[MMO] Tempest in the Aether

[Tuxide]

Hello everyone! I'm not too sure what kind of people read this board any more, but what the hell I think it's time for a promo thread here anyways.

Tempest in the Aether is a Victorian Steampunk MMO with space travel and aliens set in 1899. We are shooting to have our first technical demo in April, and although we are well on the way of doing so, there are still tasks that we can defer to newer volunteers. Our demo will consist of a township called Wellston set inside an asteroid dome, robot character models (possibly animated), and some degree of questing. I am shooting for free-for-all PVP with looting but I don't think that's going to happen.

This project is a PlaneShift fork, and saying that I'm not going to dwell on the history of our project unless people here really want me to. But being a PlaneShift fork this means that we don't have to write our own client and server from scratch (although we do have to understand how it works but that's not a problem for us since we already have years of experience with it anyways). Because we use PlaneShift as an engine we use Crystal Space as well.

We can take whatever contributors we can get, regardless of talent. March 2011 is a particularly important month for us just because we want to push out a technical demo by April, and there is a task for everyone. View, discuss, code, write, edit, texture, learn, complain, you are welcome, even if you just want to spend March or April with us. The majority of our team comes from PlaneShift directly, but there are some that come from other places and manage to fit in well. For the long term, we really do need someone dedicated to CSS and Photoshop/Gimp; that way the artists that we do have can defer these tasks so they can focus on in-game assets. Unlike a lot of projects, we want to push for a dedicated web development unit here.

More info can be found on our website http://www.tempestintheaether.com/ and the #Tempest-in-the-Aether channel on Freenode. We do have forums and you can register for them.

Our licensing is the following:

• GPL2-only for engine (not GPL2-or-newer; this is because PlaneShift is one of the rare projects that uses GPL2-only and we have to abide by it)
• CC by-sa or by-nc-sa depending on what the artist wants. We do it this way because we don't want to force our artists to use by-sa if they don't want to
• Apache 2.0 for most things in Java that are website-related (my stuff which is available on our Maven reposotiory)
• LGPL 2.1 for any custom Crystal Space code we did

Check out our media gallery; it is mostly concepts and works in progress, but it already shows off the talent we have in our group. Anything that looks like crap is probably something I drew. Anyways:


Concept art of a human male


New London center tower inside of a domed city; the space port is on the top


A Monty robot


Wellston dome township, untextured. The buildings on the left and right are modeled with tiled sections for walls; this prefabricated architecture allows for a greater variety of buildings to be constructed in speed.


Render for boots.


A tower relic.

Finally, we seek cooperation with other projects as well, since we don't seen any reason to cannibalize off of other projects. We've been experimenting with sharing an asset repository with projects such as Peragro Tempus and Trinity Reign, and we have a test server for an experimental asset repo manager set up which Peragro Tempus developed in-house (and mostly has their stuff on it currently).

[sfb]

Tuxide,

I'm probably beating a dead horse but the NC and ND clauses of CC have negative consequences and I'd highly discourage them. For example if an artist made your main character for you and released it as CC-BY-NC-SA the artist is allowed to make money off of the asset but you are not unless the artist assigns copyright to you. In this case though why would an artist bother with NC if they're just simply assigning the copyright over.

Many people fail to realize this problem with the NC clause. If said character is something important to you and you decide this important and popular character will be donned on coffee mugs and t-shirts on Cafe Press or something like that in order to raise a little extra money to pay for hosting you are technically in violation of the NC clause.

Nearly all credible sources of the "qualifications" of what it means to be Free Software and Open Source (the ten-tenets, four-freedoms and DFSG) state that these limitations on commercial distribution and derivatives are contrary to the very core of Free and Open Source Software.

I honestly have never heard a convincing argument for the ND clause and very few reasonable justifications for the NC clause. They're just bad clauses in my mind and should be avoided rabidly by projects claiming to be free or open source.

Thanks!

