Ryzom MMORPG Releases Source Code, Artistic Assets

I had never heard of the MMORPG Ryzom before but yesterday I saw an article noting that the game’s source code and artistic assets were “open sourced.” The source code was released under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Affero General Public License and the artistic assets were released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Even as a programmer, I’m not sure how worthwhile the source code is to me.  It may not be written in one of my preferred languages and I’m not writing a MMORPG anytime soon.  If it is one of my preferred languages there may be a few routines I’d like to reuse, as long as the license isn’t too restrictive.

But the artistic elements are very interesting.  I’ve begun using a few things from the excellent RPG Map Share website (and I made a donation too) but some of those assets don’t allow for commercial use and sometimes the terms are not clear. (My specific question was that if someone posts a map there and says personal and commercial use is ok, is it ok to pull out one thing from that map and reuse it?  The admin there said he thought so, but that isn’t a firm answer.  But I digress…)

So one can browse through the graphics on the Ryzom asset website and even download the full asset library to find a texture or graphic of interest.  The tagging of the assets needs to be improved (a search for “wood” returned no results even though I’m sure I’ve seen some wood textures and some objects made of wood) but it is hard to complain about free.

If you plan to use these assets, remember to read and follow the appropriate licenses linked above.