The project sounds interesting, however the descriptions are a little bit too abstract in my opinion. It somehow reminds me of MineCraft, yet I can't really imagine how the gameplay will look or what will be the challenge and goal of the game.
The first one comparing FlexWorld with Ultima Online will get a cookie from me. ;-) Seriously: The design of FlexWorld is highly inspired by Ultima Online, which *basically* is a role-playing game in a specific setting.
Due to some people building server emulators and reverse-engineering the file formats, it became one of the biggest MMORPG toolkits available, which is the reason why that game is still being played by thousands of people.
Now I don't want to clone Ultima Online (there's already one), and I don't want to clone Minecraft (does exist already, too). My goal is create an environment (mostly technically) similar to Ultima Online. Minecraft was a good inspiration for the graphics part (not the style, still talking about technically things here).
That's still very abstract and it's really hard to tell how concrete a gaming session will look like. The very first impressions will arise when game logics are being scripted, tested and evaluated. We've got a couple of people who're brainstorming, creating ideas and interesting concepts that'll be tried out to get an interesting experience.
You also want to provide actually everything (unlimited game modes, models, etc.). While it is good to have user-based content and leave much room for creativity, I guess it wouldn't be bad to have a somehow narrower concept in the beginning.
WE do not want to provide everything. :-) We're trying to create an interesting game, but let the user the freedom to manipulate, extend or start from scratch to try out own ideas. FlexWorld is very much designed to allow that.
FlexWorld will include a game mode called "Factions" in the beginning that mixes some key features like character building, adventuring, economy and fighting. The website already tries to give a rough idea about Factions. However I understand that someone not involved won't directly see what the heck it's all about. ;-)
It's important to differentiate between FlexWorld and Factions (for example!). Factions is developed using FlexWorld's techniques, like a dynamic 3D world, logics through Lua scripts, the asset pipeline (models, textures, classes, ...) etc. So basically we could also call Factions a "reference implementation", which is of course just *one* implementation. FlexWorld is not tied to one end-product, or one specific game. It's more tied to specific resources that can be combined, changed and created in a lot of ways.
That's just my impression, I'm aware that there are many things to do until the project becomes ready. And I'm looking forward to hearing of more, maybe more concrete, details about FlexWorld!
More details will follow in a not so long period. We're currently working hard to get the sub-systems ready for game logics and interactions within the world, which means that the "fun part" in the end-user's perspective will begin. :-)
You mentioned it: There're many things that have to be done – but there're also a lot of things that are already completed, like networking (both local and remote sessions, singleplayer and multiplayer), accounting, dynamic resource management with automatic download of missing assets, 3D renderer for dynamic (i.e. a highly modifyable) environments and much more.
Well putting out a actual gameplay video would be awesome
I fully agree to that, and I'd really love to fire up the game, click on "Record", do some fancy things and upload an episode every 2nd day. :-) However I'm really afraid you guys would be bored. Just think about how a game looks like (I guess many of us are here for writing them) when it's in development: Developer art, testing assets, ugly-looking environments just to confirm everything's working etc.
We're working very hard to get the first (interesting!) screenshots ready and even a short video that finally shows some interesting things you can do. Just need a little more patience.. ;-)
There's one thing I want to point out: Thank you very much, all three of you. I was always curious about why there're no replies/questions/whatever. I think the project does currently feel "too chaotic" or not targeted to a clear goal. There're about ~10 people involved in the project (most of them being in the testing team), and we talk a lot on IRC so they slowly got the idea of what it's all about, but bringing the whole idea to the table in short words to a wider audience is a difficult task.
I'll think a little more about a good description about the project on the website.
