[MUD-Dev] Where are we now?

[Madman Across the Water]

Bryce Harrington wrote:
 
[snip my comments about alternate UO clients]
 
> Have you had luck with the art?  I've noticed with other games, this
> can be sort of a rather limiting factor.  What would be nice would
> be to have a universal CPAN-like free game graphics repository...
> something game neutral, that artists could add their work to for the
> community as a whole, and game developers could draw from and share.
> There wouldn't happen to be anything out there like that right now,
> by any chance?

I know of at least one person who has free art out there, but it's for
tile-based games. As for remaking the UO art, unfortunately I do not
know of any projects out there making the attempt yet. There are
getting to be more and more programs that allow for hacking the data
files, but the only ones I know of that have ever been remade
completely are map0.mul and statics0.mul- the world map and static
items therein. Which doesn't actually remake any of the actual art
tiles being used, but rather where they are put. There are some
patches out there that do piecemeal replacement, though some of them
just take art from other sources. For instance, one guy I know
replaced one of the paperdoll platemail graphics with a graphic from
Diablo II.

So, unfortunately, at the moment freeing ourselves from all of EA's
intellectual property is just a dream, the direction that most of us
agree we would like to do in. The problem, as people here have pointed
out, is at least largely in the lack of artists. It seems that there
are always more programmers. Finding artists is tough. And making it
look at least as good, if not better, than UO, is tougher. And the
final hurdle- we can count on thousands of players who already have
the UO client and data files. We lose some audience if they have to
make a 300M download first, to get all the art.

Frankly, this is only just starting to come on the radar of the POL
community, at least, because none of the replacement clients are far
enough along yet as to be able to replace the original. I wouldn't be
surprised if the Sphere community had invested more thought into this,
as one of the replacement clients is coming from that area.

A search for the Sphere client turned up a post from Jeff Freeman,
June of 2000, that shows that we're not significantly further along
now than we were a year ago:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2000Q2/msg01062.php

A few links about UO Emus in general:

  http://www.uoxdev.com/             - UOX
  http://www.sphereserver.com/       - Sphere
  http://vulpin.burdell.org/pol/     - POL, at some point soonish to
                                     move to pol.tumbolia.org.
  http://www.paigelore.com/          - Emulator resources (pretty broken 
                                     on non-IE)
  http://arachnide.sourceforge.net/  - Arachnide, an open source but
                                     dead client project
  http://uop.sourceforge.net/        - another open source client project

And for completeness of information, UOX is open source (GPL), Sphere
is closed I think, POL's core is closed but its script distro is open
(artistic license) and the scripts make up 90% of the functionality. I
can't find a link to Sphere's client, but I think it's closed source
also.

Adam
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