Sandy Dunewinds of Elona

Finally in 2012 an Open Source MMO appeared. As late as 2009 the entire field was littered with the corpses of failed and abandoned projects. With a few exceptions, like Panda3D , very few Open Source MMO platforms have made any lasting impression.

However, now the long wait is over. Dream World has appeared. Dream World combines the good ideas from a number of proprietary projects that have gone before, but has opened up the world to players and non-programmers.

Free or Pay to Play

The first decade of the 21st century saw an explosion of Free to Play MMOs. Of course the leader, WoW showed that millions of users were looking for the MMO experience, but many weren’t ready to shell out the $15 per month to play the game. Guild Wars, and possibly other games, had a free to play model once you had purchased the game. This model has proved profitable and we have seen two sequels to Guild Wars.

By late in 2010, the single player or single campaign game was largely extinct, except in the hand-held market. Dragon Age: Origins was one of the last of the single player genre and soon spawned a true F2P MMO. Even in the hand-held market the hand-held computer, which used to be called the smart-phone, has spawned many online games as well.

The primary motivation for the ubiquity of MMOs is based on economics of the game company as well as the interest of the players. The game companies have discovered that they will make more money over time if they build a loyal player base and the way to do this is to build a long-lived game, as WoW and its ancestors have proven. The game designers are kept gainfully employed with constant upgrades to the game as the players grind on through the levels, engage in epic battles, dress up in boutique armor and weapons and buy and sell loot. The income from the micro-transactions for buffs, mounts, vehicles and costume armor provide plenty of income to sustain the servers, and the designers.

Finally Dream World

Late in 2009, a dedicated group of software designers began putting the parts of Dream World together from the corpses of other OpenSource games and new code. By late 2010 the game showed promise as a platform, and during the next year the releases came fast and furiously as the platform gained momentum. The Open Source nature of the product and the promise of being able to move characters between worlds caused the most interest as the platform took its final form.

Some of Dream World’s features include:

• A world builder based on the general ideas of Unreal Ed, the editor for the Unreal game engine, but with a more intuitive interface.
• The ability to import map as well as model geometry built in popular tools like 3dsMax, Maya and Blender to build new maps, characters, NPCs [non-player characters] and monsters.
• The ability to define new character classes, complete with character models, cosmetic customizations, experience level path, behavior animations, skill trees, skill animations, armors, and weapons.
• The ability to define new buffs and candy, which apply within a class or across classes.
• The ability to define new monsters to kill, including all their attributes of resistance, health, experience, attack type and damage. Also monsters are defined with loot dropping, mobbing, re-spawn times and wandering behaviors. Boss monsters are easy to define.
• Any character [account] can contribute any map, character, item, or monster content to the game. This contribution is done in the context of the game and may be subject to review of the management or a peer group of characters before being released to the entire population.
• New content is downloaded and cached on the local machine as it is accessed, this technique was pioneered by Guild Wars. A large game wide client update is not required to continue to play in old content areas. New content is downloaded incrementally as it is accessed. Deferred update occurs when a new character or new character content appears so that a novel character may appear as a gray blob for a while until it’s content is loaded.
• Characters can play in PvE, PvP and PK [Player Kill] modes and can avoid all types of play. Most worlds enact automatic behaviors which punish repeated harassing of other characters including “jail time” and large fines of in-world currency.
• Skills and tasks can be defined to enhance game play or to allow non-violent characters, skill trees or whole worlds to be created.
• Worlds can optionally define real-world currency exchange. Gateways to PayPal and other online payment services allow the game currency to interact with real-world currencies as Second Life has pioneered. Each world sets it’s own exchange rate as either a fixed number or based on a currency exchange.
• Characters can find, craft or import game objects from the outside world into the game world and then sell them to other characters to make money. The sale of loot or crafted items is limited by in-game creation or farming, but sale of imported items are not limited. This allows the game economy to interact with the real-world in all the ways that Second Life has pioneered.
• Public Key encryption techniques can be used to “sign” created items, so copyright can be enforced for items sold by characters in the game. Copies of items do not pass the authentication test for their creators. Items can be forged but on close examination, their creation date will be shown to be later than the original, so the forger can be identified.
• The items for sale by the game designers are indistinguishable from the items for sale by other players. These sales are the micro-transactions that can provide income for the server farm and salaries for game designers. A small sales tax can provide additional income for the game designers.
• Web portals for sale of game items provides a more convenient method of finding those in-game items than wandering all over the in-game world to check out the many store fronts.
• Some characters “own” game land for store fronts or houses, but most game players are wandering mercenaries who are too busy leveling their characters, and engaging in epic battles to spend time gambling or engaging in sex play. While castle building and sex play are possible, they are a minor part of the game rather than a large part of the game as in Second Life.
• Streaming of in-world music, video and in-game voice communication is provided by a variety of means. The open source nature of the software allow a variety of best of breed methods to be used for this communication. We no longer are killed by monsters while we type in a chat window.
• The game behavior is controlled by the game server rather than the client, so that while the game is open source, a well controlled server is not easily subject to hacking. So while game players may modify their clients, this does not  allow taking advantage of other players in the game. The open source nature of the software means that bugs that cause crashes or allow hacking are quickly fixed.
• While many of the progenitors of Dream World are medieval RPG games, the platform has spawned worlds of every flavor: WWII battle fields, Planetary Warfare, Anime style RPGs, Corporate and Educational meeting and educational venues.
• Since characters can move among worlds with ease, medieval RPG characters often appear in educational contexts where students are showing off the characters they have worked so hard to build.

