Moonwards

[Moonwards]

We're making an MMO, something that has never been done in FOSS before*. It's a 3D simulation of an advanced lunar town, based on hard science and engineering. It's a sandbox world where visitors can add things that become permanent parts of it, so over time it evolves and enriches.

For now the demo allows you to explore the huge habitats and installations, learning about the town's technology by activating tooltips, audio clips, animations, and slideshows. There is a rover to drive outdoors, around Lalande Crater, which is a real place on the moon. Chat with other visitors. The UI shows our plans for adding gestures and expressions for your avatar, and various tools for making things.

The next target is to start adding displays about real space development projects and concepts, in the giant habitat set up for that. New 3d models will be added there and tricked out with interactivity that explains them.

Then we will add the ability to pick a spot in a neighborhood and build your home. Our NPC editor will also be fleshed out so that people can add entities to their neighborhoods, and advanced users can add entities anywhere in the world.

License: MIT, CC-BY if you prefer for game assets
Made in Godot 3.2 (hungrily waiting for 4.0)
Website: https://www.moonwards.com/
Main repo: https://github.com/moonwards1/Moonwards-Virtual-Moon
Discord server: https://discord.gg/x4A9FsZxFv

* I've been advised by @rah that there are a number of FOSS MMORPGs - which has merit. I wasn't aware of that and had taken the word of one of our devs that there weren't other FOSS MMOs. However this game is quite unlike an MMORPG, and I would really say it counts as different enough from anything done in FOSS so far to be considered in a different category of game. The FOSS project most similar is OpenSimulator.

[drummyfish]

It looks very pretty and exciting. I'd be glad to play it, just don't go too ambitious, I've seen so many failed Godot projects. I am missing a relaxed exploration game very much.

Licensing of assets seems a bit confusing, the main repo license says they're CC-BY, while the asset repo itself has an MIT license. I recommend fixing this as changing licenses later can become a problem if more people have contributed.

Good luck with the development and thank you!

[Moonwards]

Ambitious is kinda a central pillar of this, we have to stick to it. But, I am free to work on this full time indefinitely. That helps a lot.

Good point about the Assets repo license. I'll change it to CC-BY right now.

Very glad you like it

[PeterX]

The thing for me is that the player experience in an MMO is fundamentally different than an MMORPG. For one like ours, which focuses on allowing people to create things and share them in the world, the networking code is fundamentally different. So, although it has some similarities to an MMORPG, I wouldn't say it should be counted as being part of the same category.

I would say the issue is there aren't enough examples of the kind of game we are making to have the right initials to add on after 'MMO' to state what it is in shorthand.

So you mean sandbox game and/or simulation, did I understand that right?

EDIT: "open world" is another label that seems to fit.

Greetings
Peter

[Julius]

Split of the off-topic discussion: https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic ... 26&p=99840

[PeterX]

Kim, you should (in the readme or in the doc-webpage or both) add the build and install commands.
So far I figured out:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

mkdir Moonwards
cd Moonwards
git init
git lfs install
git clone https://github.com/moonwards1/Moonwards-Virtual-Moon.git

Then I unsuccessfully tried make, ./configure and cmake. What to do now?

Greetings
Peter

[Moonwards]

@PeterX Oh no....
We have had occasional problems with people cloning the repo. It seems to be an issue with LFS but we haven't been able to track it down.

I'm the non-coder on the team. I've pinged all the devs alerting them to your problem and linking to the post.

[Moonwards]

But if you just want to play the game, you could download it from the website. That should just work.

So - did it clone successfully? That isn't the problem?

Because if it did, a dev just pointed out that you can download Godot, import the project, and it wll run.

https://godotengine.org/download

[Moonwards]

[
So you mean sandbox game and/or simulation, did I understand that right?

EDIT: "open world" is another label that seems to fit.

Yeah, that's about right. I understood that 'sandbox' and 'open world' are pretty similar - I'm not clear on the difference.

There aren't any missions or points or anything like that. It's meant to be a very social place that centers on creating lots of different kinds of things and adding those things to the world.

[PeterX]

Thanks for the help. I managed to download and install Godot and could start the game. Unfortunately I got an error. I have started an issue in the Github.

[PeterX]

OK, devs told me that my PC (I guess CPU and/or gfx card) isn't meeting the requirements.

So, no Moonwards for me.

Greetings
Peter

[drummyfish]

"Your video card driver does not support any of the supported OpenGL versions." (getting this on my X200 Thinkpad)

Hmm :/ I'll try it on my desktop later then.

[Moonwards]

@PeterX Once we are able to do optimization, it might work then. But it would still be pretty slow.

With Godot 4.0 and more optimization, it could be decent. Thanks to Vulkan, mostly.

Right now the code is pretty rough, it's at the just-make-it-work stage. As Godot 4.0 changes so much, refactoring extensively now is also not as attractive, since a lot of the work would still have to be changed when 4.0 is out.