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Moros worlds of fantasy

Welcome to the site of the Moros project.

This project means to create MMORG with new gaming ideas and lots of freedom for players. The game should include multiple economies where players play an important role. Players get a social status within these economies ranging from beggars to kings.

The first implementation of this game will not feature character skills and character combat. Later versions will include a skill system and dungeons to explore and a system to create all kind of missions.

It will feature a world where players become the generals of armies and the local lords of the land. Those armies will automatically defend the position where they are at a given time but only attack when the general in question leads them to glory or death.

People can be killed when their armies are totally annihilated but they directly re-spawn at their countries capital. They loose some of their build up fame but can directly start over and build new armies.

There is also fame to be won by building castles, cities, cathedrals and palaces. This is a separate statistic from military fame so only counts for economic activity and not for the military.

Use your available resources wisely and that is not easy with multiple people in the same country. There is a central chat for each country to coordinate your actions both for building and war. The best attack is with the combined strength of multiple armies but that can also get out of hand easily.

Technical design

The game will feature a GTK based client with at first a simple map based on graphics from Battle for Wesnoth. There is a central server where people create an account on and will show a list of available games.

There will be a fully integrated editor included for editing landscape features, resources and even edit cities, castles and ruins. This editor is like the complete game multi-user and has it's own chat channel to bring different people editing their worlds into contact.

People are able to host their own game worlds and make them available to others to join. They can limit the number of players and host invitation only games for friends. When the game is in an near finished state there will be a central server where a set of games can be hosted by a group of trusted main users. These games will be open for anybody and only limited by the limitations of the provided hardware and the connections.

The first game will be tuned to be enjoyable for a couple of hours and then games should be finished. The later games could run for several weeks and still be open for people to join. These longer games should should not claim the player time too much. Lots of player plans can be planned beforehand so it should not be necessary to log in every couple of hours and still have a fair chance to win.

Every game has a specific goal so people have something to work to. This should not be an endless growing game. Even when there will be a skill system people will gain XP for missions and game sub-goals and not for grinding more creatures. This opens the way to have animals and monsters that bread normally instead of re-spawning every time to give players ways to gain levels. This also means that monsters could take over large parts of the country and must be fought to keep in check. But if that could happen can be plot by the scenario builder.

Economy

The basic resources of the game are people and food. When there is enough food there can be more people in a place. Without food people try to migrate to greener pastures and eventually starve when those are not available. Yes people even migrate to the enemy when they are forces to. Certain areas a better for farming, especially the flat lands besides rivers are rich and so the initial cities will show up there.

People have held horses for a long time. Horses can help in ploughing the land and with easier transportation of food and goods. But in times of war the military doesn't seem to care about the plight of the farmers and claim most of the horses for the war. This leaves the farmers with their hands to do the job on the fields.

Wood in essential to keep warm in the winter, build houses and wagons. But lots of people can claim too much wood so the initial forests can be cut down more and more. This gives more room for fields but eventually wood becomes more valuable when the forests grow thin.

Stone is very common but it's not easy to build with it. Specialized builder units can be formed to build castles, city walls and cathedrals. It is possible to build great defensive structures to be save against enemies. But when the horizon is filled with the armies of an opponent the mighty walls look lower than before, the moat much too thin and the defenders much too low in number.

Iron can be found in the hills and mountains but without our modern equipment it takes lots of people to get the iron in more usable form. Everything from iron like a plough, a sword and a harness has a high value. Perhaps someday when the basic game runs smoothly we can introduce newer technical advances like trains and factories. Those advances should give more widely access to the wealth of minerals.

Development

The current tools and libraries in use:

  • Glade 3.2.0 for editing GTK windows
  • Code::Blocks svn 4750 for editing the files and managing the project
  • gtkmm 2.4 & libglademm 2.4 for interaction with the windows
  • gnutls 1.4.4 for save connections to the central server with X509 certificates
  • xslt for generating an openoffice document with the game rules

Doxygen documentation of the project
Description of the available communication keywords
Todo list of the project
Very short term list of developement plans
The text based changelog of the project

Current state of development:

  • The communication software is finished and already quite bug free.
  • The central server is almost completely implemented, and already had some testing.
  • The chat server is almost feature complete.
  • The classes for the game server are layed down and filled with normal rules.
  • The client software can connect to the central server and has untested chat code.

Anyone interested in development of this kind of software can contact me.
In the near future I need:

  • People willing to create some pictures: horse wagon, middle age town, city, castle, city&cathedral, palace. These pictures should fit inside a single tile and the style of the battle for wesnoth game.
  • C++ coders for the actual game and editor, it's not overly complex after the initial drawing routines are in place. A lot of the architecture is already done.
  • People willing to check how well this code behaves under MINGW on Windows. I don't have access to a windows installation but I really like the cross platform idea.

As soon as I have some code working... probably only a chat client I will post a tar-ball and a debian package in the sourceforge project. For now it all is inside the subversion tree. There is still some older code there so for now download moros/moros. Yes, I know not the brightest naming scheme out there.


SourceForge.net Logo   Site updated on Januari 1, 2008 by Jurjen Stellingwerff.