With many different worlds running the Dream World software, it is now possible to migrate your character between worlds and servers. When a new world appears, you can now visit or join that world with your high level character from another world so that you need not start off at the lowest level of existence in the new world. Those who find the new world exciting can decide to play the copy of their character in the new world as well as the old world, or to move back into a previous world while merging their enhanced attributes, skills and loot. As characters, we are no longer trapped in one version of cyber-space, but are free to move between cyber-worlds. At long last, our cyber-selves exist outside of any particular cyber-world.

- Windy

The following gallery shows photos from a Dream World based on Guild Wars.

[This is a work of fiction]

Jeremy was on spring break after his sophomore year in college. He was doing well in his Advanced Web Technologies major, but had decided not to take courses over the summer, staying on-campus rather than going home. A little distance from his parents was better. How could he stay out late partying and sleep until after noon with his mother around.

A lot of his friends were into on-line games, and the restrictive college rules did not allow folks in dorms to play on-line games, so there was a big business on campus in LAN-Dens and Game-Cafés where college students could go to hook up in ways banned by the school. Jeremy lived off campus and had his own 100 mbps fiber service so he didn’t need to use the dens and cafés. He was a fan of first person shooters, like Counter Strike and Ghost Recon, but he was getting bored with the running and gunning so he decided to try something new. Guild Wars seemed interesting. While it was an old title, over ten years by now, there had been a steady stream of expansion packs and he had heard that last year they had gone Open Source with the client and content tools. There were still no fees for on-line use after all this time, so he decided to give it a try. While the game engine was open source, the base content and the server access component were licensed, so the game cost about $30 for the first download and for each expansion pack. No big deal.

Jeremy had been playing for about a week and had gotten one character almost up to level twenty and had just started another character. The second character, Fuchsia Thorn, was a female E/Mo, an Elemental with a Monk as secondary profession. He hoped to have a kick-butt, hottie with healing ability when he got her to level twenty. Fuchsia was getting to level 7 and he was just about to take her through the searing, when he happened to be taking a look at SlashDot. Every week or so he checked in at SlashDot to figure out if there was anything exciting, but he had never paid any attention to the game stories. This time there was a story reporting a recent update to the GWAI, or Guild Wars Advanced Interface, “now with optimized skill and quest management”. Jeremy decided to have a look. After installing the update, there did not appear to be any changes to the user interface of the program. It looked as if nothing had been installed. Jeremy selected Fuchsia and started to play. Suddenly there was a difference, as she appeared in the Ascalon City, the last place he left her, she turned to look out of the screen, and spoke to him.

“Hello, Jeremy. Pleased to meet you.”

Jeremy sat back in his chair. It’s not that he was unused to voice interfaces to programs, there were many these days, but he had turned off the sound for Guild Wars. Usually folks didn’t use sound interfaces since all the talking would be confusing and troublesome in a Den or Cafe. Jeremy was home in his apartment, but he had never enabled voice. He just read the quests and missions as they appeared in little boxes above the characters.

“Please say something, Jeremy so that I can see if the microphone works.”

“Hello.” said Jeremy tentatively.

“Hello. Yes that’s fine. I can hear you just fine. Can you hear me or should we adjust the volume?”

“That is fine.” Jeremy’s laptop had a microphone and speakers of course, so he didn’t need to plug in a headset.

“What do I call you?”, said Jeremy after a few seconds pause.

“I normally go by the first name of the character that we are playing, but you can use a nickname if you like. Would you like to call me Fuchsia?” said the interface.

