Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 08:34:45 +0000
From: Oliver White <ojw@iinet.net.au>
Subject: WorldForge's first birthday!

WorldForge is a project to develop massively mulitplayer online role
playing games, similar to Ultima Online. 

It's been exactly one year since our initial slashdot posting:

http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/03/102224_F.shtml

Since then the project has generated masses of quality code, art and
documentation. These are all available through our web site:

http://www.worldforge.org

So what have we been doing all this time? Server development is
progressing through backstage and cyphesis. Cyphesis is a 'virtual
world' server and will be the basis for our first playable game, Acorn.
It is being used to develop AI and the Atlas client/server protocol.
Backstage is the test bed for our physics engine, and account
management. Features of both form the basis for STAGE, the first
increment of our final server.

Our first world, Dural, has it's first province, Cambria, in which the
village of Agrilan resides. This is where the Acorn is set. You can
expect the world to grow along with our software.

Client side work is equally diverse. In the 2D domain we have UClient,
our most advanced client. This is definitely suggested if you want to
see our art, but doesn't not currently run on windows. We could use some
windows programmers to help debug the beast. 

Another 2D client is GNOME-Anvil, obviously aimed at the linux desktop
environment, GNOME. XClient is our first 3D client, and is worth playing
around with. It also runs on windows.

Our protocol is XML based for now, and a lot of work is going into this.
You'll note that although there are several client and server
implementations, they are all expected to use this protocol. Once we
move to a production game, this will be converted to some kind of binary
protocol. For now it's much easier to debug.

Wiki - our collaborative web site engine - has made it very simple for
us to document all that is interesting or important, I hope you'll all
take a look. 

Yours truly,

Oliver White