous case back in the days, because the Free Software Foundation actually tried to buy the project and open its source (there was even a money collect).


It didn't really work for ze Germans either. In September 2007 (one year after purchasing Nevrax) Gameforge AG changed the game subscriptions from "Active" to "Free period" without making any announcement. Apparently, they had filed for bankruptcy a month before. Some random stuff happened then that the users back then know well; apparently the servers would run for three weeks while the game was sold to somebody else. The three weeks passed and nobody could care less for little Ryzom.


Strangely enough the servers were still working, although they were laggy as hell. What the fuck...? Well, Gameforge AG hadn't even bought all the Nevrax assets, and everything was returned to the original liquidator.


Letting the game die there could have sounded reasonable. Hell, this game was like cancer for every owner it had... but the project was kept in some sort of ecstasy field. Small changes in the website every now and then... emails... obscure announcements... and suddenly, out from nowhere, a company called Winch Gate Properties Ltd. relaunched the game. It took around one year to get it working, though, as accounts were activated based on their previous status (there was no billing for some time, for example).


But the biggest surprise came out just yesterday... Ryzom became open source.

Paris, FRANCE, May 6, 2010 -- Winch Gate Properties Ltd, the developer and publisher of massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role playing games, is proud to announce the release of the source code and artistic assets of the popular MMORPG Ryzom to the Free Software Development Community.

Developers can now access the source code of the end-user client, content creation tools and server in order to make modifications, enhancements or to create their own virtual worlds. This move marks a milestone in Ryzom's long history and dedication to the free software movement. In order to ensure that Ryzom continues to grow and foster as a free software project, Winch Gate is now releasing Ryzom under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Affero General Public License.

Winch Gate is also excited to provide the free software community with high quality professional artistic assets including 3D objects, animation tracks, particle effects and thousands of textures. 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. These assets will be hosted in a new online repository in partnership with the Free Software Foundation.

By freeing Ryzom code, Winch Gate is transforming the MMORPG marketplace and is setting a precedent for how gaming software should evolve--in freedom. 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.

Welcoming the news, Free Software Foundation executive director Peter Brown said, "This is a unique opportunity for the free software movement and the emerging free gaming field to accelerate the production of free games and 3D worlds. We recognize the importance of gaming and the current dominance of proprietary gaming software, so today represents a significant breakthrough from which our community can benefit." The FSF has published more information about the scope of today's release, and suggested ways for developers to get involved

Vianney Lecroart, Chief Technology Officer of Winch Gate says, "The Free Software community often has a difficult time finding great graphical assets that they can use in their own projects. We are sure that the thousands of textures and 3D objects we are releasing under the CC BY-SA will help a lot of Free Software projects."

Winch Gate intends to incorporate certain code changes and enhancements into the official version of the Ryzom game. All code developed outside Winch Gate's in-house development staff will be thoroughly reviewed to ensure quality standards, stability and security. 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. Support will continue to be given for the official Ryzom software only, with third-party projects unsupported by Winch Gate.

Initial projects will include bug fixes and porting to operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple Mac OS X. Timeframes for these enhancements will vary depending on the scale of the project and the project team. The level and world data associated with Ryzom will not be released as free content and their use will remain exclusive to players of the Ryzom game.

The source code and additional information will be available from the Ryzom Core Development Portal

The Ryzom's free media assets are available from Ryzom's Asset Repository

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Game Maker changes its logo. God kills a kitty.

By volsung on January 15, 2010 6:14 PM
YoYo Games has managed to arise the rage of their community for Game Maker, their famous middleware, with a rather superfluous movement. They changed their logo. It wasn't really good before, but people got to like that red ball thing with the hammer. And I can totally see why, as now the company has decided this should be their most successful product's new logo:


GM8_cl_Text.png


At this very moment, there are 1206 comments on the release thread. Guess what users (and developers) are saying about that smiling monstrosity.

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The boobie factor

By volsung on November 30, 2009 10:52 AM
I wanted to write about this subject for a while already, and reading Kotaku today just encouraged me to do it. To put you into context, there was a two part article on Massively called "Boobs and you" [part1, part2] that was somehow Seraphina Brennan's response to some of the comments on one of the screenshots from Blade&Soul that you might have already seen. If not, I'm referring to this one:

bladeandsoul.jpgIf you hadn't read the article yet, you should. Basically discusses how most commenters just saw a big pair of watermelons, commented on them, either agreeing (heh) or saying the game is sexist and humiliating from women's perspective, but completely ignored the overmuscled man behind the manga hottie, considering him, at least, normal. The article also points out how if anybody comments on the guy, will only be with neutral or positive adjectives, such as "powerful", "strong", etc.