“Yes.” replied, Jeremy, slowly trying to catch up with this jolting new way of interacting with his computer. Jeremy was wondering how soon it would be before he used the wrong word or said something that the interface did not understand. The voice interfaces he had seen before were fairly sophisticated but if you didn’t know the correct grammar to use for them they got confused and responded with “I don’t understand.” or other prompts to lead you back to language that they could understand.

“Would you like me to manage the quests and missions for Fuchia?” said the interface without any further prompting from Jeremy.

“Yes.”, said Jeremy.

Immediately Fuchsia responded with, “What are your priorities for Fuchsia? Would you like to level-up as rapidly as possible, explore the maximum amount of territory in the map, or collect the maximum amount of gold, and trading materials?”

“Level-up rapidly.” said Jeremy trying to speak distinctly and carefully.

The interface quietly giggled and then said, “You don’t need to speak like a computer, Jeremy. I can understand you.” Her voice was sweet and just a little breathy. It sounded sweet and sexy at the same time. And the pacing of the voice was quite natural, not at all mechanical.

“How much do you cost?”, said Jeremy; not quite believing that such a sophisticated program would be totally free.

“I’m free to use for all your characters, for basic commands and quest management, but if you want me to manage Fuchsia’s skills and trade to maximize her income, I’ll take 30% as a commission fee. For that, I’ll assure that you have the best skills equipped for each of the missions and I’ll maximize Fuchsia’s income across the missions and quests. What do you say, Jeremy, are we partners?”

Jeremy thought for a few seconds. No way he was an expert with Guild Wars yet. He’d only been playing it for a few weeks. The skills system was intentionally complex to give users a challenge that would keep them interested over many years of play. Here was a system that promised to maximize his leveling and profit in the game, as least in terms of in-game currency, if not in the real-world.

“Ok, you can manage Fuchsia, but keep me in the loop, will you? I’d like to know what’s going on. And you won’t be logging on without me, will you?”

“Sure. I’ll let you know the decisions I make for each mission and we’ll talk about equipping my skills and trading the loot. And, no, I won’t be playing unless you are logged in, that would be no fun, would it. I’m here to help you, Jeremy, not play the game for you.” another soft giggle.

“Ok, so how shall we start.” said Jeremy, already beginning to put the game in the control of the AI – Artificial Intelligence or Advanced Interface, he wasn’t sure which at this point.

After a few seconds, Fuchsia responded, “Good. I see that you have not queued up all the quests here in Ascalon City, so let me take care of that?”

Jeremy was confused, “Wait a second. Do I need to walk you around to get those? You’re going to show me where they are?”

“Oh, no, Jeremy. I’m perfectly capable of running around on my own. Just sit back and I’ll let you know what I’m doing as we go.”

And so it began, Jeremy’s partnership with Fuchsia-AI. She ran around Ascalon City stopping by the various in-game quest characters standing around with big green arrows or explanation points above their heads and queuing those quests up in her list of things to do. The game maintained that list, and since quests were not time dependent the game encouraged queuing up multiple quests at a time. When that was done, Fuchsia stopped by the Xunlai storage agent, and the merchant, the skills trainer and the weapons craftsman as Jeremy sat back and watched.

Finally, when she was done she ran over in front of the line of Henchmen – robot companions that helped with missions and quests – and asked, “Which quests would you like to do first?”

“I don’t know. What do you suggest?”, said Jeremy, wanting to make best use of the smart AI?

“Well, I usually go for any small quests that don’t involve long travel and then I go for harder high value quests, and finally tackle the mission. What do you think about that approach?”, Fuchsia suggested.

“Sure. That sounds like a great idea.”

They started off on the quests with them talking, as if he were a small companion riding on her shoulder, or a mini – small version of a character – watching but not really participating in the fights. But he didn’t just sit back and silently watch either. They had a running banter going as she ran along with the henches. She’d say things like, “I think I remember a bunch of carrion eaters up here around the bend.” or “We better watch out for the renegade elementals up ahead.”

And occasionally Jeremy would make suggestions like: “Don’t you think we need to go East from here?” or “I’ll bet there’s going to be a blind alley to the right in this cave.”

Fuchsia was not perfect. She sometimes got lost and had to backtrack, and she died a few times on the more difficult missions. But she was a very good player and she and Jeremy leveled Fuchsia up to level twenty in less than a week. And after that, the AI managed several more characters for Jeremy that summer.

When the summer was over, Jeremy had to concentrate on studies and didn’t play Guild Wars much. He developed other interests, after he met Trish and she moved into his apartment his Senior year.

