Our good friends at WorldForge have announced that they have just crossed the 50k downloads mark. Furthermore, the rate of change is promising ("...The last recorded milestone was twenty thousand in late October 2005, meaning that the last year has been our busiest ever...")...
As numbers in the increasingly frothy virtual world space go, these are tiny digits. Yet, to Alistair and all the other good folks who have kept this fire going a very long time, gratz! More seriously, I might ask why the increase? A few (idle) speculations follow:
A.) Is it because more folks have just heard of WorldForge?
B.) Is it because WorldForge has recognizably cooler software to offer to the community?
C.) More folks are interested in virtual worlds these days and "a rising tide floats all boats."
D.) It is a personality driven phenomenon.
E.) Sunspots.
The use of the word "World" as the first word in the title of an MMO? ;-)
Seriously, congratulations are in order. An open source collaborative MMO -- what a project!
Posted by: greglas | Aug 24, 2006 at 06:15
Alistair has given me annual demos of WorldForge at the last couple of Austin Games Conferences along with accounts of the huge effort that it takes to keep the project going, so it's great to hear about the growing interest.
Posted by: Jim Purbrick | Aug 24, 2006 at 19:58
I think the reasons for the increase in user interest are simple. We have made every effort to release development versions of all our key components regularly over the last 10 months. We have publicised the releases widely but only in the appropriate channels, and I have tried to make sure each release contains at least one "cool" feature.
Unfortunatly while user interest seems to have grown, developer interest is wayning. The number of Open Source MMORPG development projects grows ever larger, spreading available developers thinner and thinner, and the technical and design challenges to be overcome to remain at all relevant in field grow ever larger. The task of enthusing artists and other creative people with the hacker ethic that drives Open Source development reamins as ellusive as ever.
Posted by: Alistair Riddoch | Aug 24, 2006 at 20:23
I'm wondering why Terra Nova hasn't gotten more exposed (or given more exposure) to PlaneShift, which is a bit rough but is a fairly mature and large Open Source MMORPG. My exposure to WF is minimal but the latest playable version of PlaneShift has at this moment 33,000 torrent seeds alone, and well over 250,000 registered accounts. (www.planeshift.it)
Has no one here heard of it or is there something about it which disqualifies it from being relevant to research or discussions here?
Just curious,
Keith Fulton
PlaneShift server team leader
Posted by: Vengeance | Aug 27, 2006 at 01:50
Thanks Keith -
Speaking personally (and not the TN team) I look forward to covering PlaneShift (and other projects) as TN-centric news and events become known to us. Looks like quite a sophisticated open source project.
Posted by: nate combs | Aug 27, 2006 at 10:09
Just a point: Planeshift is cool, but it's not really open source as a whole, is it? It uses an open source engine developed for the project, but all the content is proprietary, AFAIK.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Aug 28, 2006 at 22:53
We have made the content proprietary so that we don't end up with a million slightly different "shards" of PlaneShift with customized servers. All the code (the "source" in "open source") is public and freely available on SourceForge under the GPL. The game itself is free to download and free to play if one is not a programmer.
We have not yet had anyone else try to use our engine to make a separate MMO with a different setting, other than a woman who made a virtual archaeology dig based on a r/l one for handicapped kids as her university dissertation, but I would certainly love to see that and assist whoever was making the attempt be successful.
- Keith
Posted by: Vengeance | Aug 29, 2006 at 12:10