So, here am I now to talk about the boobie factor in videogames myself.

The videogames market has been historically male oriented, and while there's an obvious female market (growing) it hasn't been really exploited at all until the latest years. Can videogames be male oriented or female oriented? Of course they can. Each game has a particular niche of players to which it's oriented, although that doesn't mean players outside that niche can't find something attractive about the game.

However, studies confirm that female players are way less impacted to some of the design techniques games use to appeal the players in general. That is, a female player will complain less about a huge breasted entrails-in-the-handbag mile-long-legs female character than male players would complain about having to play a realistic looking woman. It also happens with male characters, although for some reason (as the article above points) nobody cares enough to make studies about that.

So, even if you're orienting your game to appeal to a female audience, you could as well add some extra stuff to reach a portion of the male players outside the main niche, and yet, you wouldn't hear many complaints.

Now, there are certain beauty canons affecting most of the western world, at least in that age range normally covered by videogames (13-50?). No matter if you are male or female, no matter if you agree or disagree with them, you're also under their influx. And for some weird reason, players prefer to look good, in general. Looking good means different things, but it's mostly defined by these canons mentioned before.

So, by giving the different characters desirable features, and letting players impersonate them, there's a psychological projection of those features on the player. If a character is awesome, players will feel awesome playing it. This goes further than just the appearance, of course, but when trying to appeal a male audience with a female character, appearance is, for obvious reasons, something important. Why? Because it is important as well in real life, in the world of first impressions, where people are quickly dismissed if they don't meet certain physical goals.

Should games enforce this superficial way to socialize? Well, the question should be, should games pretend it doesn't exist? Are games mean to be educative? Are they art? Are they just entertainment? Should we also ban beautiful people from movies? Or censor all the songs that talk about a physical-only attraction? Novels? TV shows that don't develop the characters enough to show us that it's in fact a matter of deep feelings where the looks make no difference?

I certainly think the problem has nothing to do with videogames at all. Most developers just follow the rest of society, as they are also part of it. Non-appealing characters won't work when at the same time the rest of the media supports it. Does anybody around think that Twilight is selling so much because of how good it's written or the originality of the story? Just watch the trailer for New Moon and tell me what you see. And hell, just look at the reaction.

Flat chesting dark elf sorceresses won't change much towards a better future.
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Experience the Darkside with Resident Evil's new trailer

By volsung on November 13, 2009 10:37 AM
2009-11-13 10 45 01.jpgI haven't been much into game consoles for a while (my last non-portable machine was a PS2, although I had lots of consoles before), and if I had to choose one now, it wouldn't be the Wii, that's for sure.

Still, I can recognize something good when I see it. I don't know if the new Resident Evil game for the Wii will be the case, but I can tell you for sure that their new trailer will, at least, give lots to talk about.

You can only watch it on GameTrailers, and you'll soon know why.

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Bild Spiele accuses Ubisoft

By volsung on November 9, 2009 1:50 PM
The German videogame magazine Computer Bild Spiele has accused Ubisoft of blackmail. According to the magazine, Ubisoft told them that they would only send an evaluation copy if they could get at least an "A" score (sehr gut). You can check the web preview of the next issue here (in German of course).

This is the interesting part:

"Viel hat sich geändert, eines ist gleich geblieben: Wir testen hart, aber fair. Unabhängige Testurteile opfern wir nicht auf dem Altar der Aktualität. Das gilt auch für „Assassin's Creed 2". Der Hersteller verlangte die Notengarantie „sehr gut", sonst gibt es vorab kein Testmuster. Deshalb kommt der Test erst in der nächsten Ausgabe - gerne mit „sehr gut", aber nur, wenn es das Spiel verdient."

This basically means that they are not doing it unless it's the actual score they think the game deserves.

It's a shame that Ubisoft is resorting to this methods, considering that the game, at least until now, has been getting some very good previews. A clear example of marketing gone totally wrong.

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