From:	 Oliver White <ojw@unite.com.au>
To:	 editor@lwn.net
Subject: Worldforge update (sort of)
Date:	 Sun, 03 Jun 2001 02:57:08 +1000

Greetings, to your fine selves. Hope Liz is doing well.

This is a "sort of" update, because right now things are busy on so many
fronts, I can't call myself authoritive on everything that is going on
over at the WorldForge project. I just thought I'd let you know how
things are going.

We're half way through our third year of developing massively
multiplayer online roleplaying games. We believe that we're the *first*
to do this. Many games provide fantasy/sci-fi settings in which many
people can interact, but none of these really encourage the art of
roleplaying, becoming annother character for a while.

To me Stage is the gem in our crown, a highly configurable server system
that provides a toolkit for game developers. Work is progressing rapidly
now, after years of gestation. Several key developers have applied
themselves to the problem domain, and have created what I can only
describe as a work of art in software. Consider Stage as a kernel for
MMORPGs, it provides the basic services and APIs needed in order for our
rules and games developers to build their creations on. By itself, it
provides only rudimentary functionality, but almost any online game can
be built on it's foundations, from network Pong to hyperrealistic
simulations (obviously you might want to upgrade that old pentium in the
latter case. A beowulf cluster isn't out of the question... ;-). 

Two new game efforts are in the works, to be developed on the Stage
platform. The first, Mason, allows gamers to build their own castles,
boil up strange concoctions, create bizare mechanical devices and
generally build things. The second is the Sands of Syllus game, a dark
desert world where water is more precious than gold and where the undead
wage war on the unsuspecting.

On the client side, Uclient continues to be our most advanced work,
depicting our worlds from a 2D isometric viewpoint. Much work has gone
into our archive of 2D art and the results are quite stunning.
Development of Xclient, the 3D first person perspective client has been
quiet lately, but recent advances in the internal representation of
objects in stage seems to be driving interest in how the world model is
presented to the gamer, and Xclient is sure to benefit from this
interest.

You might not have heard, but many WorldForge services including the
website is now hosted by the kind folks at the Simple End-User Linux
group. They've been really great, I have to say.

Finally, don't forget we actually have a real, actual, *working* game,
now. Acorn v0.4.0 is due to be released by the German LinuxTag expo,
with several of our developers attending the show. Acorn is built using
our goal-based AI server, Cyphesis. Eventually the Cyphesis AI engine
will be integrated into Stage.

That's about all. Thanks for the support. :-)

--
Oliver White