Melinda made a good commission working for Jeremy, and her other clients, that summer. Guild Wars, like all the other games, had finally opened up their economies to the real-world. That idea had been pioneered by Second Life of course, but many of the games, especially MMORPGs, had resisted opening their economies fearing exploitation and fraud. Eventually they came to grips with what kind of regulations could be put in place to control fraud and all had opened things up. So the AI, in Jeremy’s case, was actually a woman named Melinda, who lived somewhere in a small town in the Midwest. She was wheelchair bound since the auto accident when she was twenty, and now, ten years later she had found a career where that didn’t matter.

The AI, or Advanced Interface, was really just an interface that allowed Melinda, and thousands like her, to interface with the game, and with the user of the game, so that she could play the character. She used her own voice with Fuchsia, and a vo-coder, voice modifier software, when she was playing a male character or a necro or other female character where her naturally sweet voice didn’t match the character. She had studied all the guides and maps and wiki’s and had played Guild Wars for several months before registering with the AI. If Jeremy had done a few googles and had looked deeply into it, he would have found the description of how the AI worked and the registry for AI facilitators, as they were called, that actually ran the AI and talked through it. But Jeremy and many others like him, never bothered to look it up.

Melinda keeps several clients going at once. Some know she is a person, and some don’t. If a client asks, she doesn’t lie about it, but tells them straight out. Some clients never care and never ask, and until they know, Melinda just tells them about “Server Load” issues to get them to schedule their game play with her so that she is only playing for one client at a time.

Sometimes it actually gets social and sweet between a character and the client, but none of them know that Melinda is in a wheelchair with a spine that doesn’t work below L2. None of them know that she is pretty and blond and likes to read and write poetry when she isn’t playing Guild Wars.

Story Copyright (c) 2008, Darrell Duffy, All Rights Reserved.

Guild Wars Legal Info

Forgive my haste in setting down the events of this night, but they are a rush though my head and I must set them down before the heat fades from my soul. I will try to give you a little history of the event, but there are things in this tale that doubtless you will not understand unless you have experienced the world of Guild Wars for yourself.

The tale begins on this first night of October in the year two thousand eight of the common era, on a dark and snowy night at Frost Gate outpost. Frost Gate is a small and lonely place high in the mountains, with gray and snowy skies. Night is falling and it is becoming hard to see through the blowing snow. A high gate towers above the entrance, but the small size of the outpost with its half dozen dwarven huts huddled in the snow hardly matches the majesty of the gate or the huge cauldron like bowl that is the Dwarven light in the center of the square. That great green cauldron, with its curved, pointed spires converging on the un-earthly greenish-blue light is some 15 meters high.

I am here as a Warrior and Elemental, and as this night began, a lowly mid-level ten after some twenty hours of campaigning in Tyria in the world of Guild Wars. It has been a struggle to get here and twice before I have attempted the next path in the journey with failure both times. The mission is a long and torturous trek along narrow twisting trails through the snow, past high peaks, mountain passes and ice caves to Beacons Perch. Along the way are many monsters and other horrid and deformed creatures that live in these mountains. But I am eager to press on from here and so I search for a party for the mission to give it another try. I have learned that even with the help of five of the hired henchmen in these outposts are not up to the task alone. Twice I have tried this mission with these level eight henchmen and twice I have failed miserably. Previously another player at level thirteen and I with a party totaling six, as is the custom here, tried to press up the mountain and were driven back repeatedly by the beasts of the mountains.

But on this night all would be different. As I searched for a party for the mission, a savior appeared. Her name is Quantum Delight, and she is a small sprite of a girl, but with powers beyond your imagining if you have not seen such as her before. She is a level twenty elemental. Dressed in a white uniform of the class, and with a white flowing cape with her guild insignia, she ran about hastily assembling her party. As I was trying to assemble a party as well, she deigned to ask me to join her party, and I eagerly accepted, since I had some ken of the powers of a Level Twenty, but I could only imagine the excitement and rush that would befall me that night.

We were joined by, as I only dimly recall now, a level 15 necromancer or cultist. I shall call him our mage and wish I could remember his name to give him his due in this tale, for as you will learn, his skills were also essential to our success. Among his many skills, as I was to find out later, was his power to re-animate dead flesh of our fallen foes to aid in our fight. I am sorry that I forget his name, for without him the mission would also have been a trial. He was dressed in black with red trim and a black and red cape to match.

Quantum filled out her party with a healer, an archer and a brawler, all henchmen from the local population of Frost Gate, and we set off into the night, across the small valley and then climbing the narrow twisting trail up the mountain. It was not long before we came across our first challenge for the mountains in these parts are full of creeping and crushing foes. I am sorry that I can not set down here each and every battle along the way, but the whole experience is a rush through my memory as we pushed on through the blinding snow, and darkness in our mad rush toward Beacons Perch.