[Tuxide]

Well it's not necessarily a dead horse, but it's irrelevant to me because I don't contribute art to the game. The choices are either CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA and this is entirely up to the artist. By doing it this way, the fault doesn't lie on the organization if it's not "open enough" because it was the artist's decision to use NC. PlaneShift/Atomic Blue forces artists to make proprietary assets and we'd rather avoid the criticism that it gets for doing this. I see this as the best of both worlds that achieves this; this makes our project more attractive to a wider range of artists while making it possible for a 100% NC-less product. If any artist ever does contribute under NC, I encourage you to take your argument up with the artist directly. Either artists can be convinced to not use NC or their assets can be replaced.

[andrewj]

This project looks very promising.

However I don't see any screenshots of the actual game (here or on the website), giving me the impression that you don't actually have anything playable yet.

If that is correct then I really doubt you can make a decent demo of your game in the timeframe you mentioned (in a month or two). Perhaps you should think about extending the deadline and give yourselves a bit more time to make a really compelling demo.

[Tuxide]

The only bottleneck I can see us having is getting Crystal Space exporters to work, but from what I've been seeing I seriously think getting a demo out by April is doable. We have enough talented people and activity. Even if it's just a glorified chatroom with quests like I described in the OP, the purpose of the demo will be to show that we are capable of making a game. I guess we will have to come back to this in April and see what this thread looks like.

[rogerdv]

Hmm, bad luck for me, a Planeshift client means that probably I wont be able to connect to the server. I reported the problem several times in the PS forum and nobody can give me an answer.

[Tuxide]

Without really understanding your situation, I'm afraid there's nothing I can really say to address it right now.

One thing I do want to point out is that in PlaneShift, they don't do a whole lot of things that they really should be doing when developing their engine. For example, unit testing, continuous integration, cross-compiling, release-early-release-often, etc. We are in a much better position to do all of these things. We use Hudson/Jenkins to schedule build tasks and we have a compile farm (although I could use some help just managing it in general).

[rogerdv]

Well, maybe this is not the place, but I will give you a brief description. My problem started a few years ago, suddenly I couldnt connect, servers simply said Failed. A few months ago, I moved my workstation and connected it directly to the router, no firewall in the middle. then I connect, but about a minute later the connection drops. I cant pass the character creation step, or simply if I dont log in the game, the servers stop responding to ping. Thats all. I have to say that my lag is hughe, about 700ms.

[Carver413]

why would you even bother trying to play a game with a lag like that. you would be totally useless to your teammates

[rogerdv]

Well, it actually works. I have played some online RPGs and I can assure Im an almost functional team member. You just have to get used to the response times and act in consequence, Im a sort of disabled person that has to live with that handicap. Besides, I cant simply sit and wait for my country to have a fiber cable (we do have it now, but will start working in july).

[Tuxide]

We want to make it possible for people to be able to set up their own shards RunUO-style so people aren't limited to connecting to a single machine in a single location. That includes making quests and such publicly available. A bottleneck I can foresee is that a way to actually provide such data needs to be developed because I don't think a simple database dump is going to be good enough any more.

[Carver413]

Well, it actually works. I have played some online RPGs and I can assure Im an almost functional team member. You just have to get used to the response times and act in consequence, Im a sort of disabled person that has to live with that handicap. Besides, I cant simply sit and wait for my country to have a fiber cable (we do have it now, but will start working in july).

well perhaps if this project flies you can run you own server. atleast you will get a good ping.

[Carver413]

I have tried registering on your forum, all I ever get is
You have entered the wrong CAPTCHA sequence. Please try again.

[Tuxide]

What link are you using to register? Try this one; it should let you log in to most of the site, including forums and bugtracker.

http://www.tempestintheaether.com/index ... ister.html

There are a lot of web-related tasks that need to be done anyways, but my focus right now is just on getting our build system to work.

[Carver413]

that one allowed me to register but failed to send an activation email. I sure hope your game works better then your web page

[Tuxide]

It seems Sendmail crashed earlier this week for some reason and I wasn't aware of it. I turned it back on and I went and activated your account in case your registration email didn't go through.

What we have right now as a website is something we quickly threw up last year and is only meant to get us by until we can replace it. It is by no means final and I do not really care for Joomla myself, but I inherited it when I came on board. I intend to replace how user authentication is done as soon as I can, but this requires a major overhaul and getting automated builds working so there can be a client to download is more important right now.

[farcodev]

ohoh Space 1889 RPG ported in a MMO, why not

keep it up !

