Ryzom Ring, Diary #1

Ryzom Ring (R²) - Developer Diary #1 (Page 2 of 2)

Outlands can either be 'private', in which case access can be granted to friends, guilds, or whoever else, or 'public' in which case they are accessible to everybody. Public areas have to follow certain guidelines with respect to the game universe and storyline and players who pass through will be prompted to rate the area in terms of both the 'storytelling' and the map's scenario design. The teleporter menu entries for public maps will include average player ratings and a link to the list of player comments. Our goal here is to give the community real power to vet the public outlands.

There will be an application and approval process for making Persistent Outlands public and the 'public' status of an Outland can be revoked if ever the necessary guidelines are not followed. The point here is to ensure that areas that are freely accessible to all players in the game are subject to an official stamp of approval and comply with the spirit of Ryzom.

• How will we ensure that R2 scenarios tie in with the existing game?

It is, of course, critically important that the R² extension doesn't destabilise the Saga of Ryzom. This means that there must not be ways of using the R2 tools to setup ways for developing characters' skills and wealth more efficiently than by playing the game in the normal way, and implies that there must be some restrictions on scenario design and animation possibilities.

Our general approach here is to create a set of different options for scenario designers to choose from, giving as much flexibility as possible. Each of these options will provide a set of possibilities and limitations for the content that can be used in the scenario and a set of possibilities and limitations for the actions that can be performed by an animator while the scenario is running. I won't give you any more detail on these here but will come back to the subject in a future article.

Now, bringing a bit of realism to the table, it is highly unlikely that we'll succeed in identifying and blocking every possible way of exploiting with our first release of the expansion pack. No other game in our genre that I know of has ever released with absolutely no possibilities for exploiting. It's just the way things are. In response, R2 includes extra server systems that track play activity and alert us of anything that looks suspicious. We'll investigate and react quickly to deal with problem points as we see them arise.

• What are the R2 development plans?

Questions have been asked about the possibility of modelling one's own terrain, and the possibility of creating one's own graphics for one's own scenarios. For the first release the answer to both these questions is no. For now, both are excluded because they both require quite substantial rules, validation and support systems in order to ensure that we don't denature the Ryzom universe or introduce obvious exploits. Our goal at launch is to offer a set of features that provide strong possibilities for their users and that creates a base on which we can build for the future. After launch, we will see which features our active players are clamouring for and we may consider implementing one or both of the above at this time.

When we feel that the initial feature set is ready, we'll announce the opening of a beta program. This will be a closed program for selected players only. It goes without saying that only existing players of Ryzom will be eligible candidates. We expect to go into Beta some time in the autumn, but no date will be announced until we feel that we're really ready.

-Article by Daniel Miller (aka Sadge), Nevrax

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