Hi,
I’m one of the major contributors on the Ryzom Core project. Have a look at
the commit history for bragging rights. This thread seems like a good opportunity to provide some history and shed some light on the situation.
Originally, only the engine was open sourced by Nevrax as NeL. The intent from the beginning though, at least on part of some of the Nevrax founders, was to have the entire game as open source. Unfortunately not all the owners of the company back then agreed with this direction, so the open source commitment already ended up being half-assed from the start. Back then, contributions to NeL required a CLA, and Nevrax could keep their game closed source.
After the bankruptcy, the game was temporarily owned by Gameforge. The open source community forked off to OpenNeL, no more CLA applied, and many new contributors joined.
The community put a lot of effort in cross platform support on OpenNeL back then. When the current owner took over, they were very much interested in taking advantage of our work. That’s when Ryzom Core was established. The game source was released under AGPL, and graphics assets under CC-BY-SA. The new name for the combined project, Ryzom Core, was chosen by them for marketing reasons.
Unfortunately, while there were a lot of capable volunteers at the time, the person in charge of the official Ryzom servers since then has been largely ignoring the open-source community, except when they need free labour done. Any attempts by the community to implement new features have always been cut short by an unwillingness to make changes to the network api in the commercial game, or to rebuild runtime data to support those new features. In reality, any features that compete with the personal projects of the “main developer” have always been deliberately ignored. Two years ago, they “accidentally” deleted the entire server code from the core branch.
Let's be real here. The commercial Ryzom game is definitely not run as an open source project. They do not contribute much to the open source repository, nor do they collaborate with the open source community unless they need some free labor done. Nearly all real progress on the project gets done without their input. They use open source as a marketing gimmick, and as a source of free labor.
Several years ago, “because it was difficult for the community to contribute”, they created the Ryzom Forge program. In reality, nothing more than a new CLA disguised as an NDA, for people who want to contribute to the commercial Ryzom game.
The majority of new features to the commercial game are added through the in-game browser, rather than natively to the game. This allows them to create an entire set of useless web browser mini-games inside the game as closed source features. If you try to run their branch of the game and server, the user interface is full of non-functional web browser frames.
Fortunately, the web content they’re adding through that system is of such low quality, that nobody in the Ryzom Core open source community is interested in it anyway. The open source branch does not include any of those features for good reason.
Regarding the 3ds Max models, it is a bit of an issue, especially with the bezier patch landscapes. We do already have a fully featured tool that exports meshes and skeletons from Blender files. But it seems the commercial game’s team so far still pretends it doesn’t exist. They can use the lack of Blender support as an excuse for not adding any new high quality graphics content to the game.
Their real problem is that they don't have the technical skills required to maintain the entire graphics pipeline. Any assets they add have to be built manually. Any changes that require assets to be rebuilt are simply impossible. Their development workflow is largely dysfunctional and bottlenecked by their “main developer”, who put himself in a position where he's the one to manually process anything that gets changed, rather than empowering the community. They do not even trust their own volunteers to run their own full development shards locally.
The Ryzom Core community has had the entire pipeline functional for years already, yet the Forge team conveniently still uses a lack of good tooling as an excuse for not providing substantial new graphical content to players. We've spent the last years debugging and fixing issues in all of the tools and released assets, by ourselves. When the Forge team asked us help with rebuilding landscape, they went silent as soon as we asked them to help in verifying that all the rebuilt data was correct. This is all work done by the open source community, no help from them.
On the topic of Khaganat. It seems to be more of a story project at the moment, than actively producing anything using Ryzom Core. Have not heard much from them, recently. I believe several of their members also signed the new CLA with the commercial Ryzom game owner, to be part of the Forge program. However, as far as I know, their development did not go much further than recoloring textures, reskinning the U, and placing some NPCs in the game. I would not call them very active anymore, as far as their involvement with Ryzom Core goes.
We're currently in progress of testing
a new Quick Start package for running your own Ryzom Core server. This package is preset to give you the entire development workflow for graphics, programming, leveldesign, debugging, and publishing to production. The first release is focused on just Windows as a development environment. Since that's what the original developers used, we know for sure all those tools are feature complete, and this will serve as a known working reference.
Currently we have nobody maintaining the Qt ports of the leveldesign and graphics tools, and they no longer build on the latest Qt. We'd welcome any help with assembling a package for other platforms. The most important here is to have a unified folder structure.
I'm also setting up a new public server for Ryzom Core online soon, which should make it easier to try out development on just the client code as well. This will also include the Ryzom Ring, which is the player oriented level editor that was mysteriously removed from the commercial game.
I very biasedly agree that the commercial Ryzom game should be removed, and replaced with Ryzom Core. With the Ryzom Ring included, at least it is playable as a storytelling environment. Re-implementing the missing data, that's necessary to make the actual gameplay functional, will still take some time.