My name is Josh Ritter and I am a game industry vet with some 11 odd shipped retail titles to my credit. This eventually got pretty boring for me... and so a couple years back I went independent. I spent about a year playing Everquest... I bought 5 computers and ran 5 accounts, simultaneously... it was an addiction and I am not proud
At any rate, the experience solidified what I wanted: An independent RPG.So what does all this have to do with Crossfire?
Well, I have an Open Source RPG engine I have been developing for the last 6 months... it is for our game Minions of Mirth. At any rate, the entire source code is hosted on Sourceforge. It is under the GPL license. The engine currently runs under both Windows and MacOSX.
The game is being billed as massively single player, but that's just a marketing hook. In reality, the game is written for multiplayer. We want to launch multiplayer next year, it's hard for a team of 2 people to launch kickass single and multiplayer simultaneously. The game code is based on an extremely modified QuakeII engine. I mean, extremely.
A link to the source code, screenshots, an 8 minute video, and some gameplay features can be found here: http://www.prairiegames.com
Some features of the game and the engine follow... again, the code is released under the terms of the GPL. It may be of some use... perhaps for a Crossfire 3d client? SQL Database support? There also a host of tools... or maybe just for some ideas...
Vibes,
-Josh Ritter
http://www.prairiegames.com
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Minions of Mirth Game Features:
+ Massively Single Player gameplay!!!
+ 15 character careers from 3 character archetypes. Multiclass characters with primary, secondary, and tertiary class
+ 8 playable character races
+ 16 incredible zones to explore
+ A persistent world where your actions have lasting effects
+ Over 10,000 frames of rendered game graphics!!!
+ Alignment system for playing either a good or evil character ...
+ Epic battles rage across the land... you can fight for either side and the outcome of the battle can affect quests, etc
+ Immersive first person gameplay!
+ Slick game GUI that never gets in your way
+ Quest system supporting multiple quest and reward items as well as triggered events
+ Bounty system dynamically generates bounties for you to hunt ... bounty rewards can be money and items!
+ Vendors across the land selling many assorted goodies
+ Track monsters from great distances
+ Melee and ranged combat
+ Vast outdoors (oceans, mountains, jungle, forests), sprawling dungeons, and zones that mix the two!
+ Various modes of transport including boats and airships.
+ Full blown weather system with climates, seasons, cloud cover and varying precipitation!
+ Day and night cycles, with monster spawns and world events tied to time of day. Beautiful star gazing at night!
+ Many types of flora and fauna
+ Players have many wearable inventory slots, quick slots, carry slots, and a vault to store game items
+ Phat Lewt! Robust game items with stats, spell effects, procs, special flags like artifact/indestructible, usage requirements and recommendations and a nifty bonus/penalty system...
+ Game items may also have quality associated with them from Crappy, Shoddy, Normal, Superior, Exceptional.
+ Hundreds of spells... including combat, pet/monster/item summoning, etc .. spell effects include levitation, blindness, paralysis, charming, etc
+ Level cap of 100 with over 80 character skills!
+ Full engine + game source code available for modding
+ Compatible with Windows + MacOSX
+ Cooperative (and PVP) multiplayer coming in 2005
Prairie Engine Technical Features:
+ 100% Open Source. The engine, tools, and gameplay code is available under the GPL.
+ 100% compatible Quake3Arena shader support which can be applied to world geometry, dynamic geometry, or even GUI elements!
+ Single player. The game is fully playable in single player mode. It does not have limited single player content.
+ Multiplayer. The engine and gameplay code is written for multiplayer. The game server is capable of running more than one zone in the same process. This is a really big deal(tm).
+ 3d sprite system allows character, item, monster, and other graphics to be created and integrated very quickly. A tremendous amount of game characters can be on screen.
+ Terrain with inside/outside support and no hard limit to size
+ Day and night cycles with seperation based on inside/outside.
+ Robust pathfinding
+ PVS generation is used by networking and graphics systems
+ Extremely powerful particle system and surface clipped decals!
+ GUI system with support for animated palettes, per pixel clipping, and shader effects
+ Cross platform support provided by the incredible SDL library. http://www.libsdl.org
+ Integrated RDBMS backend provided by the tremendous SQLite library. http://www.sqlite.org
+ Lua scripting. http://www.lua.org
+ Extremely fast toolchest with innovative methods for level creation. Examples include, extrusion from 2d level data, custom Python language based processors, procedural entity scattering, light brushes for quick/dramatic lighting, etc.
+ Created primarily with free and open source art programs
+ Based on a heavily modified QuakeII branched from Team Blur´s Quake 2 Evolved. http://www.planetquake.com/blur