Re-opening windows

Last month, Metaplace.com, the site that drew me away from the MMORF project, announced their closure. Not of the whole company, mind, but of the portion in which I was an alpha/beta tester for the last two years. I won't get into my thoughts about that here, as I've written some of them elsewhere. Instead, I'll say a bit about what that means for my free time, as spare as it is...

I'm currently planning on reviving the MMORF project. The whole point of MMORF still stands -- to see if I can write an engine that could run an MMO. But more generally, a generic engine that can be used to implement any genre, and style -- the only common thread would be users connecting to a virtual world and interacting with it and others.

This is what Metaplace provided, in a sense; they wrote the backend which MMORF strives to be, with a full interface for others to create their own worlds. This isn't what MMORF was going for, exactly, but it was enough to distract me for two years, to get a feel for the kind of flexibility that would be needed in an engine to support any kind of game someone could come up with. It gave insight into the kinds of APIs that were needed, the protocols a working system might use, and the scripting that would be needed.

Now that I'm thinking back to the MMORF project, the direction has changed; no longer am I looking to be the content developer, but the backend developer. As previous posts here started discuss, the various pieces that one needs to make, basically, a Metaplace-like system, sans the UGC portion. It was never my intent with MMORF to provide easy-to-use tools for the average joe to make their own world; I had always pictured it as something a more advanced designer/programmer would use to create their world, offline and behind the scenes, instead of right there in the same client as one uses to connect and play.

I'm going to go back and read all of my previous posts, now, to see where my thinking was going and where it left off. Let's see where this project takes me now!