Kizare

April 16th, 2010 by Tim Jones Leave a reply »

I’ve decided to bring an old project back from the dead. But this time, I decided to change the game a bit. Kizare will instead be an online 2D MMORPG (something akin to http://www.graalonline.com). The difference, however, is that Kizare will be open-source, and free – any sort of profit made from this will be from my taking other avenues (much like Grooveshark makes revenue through a very low cost, $3 a month, VIP service – but the core service is free).

You can checkout the Google Code project home here:
http://code.google.com/p/kizare/

This project will be my first software to launch for MetaCipher Studios.

So, why am I saying this? Because I’d like your help. If you are at all interested, send me an IM, email, whatever, and I can fill you in on the details.

Info:
– Kizare will primarily be a Windows based game, though porting has not been ruled out
– Kizare is basically a shell that will run on the JS SpiderMonkey engine
– Players will connect to different servers, and will be able to explore different worlds
– A primary server will exist for authentication, stats, broadcasting, etc.
– Servers can be hosted by anyone (must broadcast to the primary server)
– Can create private / locked servers via password
– 2D OpenGL (ortho)
– HawkNL for network access
– DevIL for images
– SDL_mixer for audio (ogg)
– Worlds will consist of a primary JS file (the main application if you will), maps, and resources (images, sounds, music).
– All necessary files are downloaded at the time of a client connection, and versioned.
– Servers must perform a “recycle” to update all clients if any files are updated.
– Scripts will not live on maps, but rather, events are invoked upon the primary JS file belonging to the server (other JS files may be used, but they all live in the same context).
– The primary application will expose an API to all scripts; this API will be 2D MMORPG, specific, meaning, it will not be so abstract as to create anything you want. (i.e., Collision is assumed to be 2D).

Things to know:
– I may fallback to Lua, as I am not 100% sold on SpiderMonkey

To be honest, Graal is what brought me into game programming back in the day. At that time, anyone could create their own player world and host it, for free. It seems they have taken a new direction (one that I don’t like), and I’d like to bring back that same experience for others.

Update:

Decided to use Lua instead of SpiderMonkey.

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3 comments

  1. rndl says:

    yea interesting
    opensource is a good idea so the community can help around and publish their codes so we can create a good opensource 2d mmorpg

    hey have u write a piece of server side code?? i mean these player, item structs or the client is not finished yet??

    • Tim Jones says:

      Client / Server is not finished yet – and won’t be for a while. If you’re talking about network communications, it will be packed bytes with header information.

  2. noside says:

    Interesting :)

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