Ryzom birthday/20 years/Meet the designers

!!!! WIP !!!!

There are currently still 81 articles in preparation in the category "WIP"

Article in preparation. Please let the author finish it before you modify it.
The last editing was from Craftjenn on 6.10.2024.

•

Nevrax team: Foufou, Malkav, Gwened and Benenslip

FR version is quite finish...

Presents:

From Nevrax team: Foufou (artist), Skemeth (artist, level designer), Malkav (dev), Gwened (dev), RaidEngine (Level Designer) and Benenslip (dev)
From actual team: Tamarea, Ulu et Riasan, Pavor, Wiedii (event), Margote + Natownatas (music) and Giao (just for the Nevrax Guild and to guide the old-timers)

Gwened: on the Ryzom team from 2000 to 2007. His 2 biggest contributions: network code and resource harvesting.
Benenslip: Ben, former Ryzom developer
David/Malkav: ex GameDev Nevrax from 2001 to 2005.
Skemeth: former Nevrax game/level designer. Oh, and former QA tester too. His contributions: starting island design, combat design, Xp levels, money, bug hunting and collision holes made by Ben.

Chapter 2: questions & answers

On the size of the team: between ten and a hundred and fifty over the period! Just under 50 most of the time. Everything was done by hand, no motion capture.
Malkav's contributions: gameplay, XP system, bricks, Combat magic, swapping and the like with my team.
Did they stay in video games?
- Skemeth : I was in the games industry for a while, actually. My last video game was Assassin's Creed 3 (with other nevrax people).
- some Nevraxians have continued in gaming (Ubi for Gwened), while others have changed professions, for example as a tattoo artist.
What are your favorite games?
- Malkav: back in the day, I loved Baldur's Planescape Torment etc. Now I play with my son, and it's more Mario Kart.
- Foufou: Elden Ring
- Benenslip: I play chess :)
- Skemeth: The Witcher 3 was truly a masterpiece in my eyes. The story was incredible
- Gwened: I play at writing code :)
How did you feel when you were contacted to say hello on the occasion of Ryzom's 20th anniversary?
- Gwened: It's incredible to know that the game is still active and maintained by enthusiasts!
- Foufou: pleasure
- Malkav: I admit I'd forgotten the date and was surprised (like 20 years already?!). And great pleasure to remember the game, the dev and the people who made it + max respect for those who keep it alive today.
- Skemeth: I have to admit that it hurts a bit to realize that it was 20 years ago! And that's when the nostalgia kicked in... ;)
Did you know that Ryzom still exists?
- Gwened: yes, of course, we know that Ryzom exists, but if we're not involved in it anymore, we follow it on social networks.
- Benenslip: I'm quite amazed that the game still works so well after 20 years!
Have you played it yourself? And what do you feel needs to be improved first?
- Malkav: Honestly, I couldn't play it, I could ONLY see the flaws :D and I spent my days in the code or trying to reproduce bugs or test in the graphics client.
- Gwened: there was a period when I played a lot (incognito). And I'd like to thank those who ported the game client to Mac and Linux platforms.
- Ulukyndev: (and it runs on raspberry :P)
Did the new developers find any funny comments in the code of the old developers?
- Ulukyndev: (Yes, lately I've been reading in the code: Ask Steph)
Skemeth: For example, I started out as a playtester... and spent many hours walking around EVERY inch of every map to find holes in the collisions.
Gwened: an anecdote, after I designed and developed the harvest, I saw that players had dissected the system from A to Z, and I learned a lot about it!

Chapter 3 stories

How many players were planned?
- quoted capacity: we were up to a few thousand connected players per server.
- Gwened: at the time, connections in the USA weren't as good as in Europe, so we decided to use very little bandwidth and run on 14K+ modems.
Gwened: many former Nevraxians have moved to Canada at one time or another, a nod to those working on the next Assassin's Creed!
Benenslip: no one on the initial development team had any experience in developing an mmporg.
Gwened: from the outset, the technology was licensed under the GPL, and we had the support of Richard Stallman. He came to our offices in Paris and even played a tune on his flute! (hence the GNU on the flute).
RaidEngine: In fact, the first raid was a mistake. A dev had uploaded the test files I'd been working on. Suddenly, the servers went up in flames. Then we decided to make it a feature, because over the weekend, players had a lot of fun defending themselves against hordes of kitins.
Malkav: Against the advice of my team, we fixed a code in the character save on the day of the game's release. Obviously, it crashed and we had to revert/restart the servers on day 1.
Gwened: there are several very different iterations of the wildlife management system. The very first was an autonomous multi-agent system. The animals were going crazy and we didn't know why, it was uncontrollable. RaidEngine: herbivores and carnivores were fighting all over the place. Gwened: finally, Atys has always had its share of mystery, and its own life ^^.
RaidEngine: I remember the invention of the leash system. Today, it's used everywhere. That's because players were exploiting the safety zone of the water zones. They would fight high-level mobs and jump into the water to avoid being killed, only to fight the same mob again later. So we decided that the mob would reset and leave if it was detected as an exploit. And so the leash system was born. We used this system on The Secret World (another MMORPG with another company).

Chapter 4 stories and end

Gwened: Stanza's system is called Sabrina internally. For NevrAx Advanced Brick System or something like that ;) Skemeth: Sabrina was named after Sabrina the Witch, a children's TV series ;) Because, you know, that was the magic system... ;)
Skemeth : One day, RaidEngine brought a little Kittin to the office! A matoutou, if I remember correctly. Which was a huge spider. Fortunately, the (ugly) beast was already dead. But even dead, it was pretty scary! ;) It was a trophy from South America, a real giant spider. RaidEngine: I think the management forced me to leave with the spider for the day as punishment.
Skemeth: If I remember correctly, the Fyros country was the first to be realized, Matis the second, tryker the third and zorai the last. Although tryker and zorai were completed around the same time. For some reason, we couldn't place as many trees as we wanted to create that jungle feel... so the idea was to create a labyrinth.
Gwened: for Arthur, on the other hand, it must be related, as there were several concept artists working together on Ryzom and on L. Besson's films. Before directing Nevrax, David C had worked at Gaumont (co-directed with Olivier L).
Gwened: there's an inaccessible area, but from the air it looks like an ester egg! Skemeth: if you look at the dunes behind the fyros capital, you'll notice they have a strange shape...

I found the women body, near Pyr

and irrelevant discuss about wikis (in French).

Full logs in French at Chapter 1 • Ch 2 • Ch 3 • Ch 4

Lucios

Team Nevrax: Foufou, Makav, Gwened and Benenslip
Skemeth told us about the creation of mouvements
Malkav, Gwened, Skemeth, Foufou, Benenslip
Multi-stage wildlife design
An easter egg in the desert: a woman's body

When DeepL is funny (or surrealistic)

A financial project from Europe, instead of Partoch's sentence (translation of the French on right)

"The European Union government has taken the initiative of setting up a financial market information management system." instead of "That's a bit of a tease, now we know you have other things in store."