Unofficial Call-out for Open Source Volunteers @ MOUL forum

[Karkadann]

I found this posted by Whilyam over at the Myst online forums thought you guys might be interested

If any of you have watched the Mysterium footage ( seen HERE ) you know there was news of Open Uru.


To boil it down, Open Uru has been set aside for the moment in favor of an unknown paying project. Mark "Chogon" DeForest, who was working primarily on the project, is busy with that. The question came up (almost at the end of the above video) about whether talented volunteers could do the required work of stripping plug-ins and other pieces of software Cyan cannot legally distribute as open source. And Rand replied, essentially, yes-- that such a deal would be fun.

So this is a humble request for those volunteers. While I have no training (or knowledge what-so-ever) in the technical aspects of the server and world-creation code, I do know that the fans here are supremely talented. From back in UU when fans were able (with Cyan's help) to resurrect Uru and begin to unlock the ability to add new worlds to it. Through Uru Live when development continued behind the scenes. And finally to the present day when I can still explore not only the original Ages, but Myst V ages, Live's Ages, and fan Ages beyond anything that was around even a few years ago. If that can be done, this can be done. So I urge those with knowledge and talent to take up the call. There has never been another moment for the fans in which your action could impact the future of Uru than now. If you are interested, I urge you to contact Chogon or another representative at Cyan. Times there are tight and I am positive that they would welcome the help.

http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=18010

[J'Kla]

From what I could make out the task involves stripping plugins from Studio3DMax so do we have any 3DMax gurus?

[I.Brattin]

I kinda doubt many people here use it, it is a $4000 program. I have it, I got it from my father when he nolonger needed it, and use it from time to time but I don't know enough to actually be able to strip out the plugins.

[J'Kla]

Somebody will.

there's this resource for information on what plugins there are

http://www.maxplugins.de/

It might be usefull to find out what version Cyan are using and we probably need some port software for Blender to 3DMax.

We need to be picking the bones out of this because you can bet Cyan havn't got resources so this has to be self motavating.

[Karkadann]

No offence but it seems you guys have manipulated the code in Uru from stem to stern. If you look at it as a challenge ...................

[MustardJeep]

I would hope a few people take this on Karkadann, but Max is nasty closed source. I don't know how long it would possibly take for anyone other then a experienced max plugin programmer to do it.

[J'Kla]

It's not changing the plugins just stripping them out.

[Jojon]

Err, I don't know much, but as far as I understand, plug-ins, by their very definition, are external programs called by- and interfacing with a host application through an Application Programmers' Interface, provided by the latter, so "stripping" a plugin from an application should account to no more than removing it from its "plugins" folder. If you compile something into the main binary of an app it is no longer a plugin. :7


The stripping involved, would more likely involve the removal of proprietary stuff from the plugins, such as physics engine tools and maybe stuff like commercial image converters/photoshop/pro-tools link thingummies...


EDIT: ("Interface", not "Layer" as I wrote first)

[Tsar Hoikas]

They probably mean grunt work such as removing the proprietary bink library, which is not available for free. PhysX is however (I have the SDK myself) and should pose no issue.

[ddb174]

PhysX is free of cost in certain situations, but it is not open-source, and there are license problems with programs that cannot be compiled into a working form without proprietary libraries, depending on the license. In any event, a game engine that is not actually fully open-source will have even more difficulty convincing people that it is worth working on. Perhaps ODE is now in a good-enough state, I don't know.