I left the last part of The Life of An Adventurer a bit unfinished, only just touching on the possibilities of the [ Iris2 ] engine, so, here I intend to fill that out a little.

Iris2 is a 3d client for the classic MMO, “Ultima Online”, it uses content from the original UO 3d client, along with Free Content assets.

I’ve mentioned another project in the past by the devs, or at least by two prominent members of the project(Ghoulsblade and Hagish): [ StressFreeZone ].

The rendering of the engine is fairly similar to that of Neverwinter Nights, and could probably be adapted to be perfect. The ruleset, of course, would need to be changed, but, that is to be expected.

Iris is coded using OGRE3d, and the middleware layer lugre (again, lugre was created by the dev team and, so I believe, is used by a number of other projects. ( EDIT: lugre appears to be only used by a few smaller projects – Thanks to Ghoulsblade for the correction! )

Really short one, today, just giving a bit of knowledge on Iris2. Ghoulsblade and Hagish - If you’re reading this, and want me to update or add anything, etc, drop me a line, thanks!

Well, time to revisit an old article: [ Games and Clones ]. Not content to leave this blog untouched, I’ve decided I should probably post more than I have been, lately.

I’m going to play with the premise of the article a little, though, in this one, maybe it’ll work a bit better this time.

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In the first (and up-until-now-latest) installment of Games and Clones, we covered the possibilities of  an open source clone of Electonic Arts and Games Workshop’s 1996 PSX First Person Shooter, Space Hulk : Vengeance of the Blood Angels.

Time to shake things up a little.

The year is 2002, and [ Bioware Corp ] and Infogrames has released their latest Role Playing Game Masterpiece Neverwinter Nights. Until the next year, when the Linux and Mac versions are released, the game is Windows only. The game, to the joy or dismay of its players, is basically D&D 3rd Edition in a 3d game engine. The campaign, was generally considered poor compared to the Role Playing Game that Bioware had previously released: Baldur’s Gate 2 : Shadows of Amn.

The years go past, and the community grows, producing its own campaigns, and content. Bioware has offered some of the community a chance to sell their modules under a “Premium Module” program. This program would allow the game to be updated indefinitely, or at least in theory.

Obsidian Studios develops Neverwinter Nights 2. Atari, the current publisher, forces Bioware to cease production of Premium Modules, which in itself, ends the chance of indefinite life through continual patches and updates.

The game is not perfect. The game has flaws. All games do. To be honest, Neverwinter Nights can be very complicated, sometimes a little too complicated. But, it was designed to allow an emulation of the d20 game system.

I’d love to see an open source game similar to this… The way it emulates a ruleset, and allows for all sorts of roleplaying styles. Allowing for different types of maps, extremely scriptable, and extensible. allowing for so many different creatures, classes, everything.

Moddability to the extreme. An open ended engine, that the user (or content creator/mapper/level designer/etc) can customise, and create their own game, or adventure. Multiplayer is *very* important, as is single player.

It is not an Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game, but rather an Intimate Multiplayer Online (IMO) game, this term was coined by Bioware, to refer to the way multiplayer works in NWN. The players (in most cases) are a part of a single group, and need to work together.

Anyways, as a game engine that could possibly be used to create a new (open source) version of NWN.. would be, in my opinion, [ Iris ].

That’s enough for this one, I think, I’ll probably continue on on this note sometime soon.