Are there any open source MMOs which people contribute to?

[Amag0k1]

I have been thinking more and more about what worked back in the day in MMOs and what may not work now. And i cannot help but wonder what an open source MMO would look like, where players would vote in elements to work on and develop it.

I think it would need to be small enough that it could fit on cheap hardware as a server, and perhaps people can cluster it, donating compute time.

Does such a think already exist?

EDIT and context.

The point of my recommendation, is if we remove the need for financial intensive by making it truly opensource, and as such making artistic and user interaction shine, what would it look like, if it would even be something to work towards.

 

[ciro64]

Open source gaming needs more love in general, but a MMO specifically would be quite interesting. Especially considering how proprietary MMOs often get sabotaged by their companies.

A hypotetical popular open source one would get a lot of forks for sure.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

MMOs are far too complex and expensive to run, realistically its unlikely for a FOSS one to exist, best you might be able to find, is MUDs.

 

[Amag0k1]

MMOs are far too complex and expensive to run, realistically its unlikely for a FOSS one to exist, best you might be able to find, is MUDs.

Depends on scale, i knew some one who ran Zenith RO (if any one remembers the original back in 2004, which was a private server for Ragnarok as it was not available in the west), and he did this on a Windows xp laptop, with a few cluster devices to manage traffic flow.

Look at Maple story as another example of this. We could even do a SMT first person view with sliding screens like the original Fantasy star online dungeons.

The MMO does not need to look shinny like today's graphically intestine stuff, just has to follow the basics, and apply it well.

Compute power could be donated by folks if needed to, so i guess the only worry is attack vectors by bad actors, who might use this MMO network for lack of a better word, to exploit people.

May be run the server on an isolated VM instance, and then connect to it from a client running on another device?

 

[chufflord]

It's an interesting idea for sure. I think the closest thing I've seen to something like this would be those games that just give a lot of creative tools to the players. Well of Souls, Neverwinter Nights, and Furcadia come to mind immediately for me. However, those are much smaller scale, and you're not really touching the engine under the hood- just using it to make custom worlds, characters, etc etc..