Ryzom MMORPG goes open source and creative commons

[Frank Dodd]

I spotted some interesting news this morning about the Open Sourcing of the Ryzom MMORPG game under the GNU AGPLv3 license. Probably even more striking is the fact that they have made all of the Ryzon Artwork (textures, 3D objects, animations, particle effects) available under the Creative Commons share alike license.

While I am highly sceptical about the reuse of art assets there is a huge amount of material in there 20,000+ objects that will be very useful for testing and creating demonstrations. They could also form the base of some interesting derivatives modifying a 3D character and cutting out on some or all of the modelling, UV unwrapping and character animation for example.

I haven't seen the core software but there is almost certainly a solid 3D engine, shard based network communications system, RPG level AI facilities, combat model, audio engine, not to mention an entire free MMORPG platform if you want to pick it up tweak and run or simply just run.

Now that the fun part is over I really cant decide if this is good news or not, perhaps I am being somewhat small minded about it but this could be very disruptive to quite a few projects and developers, although projects like Irrlicht and Ogre by providing a generic 3D API for a wide range of applications and a BSD license for closed source projects should be fairly well insulated from it I would have thought.

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