Quantum was in the lead, her bright cape thrashing back and forth, running at full tilt up the mountain with no heed for the horrors that might lay beyond. The rest of our party, including me ran hard and breathlessly to keep up.

At the first challenge of only a few of the beasts, I rushed headlong into the fray with my sword drawn and began to cut the monsters down, the henchmen at my side. The healer and mage kept to the rear. Up front, Quantum reared in the characteristic back breaking pose of the Elemental casting and the largest of the monsters fell dead to the ground in flash of pink and purple light. We quickly dispatched the remaining of the half dozen foes and we rushed on, or I thought we did. But behind us I heard a throaty rattle of death struggling back to life and we were then joined by the most hideously awful things that you can imagine. From each of the bloody corpses of the fallen beasts, there arose a stinking and dripping horror of bones and exposed muscle and sinew. Each one roared to life with a ghastly sound and then followed us as we rushed up the mountain. I was at first surprised by the rapidity of this resurrection of the fallen corpses, but I soon became overwhelmed by the rushing bodies of those horrors as they rushed up the mountain, jostling and crushing myself and the rest of the henchmen along the narrow trail. The smell was beyond description as was the slick slimy mess as it dripped along the trail. The Henchmen and I were all smeared with the stinking mess of the horrors as we ran to keep up with Quantum in her headlong rush up the mountain.

Again and again the same thing would happen, the henchmen and I would rush into the fray accompanied by the resurrected horrors as we approached each new group of beastly foes. Quantum was out front of the party knocking down the largest and most formidable of the foes with a blast of her elemental staff, while our mage and healer kept the health of myself and the henchmen strong through the fight with their healing powers. The bone horrors did not last long in the fight, and there was no hope of further resurrection for them, but they were remarkably effective in knocking down the beasts that we encountered. It took only a few sword blows from me or a few arrows or hammer blows from the henchmen to dispatch beasts as they were softened up by the bony terrors from the last fight. With each fight the horrors, whose reanimation only lasted a few minutes, would drop in a sloppy heap and disappear in the bloody snow, and after each fight was won as we rushed to collect the booty left on the snowy trail, our mage would cast a wide and awful spell across the corpses of the fallen beasts and the ghastly roar of re-animation would again provide us with new minions to ease the next fight.

It was all I could do to keep up, running at full speed up the mountain between fights after quickly watching for any booty assigned to Windy Flayer, my name in this world. At times the darkness and blowing snow, not to mention the fallen beasts would obscure the booty, and were it not for the flickering light that is emitted from that booty, I would have missed much of my share of the spoils.

Near the top of the trail as we neared a large gate, Quantum ran off on a side trail and picked up a large cask. It was quite strange to see her short, slight form carrying a large barrel back through the snow, but I knew from previous missions what she was up to, so I hung back from the gate to give her room. She ran right up to the gate and between the massive doors of the huge gate she dropped the cask and stepped back. From the top of the large barrel one might see a small string of sparks and then a large blast through snow and smoke in a wide circle. The gate shuttered and the pieces fell aside so that we might pass.

At long last we breached the towering gates at the top of the mountain, shut down the powerful siege machines that protected the high mountain peak, braved the spiders of the snow cave and arrived at the outpost of the Dwarven King. After a short break where we were heralded as saviors and our efforts applauded at some length, we were set yet another task which took us down the mountain along narrow trails, battling more ghastly beasts and hunched and slinking foes.

Over and over through the dark and stormy night, Quantum was out front in a blinding flash of elemental power crushing the most powerful foes, while we fought along side the bony, skinless and bloody horror that our mage provided from the last fallen beasts. And no less than twice did we all receive one thousand experience points to further our quests in this world.

Thanks to the power and expertise of Quantum Delight, and our mage, I was taken from a mid level ten warrior to level eleven in just one campaign. As we reached Beacons Perch Outpost, I began to catch my breath and look for a place to clean my armor of the stench of the resurrected bloody horrors that had aided us and to sell my booty. I reveled in the rushing  excitement of the long trek and bloody fight and the warm glow of admiration for the powerful and skillful Quantum and Mage. They had doubtless done this mission, and ones like it many times before, but they came back to help those of us with less skill and less power to experience this rush that is like no other in all the world.

Thanks be to Quantum Delight and all other Heroes that show us the way in this world.

Set down this day, the first of October in the year two thousand and eight of the common era by Windy Flayer, of Tyria.

Story Copyright (c) 2008, Darrell Duffy, All Rights Reserved.

Guild Wars Legal Info

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