[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Where are all the amateur MMORPG devs?

[Bristle]

John Szeder <john at mofactor.com> wrote:
> 
> That is what I am doing. I have waited ten years for a shot at
> building an interesting and differentiated online world, waiting
> another year won't kill me.


I have spent some time on Second Life since last winter and had a chance
to see things that are being done there. Certainly SL has a lot of
problems but there is also many little worlds that are being built there
and its easy to create content.  That includes terraforming, buildings
with high res texture, flexible clothes and hair, skins, landscaping,
things in the sky and underwater, scripting, animation, audio, and
video.
 
Some things that are lacking include NPCs and good methods for adding
things like a game system. The SL client is open source and there is
even a nongraphical client called SLeek. With the open source project
libsecondlife you can created avatars that do things through exernal
software and there is an open source project called OpenSim.
 
The downside is that to do anything meaningful you need a full region
and that is going to cost money - around $1700 to "own it" and $295/mo
payment to Linden Labs A region is 64 acres and runs on one server.
Their server farm is around 4000 servers to handle an average of 4
people per server which means a lot of "empty rooms".
 
OpenSim is an open source project and you can run it on your own server
or grid or hook into some existing grids (both free and "for a fee"
versions). It's possible that Linden will in the future allow user
servers to hook into their grid.  Meanwhile Linden is still working on
making their server open source.
 
libsecondlife will allow you to use C#, Python, or any other .NET to do
just about anything as either agents or messages to objects.  The
internal scripting language is okay but it takes a lot of resources to
run it. They also have a limited XML-RPC.
 
The avatar animation is done with BVH files so all you need is either
Blender or Poser or DAZ3D Studio (free) to create new animations.  Prims
(cubes, spheres, etc) can be done online or through prim.Blender and I
believe Maya.  The new prim sculpties can be done in either Blender or
Maya. Probably Zbrush too but I haven't checked. And since a sculptie is
just texture file (like a displacement map), the animation can be done
with Quicktime movies.