WorldForge Community

There are currently no plans to do any more work on isometric based clients or games within the WorldForge project. Isometric engines are a lot of work to develop, and even more work to create graphics for, and there is simply not enough interest in them to justify the work. 3D graphics cards with excellent rendering capabilities no longer cost more than about 20 or 30 dollars, so the expense is not a barrier.

WorldForge libraries are all completely independant of graphical implementation.

I have an idea: Why can't we just use the existing engine and change the camera angle so that one is very high above the terrain looking down? Down the road we could add texture granularity based on viewing distance so you get different textures when in "2D isometric" mode.

Then we could allow players to spawn NPCs by creating, oh... say a town center? And then that player could control the NPCs the same as like the pigs but with different behavior for each type of NPC. Sort of like Age of Empires. I think that would be really cool and would bring a whole wave of gamers who like those types of game into our ranks. Maybe one day you could command a whole army of NPCs and defend your little village or invade another players, hehe.

Here's another thought: What if we attract venture capital by offering in-game advertising and then use that money to quit our boring jobs and work on this full-time? I mean then we could do what we love, get paid for it, and speed along this incredible game which we can all contribute to. Plus if the game gets popular enough, you could get millions from advertising and dump it right back into servers and coding. Like imagine in the game there would be Pepsi stadium or Trump Plaza or other ads. Maybe you occasionally find a Coke bottle in the city? lol. I'd be willing to put up with that for a world-class gaming experience, and anybody who doesn't like the ads could host their own servers. I'm sure other ventures will start up as well making servers and trying to attract advertising dollars. Eventually we could decentralize, similar to IRC, and people could pop in and out of servers like they do on IRC channels. Then one day companies could even set up their own virtual office where you go, in-game, to pay your bills. Of course they will need experienced WorldForge developers... thus ensuring a lucrative future for all worldforge developers and an ongoing pool of talented programmers to work on the core systems.

Another Idea: Perhaps we could attract grant money by using the game for educational off-shoots or medical simulation or some kind of thing like that. I write proposals and I see a lot of money out there for "edutainment" and simulation. Hell I could even contribute with my experience when I wrote a web-based "challenging patient" simulation for doctors to learn how to cost-effectively deliver complete treatment. If any reputable developers are interested, I could write up some proposals and we could get roughly 6months salary to work on it and, if we're successful and get a decent proof-of-concept, we could get an additional 2 year funding, and then by that time we would have a product to sell, hopefully, and become self-suporting. And when all is said and done, the game would really kick-butt because of all this development.

Find Dink Smallwood and give him a go. Its single player isometric 2D but developing fast. There's extensive support for moding dink and someone's sure to be looking at multiplayer eventually. Creating new objects is difficult but there's tutorials on that out there. Dink plus blender would be enough.