Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:55 am
Openlancer Summary
General Summary
Openlancer is an open community developed free open source game which aims to transcend the traditional scope of commercial game design by combining the benefits of procedural content generation with the depth of community based interactive fiction development. In effect, the aim is to create the first title of a new game genre, a “community held alternate reality simulation platform” . A “living game” in which the community has both complete intellectual control and complete development control over the game engine, game “rules”, and game content.
Being open source allows the community as a whole to contribute to Openlancer and to maintain it long term. Unlike closed source commercial games which have a relatively short term of commercial viability or life span, Openlancer can be maintained almost indefinitely or as long as the community exists and is willing & able to do the work. It also allows the community to be self reliant, there is no need to petition for attention from some third party who's primary interest is financial.
Freelancer Comparison and Contrast
Freelancer presented the non-flight aspects of game play in a mix of cut scenes and an extremely limited “room” interface. Openlancer fully implements these non-flight game elements and then expands on them to their logical conclusions. Specifically:
-- Instead of static solar systems, Openlancer uses a procedurally generated game world allowing for much larger more detailed static “core solar systems” and a near infinite number of reasonably detailed semi-random systems generated during space exploration. In all cases, after solar systems and/or planets are generated they become persistent.
-- Instead of limited space flight, Openlancer uses “unit mode” game play, this allows the player to control any vehicle, be it spacecraft, aircraft, ground pounders, or static emplacements. Spacecraft run the full range of sizes from minuscule pods; to small craft fighters and freighters; to large craft transports and gunships; and up to capital ships. Ground units include hover, tracked, wheeled, and walking units.
-- Instead of the “room” interface, Openlancer uses a full featured “character mode” RPG game play system. Characters can run around on foot in larger ships, in stations, on planets, in structures, and even spacewalks. No modern RPG is complete without comprehensive character sheets, dynamic dialog, and a wide range of interactivity with the environment. No futuristic RPG is complete without full support for small arms combat and, of course, a wide range of power armor.
-- Instead of the static market price sheets, Openlancer uses an economy engine, this allows for a fairly complex living economy with pricing based on supply and demand. A contract subsystem handles (semi) random missions, regular faction employment, and drives a fair amount of NPC activity.
-- Instead of strictly static items, Openlancer uses a dynamic creation engine. This allows characters to build their own items, units, structures, and pretty much anything else they like. A blueprint & template subsystem, technology subsystem, character skills values, production equipment quality values, and raw material quality values allows for all items to have more realistic and normally unique stats.
-- And the list goes on but you should get the general idea. This game is almost fully dynamic.
All of these dynamic systems taken together add up to a living game world. The result is each single player experience and each multiplayer server will have a unique game world that is directly influenced by the actions of players and server administrators. The role of mods will be significantly different from Freelancer and probably more interesting.
Development Summary
For a typical commercial developer this project would require a small army of professional developers, five years, and tens of millions of dollars to be completed much less commercially successful. Instead, we are leveraging community development by a mix of professionals, modders, other hobbyists, and anyone else interested in lending their time and effort to the community.
The community based development effort coupled with using as much free open source middleware as possible will significantly decrease the amount of time and effort required to complete the project. This middleware includes the likes of: Ogre 3D, CE GUI, OpenAL, RakNet, ODE, SDL, MySQL, LUA, and maybe others. Everything is C/C++ for the best performance and a high level of cross-platform support.
Content creation is a mammoth task for all modern game projects with most requiring a small army of artists. In this case procedurally generated content will allow the game engine to create a volume of content that would literally take a small army of artists several life times to create manually. Openlancer is also tapping into a large collection of community mod resources and other free content resources on various game development sites. Even after all of that we still need more and most of it will need to come from the TLR community.
--MegaBurn,
Lead Designer and Webmaster,
Openlancer Project
Openlancer is an open community developed free open source game which aims to transcend the traditional scope of commercial game design by combining the benefits of procedural content generation with the depth of community based interactive fiction development. In effect, the aim is to create the first title of a new game genre, a “community held alternate reality simulation platform” . A “living game” in which the community has both complete intellectual control and complete development control over the game engine, game “rules”, and game content.
Being open source allows the community as a whole to contribute to Openlancer and to maintain it long term. Unlike closed source commercial games which have a relatively short term of commercial viability or life span, Openlancer can be maintained almost indefinitely or as long as the community exists and is willing & able to do the work. It also allows the community to be self reliant, there is no need to petition for attention from some third party who's primary interest is financial.
Freelancer Comparison and Contrast
Freelancer presented the non-flight aspects of game play in a mix of cut scenes and an extremely limited “room” interface. Openlancer fully implements these non-flight game elements and then expands on them to their logical conclusions. Specifically:
-- Instead of static solar systems, Openlancer uses a procedurally generated game world allowing for much larger more detailed static “core solar systems” and a near infinite number of reasonably detailed semi-random systems generated during space exploration. In all cases, after solar systems and/or planets are generated they become persistent.
-- Instead of limited space flight, Openlancer uses “unit mode” game play, this allows the player to control any vehicle, be it spacecraft, aircraft, ground pounders, or static emplacements. Spacecraft run the full range of sizes from minuscule pods; to small craft fighters and freighters; to large craft transports and gunships; and up to capital ships. Ground units include hover, tracked, wheeled, and walking units.
-- Instead of the “room” interface, Openlancer uses a full featured “character mode” RPG game play system. Characters can run around on foot in larger ships, in stations, on planets, in structures, and even spacewalks. No modern RPG is complete without comprehensive character sheets, dynamic dialog, and a wide range of interactivity with the environment. No futuristic RPG is complete without full support for small arms combat and, of course, a wide range of power armor.
-- Instead of the static market price sheets, Openlancer uses an economy engine, this allows for a fairly complex living economy with pricing based on supply and demand. A contract subsystem handles (semi) random missions, regular faction employment, and drives a fair amount of NPC activity.
-- Instead of strictly static items, Openlancer uses a dynamic creation engine. This allows characters to build their own items, units, structures, and pretty much anything else they like. A blueprint & template subsystem, technology subsystem, character skills values, production equipment quality values, and raw material quality values allows for all items to have more realistic and normally unique stats.
-- And the list goes on but you should get the general idea. This game is almost fully dynamic.
All of these dynamic systems taken together add up to a living game world. The result is each single player experience and each multiplayer server will have a unique game world that is directly influenced by the actions of players and server administrators. The role of mods will be significantly different from Freelancer and probably more interesting.
Development Summary
For a typical commercial developer this project would require a small army of professional developers, five years, and tens of millions of dollars to be completed much less commercially successful. Instead, we are leveraging community development by a mix of professionals, modders, other hobbyists, and anyone else interested in lending their time and effort to the community.
The community based development effort coupled with using as much free open source middleware as possible will significantly decrease the amount of time and effort required to complete the project. This middleware includes the likes of: Ogre 3D, CE GUI, OpenAL, RakNet, ODE, SDL, MySQL, LUA, and maybe others. Everything is C/C++ for the best performance and a high level of cross-platform support.
Content creation is a mammoth task for all modern game projects with most requiring a small army of artists. In this case procedurally generated content will allow the game engine to create a volume of content that would literally take a small army of artists several life times to create manually. Openlancer is also tapping into a large collection of community mod resources and other free content resources on various game development sites. Even after all of that we still need more and most of it will need to come from the TLR community.
--MegaBurn,
Lead Designer and Webmaster,
Openlancer Project