Project Quarm - 1 Box Planes of Power

Control

Control

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Torrid said:
One reason why I worked on TAKP so hard is because I wanted to see custom servers sprout up from it. The emulators have sophisticated scripting functionality which allows for rapid iteration. It took me just 3 days to script the Ring of Vulak. I'd bet the emus have more powerful scripting behavior than Daybreak has and we certainly do compared to EQ 20 years ago. One thing I added to TAKP was the ability to create NPCs from scratch entirely in the script code so that I did not need database templates to create NPCs. That sped up development and hides script NPCs from the Allaclone. I also added much more powerful cross-zone communication such that zones can send long strings of data to each other and I was thinking up all kinds of cool stuff that might be done with it.

Here's a more intricate custom event I was working on but abandoned 2 years ago for, reasons:



Killing custom content with lawfare is definitely something that makes me unhappy. THJ picked the fight though with their egregious monetization, and we're all losers for it.

Also agree with you Zaide that if Daybreak were smart, they'd leverage the fan community instead of alienating us. Discord makes it super easy to just invite us into private rooms to chit chat at the minimum.

This is implausible but I wish some kind of profit sharing arrangement could be struck with emus. I was trying to think up how that might work. This is what I came up with in the shower:

* Daybreak gets 50% of the profit of the emu. They only do two things: handle payment processing and do some cursory oversight just to make sure the server is not harming the brand by doing anything crazy or highly unprofessional. Daybreak does not need to provide any code or assets, just lets us use EQEmu and the forks of it and allows client mods. Presumably they wouldn't care if people were downloading client assets via Steam in this scenario.

* EQEmu (and Project EQ, TAKP?) gets 10% because they made the server; the forkers just modify it and extend it. Same for the database. People underestimate how much work this was. Money goes to improving EQEmu somehow and hosting up and coming servers. Emus are not made by "a couple of guys". They were made by dozens of guys over 20 years and every emu leverages all this work.

* The emu server creators get 40%.
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While I can't imagine they would ever do anything like this, I have always thought that it would be a successful model if a company started out with this in mind. Make a solid base game with assets to pull from and a sufficiently streamlined web-based pipeline to allow people to spin up and monetize (maybe even white-label) their own content. Probably not as good of an idea now as it would have been 20 years ago, but it's basically at the top of my list of projects to do fail at if I ever find infinite time somehow lol. If the emu community really wants eq to live on, they should build a non-eq based client and do something similar that takes the right lessons from eq but fully ditches the ip. Not sure what the market would be, but at least it wouldn't exist at the whims of an investment company.
 
moonarchia

moonarchia

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Control said:
While I can't imagine they would ever do anything like this, I have always thought that it would be a successful model if a company started out with this in mind. Make a solid base game with assets to pull from and a sufficiently streamlined web-based pipeline to allow people to spin up and monetize (maybe even white-label) their own content. Probably not as good of an idea now as it would have been 20 years ago, but it's basically at the top of my list of projects to do fail at if I ever find infinite time somehow lol. If the emu community really wants eq to live on, they should build a non-eq based client and do something similar that takes the right lessons from eq but fully ditches the ip. Not sure what the market would be, but at least it wouldn't exist at the whims of an investment company.
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They would have to ditch the names, art, zones, and gameplay to be clear legally. But a generic server/client model already exists with Unity. If you had a solid team with some experience (ie, not Pantheon) you could get a decent generic MMO up and running in no time. That said, Unity's licensing is a gamble that you aren't going to get fucked down the road.

Building a new generic server architecture is doable. EQemu could probably do it easy enough. The problem would be writing a new game and graphics engine for the client. That's going to be time consuming and fucking expensive.
 
Quaid

Quaid

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At a bare minimum, there has been an agreement between Quarm and DBG in place now for 7 days. There is no timeline for relaunch other than the community will get seven days notice before the server comes back up.

That announcement has yet to come.
 
Control

Control

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moonarchia said:
They would have to ditch the names, art, zones, and gameplay to be clear legally. But a generic server/client model already exists with Unity. If you had a solid team with some experience (ie, not Pantheon) you could get a decent generic MMO up and running in no time. That said, Unity's licensing is a gamble that you aren't going to get fucked down the road.

Building a new generic server architecture is doable. EQemu could probably do it easy enough. The problem would be writing a new game and graphics engine for the client. That's going to be time consuming and fucking expensive.
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Yeah, it wouldn't be quick or easy, but that's why I said you would need to build your business model around it. You'd almost certainly use unity or unreal for the graphics engine, and if you were mainly concerned with allowing people to roll their own content, you could start with a super-basic set of game content with some asset packs for graphics. Since there's a working server already, the real heavy lifting would be the client and a set of tools steamlined enough for normie-ish aspiring game devs to use. Again, no idea what the market size would be, but I bet it would be enough to keep a tiny team fed.
 
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