[sfb]

The choices are either CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA and this is entirely up to the artist. By doing it this way, the fault doesn't lie on the organization if it's not "open enough" because it was the artist's decision to use NC.

I'm sorry. I just had to chuckle at this use of the phrase "open enough" considering the context. I just argued that NC and ND were inherently contrary to being Open Source and Free Software and you countered me by saying not providing them as options made you "not open enough." Just wanted to point out the irony in the statement.

PlaneShift/Atomic Blue forces artists to make proprietary assets and we'd rather avoid the criticism that it gets for doing this.

See also dead horse... I understand your concerns here but NC and ND put you in the very trap many argue against the ABC License for. Their license is neither open nor permissive and requires explicit copyright assignment. The contrast here is that by asking artists to not using NC or ND you're assuring that their work is still in the full ownership of them but also ensures that you and other projects can continue to benefit from the derivitive the artist releases under the BY-SA.

In *stark* contrast the ABC License seizes the artists works and makes Atomic Blue the sole owner of the content. Look at their clauses:

2. You may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, sell, participate in the transfer or sale or reproduce, create Derivative Works from, distribute, perform, display or in any way exploit any of the Material released under this License unless expressly permitted by the Atomic Blue.

3. You may use the provided Material, for personal use only, to connect to an Official PlaneShift Server only in conjunction with a Planeshift Client, distributed by Atomic Blue. Official PlaneShift Servers can only be designated by Atomic Blue.

I see this as the best of both worlds that achieves this; this makes our project more attractive to a wider range of artists while making it possible for a 100% NC-less product. If any artist ever does contribute under NC, I encourage you to take your argument up with the artist directly.

Now... I'm not an artist. So I'm honestly asking now - what reasons would you (artists out there reading this) give to insist that a project allows for NC and/or ND content? Especially in contrast to a, in my opinion, terrible license like PlaneShift's. Criticism of that license is something that I do understand.

[Tuxide]

The choices are either CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC-SA and this is entirely up to the artist. By doing it this way, the fault doesn't lie on the organization if it's not "open enough" because it was the artist's decision to use NC.

I'm sorry. I just had to chuckle at this use of the phrase "open enough" considering the context. I just argued that NC and ND were inherently contrary to being Open Source and Free Software and you countered me by saying not providing them as options made you "not open enough." Just wanted to point out the irony in the statement.

I was referring to the product not being open enough, not the organization. If somebody doesn't think the product is "open enough" because they don't like NC assets, then they can make an NC-less version or fork if they really want to.

Now... I'm not an artist. So I'm honestly asking now - what reasons would you (artists out there reading this) give to insist that a project allows for NC and/or ND content?

Well, I'm not going to dictate how another project should do things. Within our own organization, decisions like these are the result of a meritocratic decision-making process, and I simply don't have merit in any of these other projects. No matter what, there will always be somebody rejecting something that project X does. Considering that, one difference between us and PlaneShift here is that if "something must be rejected" then we want to encourage that and they don't. Another difference is that our political system is meritocratic, where merit is based off of things such as current activity. PlaneShift has a triumvirate that does a 2-out-of-3 vote on every decision, and it has zero regard to the current activity of its three members: If two of them aren't active during the time, then the third member gets his way.

We don't allow for ND assets and I don't foresee us ever doing so. I'm not too sure if we have NC assets currently, but as I recall, the reason we allow NC anyways is that during the time that decision was made there were a few artists that requested it. In particular, these are artists that don't want to contribute to PlaneShift any more.

If you were to press me further on the matter, then I suppose I would tell you my own opinion. I don't really care for NC myself and I don't think any programmer we have really does. But Victorian Steampunk itself demands a greater degree of artistic expression than a lot of other genres, and we want to encourage artistic freedom here anyways. Such a project can either give their artists the freedom they want or take it away from them. What we say to them is "You can choose either license A, B, or C." We do not say "You have to choose B".

I don't really care for SA either because I'm more of a copycenter kind of person. That's one of the reasons why I use the Apache 2 license for my own website-related stuff instead of the GPL2-only. I personally consider the GPL2-only to be an overly-restrictive license because it's license-incompatible with the GPL3.