IDEAS FOR RYZOM

If there was an additional option for donating Ryzom, would you use it? Say, you have a f2p account, don't want to subscribe, but can donate some bucks to the devs, or you have some extra money you willing to spend to support Ryzom, but don't want to mess up with another account.

Of course, there would be some issues, like the control over this Support Ryzom Fund in order to prevent it from turning into Support Winch Gate Director's Vacation on Maldives Fund.

Since Winchgate is a for-profit company, "donating" is probably not the right word. Perhaps "optional payment" would be better. ;)

Better yet, WG could provide some token service in exchange for the payment, such as a title like "Patron" that will expire after a certain amount of time.

Also, there is already a way to give money to WG without converting your F2P account to P2P.

You can create a alt account and subscribe it. Then you can pay as often or as little as you want, without locking your main F2P toon into a P2P account. :)

Another idea for WG:

Make a "subscription-lite" plan that costs something like 75% of the regular subscription price, but still has the level cap and storage limitations of F2P.

While paying this fee, the player gets the 2X xp bonus. When "subscription-lite" expires, the account reverts back to regular F2P with the 1X xp.

This would allow WG to collect money from "F2P'ers" that would otherwise be reluctant to lock their toons into a P2P account.

Maybe we would fund it if we were told what we were funding.

i.e. a development snapshot being given if they could raise a certain amount of funds to increase the "contracted" dev team for a certain period.

In order to develop a game further and I do not mean bolt on a web based PHP code, i mean actual coding in the core C coding of the game you need to throw talented developers at it, which costs money....if we knew how much maybe people would donate.

When the game was about to die they made a serious pot of money to help make the game open source.

The biggest problem at the moment are not the C++ developers ;-) (ryzom core got some incredible people there)
But they need to redo the tools so they don't rely on Windows and 3DS Max any more (is currently in progress in Ryzom Core)

What Winchgate doesn't get from the OS project are the real content and designs for (new) objects and if they want to get help here they need the revamped tools for e.g. designers using blender instead of Max

And I don't think that it really matters what kind of code they use for the missions/rites (as long as it's running stable and fast enough) - let them use PHP if that's faster to implement...

And in Ryzom Core they are searching for designers as well (to have some nice new models that can be used for testing purposes and maybe redo some of the older textures)

Jarnys, shame it is quicker to develop the webig but slower for the end paying user ;)

Yeah - but that's not PHP's fault in this case (had a look at the code and they are loading far too many things every time the site is loaded)

Jarnys,

i think they just create an object and then launch each object on each load. Which is time consuming and intensive on the server if everyone is accessing webig for lots of different things at a given time.

What I meant with "too many" was that they're loading the class definitions for everything the app provides on every call and not only those that are really needed ;-)
And they're loading all texts (for all languages) as well every time...

pretty much what i was getting at :) I have looked at it too :D

Other:
Depends on what I can afford at the time. I could probably manage $1 every month or so regardless of my financial situation. When I find a steady job I'd probably just subscribe one or two accounts, but it would be nice to have an option for when one can't afford a subscription.

I think it is more accurate to point out that this is where our (Ryzom Core's) efforts currently lie. Most of the tools are ported to Qt and are cross platform. There are just a few left to be fair. We want to obliterate the 3DSMAX reliance but with no Blender/Python developers available to us I fear this will be an on-going 'wish'. I appreciate your kind words about our community though - there are some very smart people there.

I'm not sure I totally understood this paragraph but I think the gist of it is that we're (Ryzom Core) providing stuff to Ryzom but without new 3D content and new game-content they're useless. The Blender is really for non-Ryzom projects based on Ryzom Core's platform. Although I think there is a lot of opportunity for player-generated content if a Free tool was available to author in and test with.

A good example, though, of this is that we mentored a student to implement guild-based missions in Ryzom Core. There's a document on how to do this and a video demonstrating it. Guild leaders can accept a mission and all of that guilds members can contribute towards the goal. We did this in 2011. But without Ryzom content people actually using it this is a pointless feature to add. )=

Not having seen the 'ARCC' code I still have some caution on this. I like the Ryzom developers, all of them are smart and capable people. I'm just afraid it might rely on too many hacks to bypass the way the system was designed in order to quickly develop a tool.

There's really nothing wrong with the mission editor (other than that it is ugly and MFC based right now) other than the fact that non-developers cannot 'inject' new missions as they're actually modifying the primitives that define the world. And the reloadMissions command is broken and has been for a few years.

This is sort of true - yes. There are Ryzom Core-based projects that would like designers but we would also like to see designers contributing example content to Ryzom Core. We have a basic Silan but we don't have any engaging mission to showcase the potential of the game. There is a LOT of potential. You can always get Ryzom Core and start hacking on an idea. I'm willing to bet if you have something well written produced that Ryzom staff would accept it. If not - I will and we'll merge it into Ryzom Core's sample world.

How about a bounty system then? Or like a feature 'kickstarter' where a player can post an idea and other players can pledge towards getting that feature coded. The first individual or team to complete it collects the bounty or pledges.

The code could be run through Ryzom Core and thus public and peer-reviewed to prevent bad ideas and poorly coded features from hitting the live game.

Sounds great. I'd be happy to pay for some ideas, as long as Ryzom devs confirm they include said idea in the game once it's fully developed.