Thrive game

[Thrivinator6000]

Hello, I am Thrivinator6000
I am here to tell you about an open source game called Thrive.
It would really be good if anyone could check out the game and help its developement
THE OFFICIAL ADVERTISEMENT:
The forum is back up.
The Thrive forum is down. Please do not panic yet.

I'm sorry for taking so long to post this, but here it is! The official Thrive advertisement!


Thrive is widely inspired by the concept behind a PC game called Spore. Though Spore was initially billed as a realistic, scientific game about evolution, the final product got watered down until it had practically nothing to do with science or reality. Thrive aims to succeed where Spore failed. Thrive will be a free, open-source game created by an online community of dedicated volunteers. Our team seeks to accomplish two major goals: create engaging, compelling gameplay that respects our players' intelligence, and remain as accurate as possible in our depiction of known scientific theory.

Upon beginning the game, you will witness the explosive birth of a new Universe. You start out in God Mode, one of the games three modes. The other two are Organism Mode and Strategy Mode. In God Mode, you can raise volcanoes, control the fate of ecosystems, and manipulate evolution itself-like a sandbox game. Organism Mode is entered by choosing an organism and essentially taking control of them. Explore the environment and encounter other organisms, all like a kind of adventure game. Strategy Mode is entered by picking some form of country or other faction, which you control in RTS style.

We realize that the entire idea is hugely ambitious, so we're doing this in parts. Our current goal is to program the Behaviour Editor, a simpler editor where you manipulate the AI of your organisms. A prototype is available at the end of this post. But, we desperately need people to get just this done-programmers, artists, and more!

Our current planned order of development is as follows:
1 ) Conceptualizing
2 ) Microbe Editor
3 ) Microbe Stage
4 ) Organism Editor
5 ) Organism Evolver in a preset environment, with a few NPCs
6 ) Pre-sapient gameplay
7 ) Culture Editor and Sapient Gameplay (On one planet, pre-space)
8 ) Space
9 ) Testing
10) Release

If you would like to be part of this incredible project , and can donate any amount of time at all, we are actively seeking the following:
- Graphic Artists
- 3D Artists
- Legal Advisors
- Project Managers & Coordinators
- Software Developers (Games)
- Scientific Advisors
- Composer (Soundtracks)
- Sound Effects Engineer
- Promoters
- People with cool ideas and visions for the biggest game ever conceived!

We do already have two coders, Bashinerox and PaperGrape, though if you have some coding experience your assistance would be greatly appreciated!

If you are at all interested in contributing, please visit our forums for more info:

Our forums
Current Concept Document

Currently all we have are a few prototypes, most made in scratch. Here they are.

LINK TO SPACE PROTOTYPE

LINK TO CELL STAGE PROTOTYPE

LINK TO PLANET EDITOR

LINK TO BASIC CELL EDITOR PROTOTYPE

Better Cell Stage Prototype

REMEMBER that we are a FreeWare and OpenSource project, and that because of the revolutionary nature and monumental scale of the project, this game will not be completed for some time. We welcome all game developers and we greatly need your help. We're all looking forward to having you on the team!

Thrive

Your world awaits!

We hope to update this thread with any new information, once we get going.

[farcodev]

The links aren't here o.O

[Dm3d]

doing a cursory search, I found http://thrivegame.forum-free.ca/forum and http://thrivegame.wikidot.com/. looks like a pretty interesting project.

[Julius]

Worst announcement post EVAR

Give us some technical details and links!

http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/ (why can't you middle mousebutton click to open in new tab on that site???)
https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive

Is build with OGRE and CEGUI and can be scripted with lua.

No mentioning of a content license policy as far as I can tell.

P.S.: "legal advisors"??? seriously?

[moopli]

Oh my goodness.

Hi everyone, I'm moopli, one of the Thrive devs. I'm not sure if, over on our forums (join us at http://thrivegame.forum-free.ca), we ever decided to advertise here, certainly not like this though, but that's not on-topic here.

So, on with the damage control:

Most of the info above is outdated.

We are not in fact currently working on the behavior editor. We are working on the Microbe Stage -- unicellular, eukaryotic players and non-players, 3D graphics, 2D gameplay. Swim around and release poisons and absorb food and die repeatedly ! For a taste of the sorts of interesting problems you could work on if you joined us, we currently have diffusing clouds of chemicals, implicit skinning (the guy last working on it has a metaball prototype, follow along if you like: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/issues/115) and soft-body dynamics in the works.

When we hit the Early Multicelluar Stage (exactly what it says on the tin), we'll have even more interesting problems. At the very least, there'll be more skinning, slightly more intelligent AI, terrain generation, evolution, and inverse kinematics.

Don't let me scare you though -- we have jobs for everyone. Since nearly everything is prototyped in Lua, and since we have so many jobs to do, there's always a glut of easy coding jobs to do. Fiddle with XML and work on our GUIs, create new organelles, or one of any number of other things: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/issues?labels=easy.

We are looking most importantly for programmers. Legal advice, if ever, is easy enough to get from the EFF; dedicated promoters will likely never be needed; we have suffered since the dawn of time from a plague of ideas-people and are doing everything we can to cut down on it (much better to actually contribute); and project managers are (usually) best promoted from the ranks. We have a great (and very welcoming) music team, and we're currently short on people with experience doing sound effects. While a particularly knowledgeable and eloquent scientific advisor might become indispensable, we'd much prefer they know their algorithms and thus be able to contribute more than just platitudes. We'll eventually need some particularly talented 3D artists to make things that look good even when deformed, but if I had my way all our models would be procedural :P. Finally, for graphics artists we could currently use an artist with some coding skill to make GUIs. If they also know their stuff w.r.t UX, I will likely beg them to join.

Bashi and PaperGrape are no longer with us (and haven't been for several years).

We are far past the prototype stage, and are now working on 0.2.3. For 0.3.0 we plan to have the big graphics overhaul ready, but until then we're just doing all sorts of things.
http://thrivegame.forum-free.ca/t1276-thrive-releases

And of course, we certainly do have an ambitious scope. We don't expect anyone to stay with us for the whole development, but if you'll be able to help us through a few releases, or even an entire stage, then we want you.

I'm sorry we ever confused anybody earlier, and I hope I've cleared things up.
I only wish I found this earlier.

Editing in responses:
Hey Julius, you're absolutely right -- Ogre (Byatis) for graphics, CEGUI (0.8.3) for GUI, Bullet for RBD, lua+luabind for scripting, tinyXML for xml, and I think I'll stop there
I believe, a few years ago we decided on putting everything under CC BY-SA, but I have a feeling we haven't been consistent with licenses in the past so I've brought it up back on our forums. As for the website, I'm currently in the middle of a website move so that'll give me a chance to look into that oddity. Oh, and as a mod, you've probably judged many project adverts in the past, and since it won't do to make such a blunder again, could you share some tips? Thank you

And Dm3d, the wiki you found has been in pretty bad shape for a few years, but I recently went through and fixed it up; if anyone wants to take another look it'll be more useful now.

Edit2:
Come to think of it, we're lucky this is in OT. In a few days I'll probably have an advert up where it belongs. Hope to see you there!

[Gekon]

Lets wait and see what we gonna have in our hands :> its look interesting project now, just keep up !