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THE NAME
The project has no final name yet. The working name is "NNN project" which means "Noname Nowhere Notime" - some kind of Peter Pan's Netherland - fairy world. The others say that "NNN" is codename from "Nya Neko Nya", which also can be true.
THE SUBJECT
"NNN project" is an attempt to make a Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game for cute anime fans, to make the world where we could be anime characters. The world which could in future be compared with MicMac or Lucent Hearts or even become better, because everyone may contribute it.
THE NNN PROJECT IS COMPLETELY FREE AND OPENSOURCE.
Consider it under the NNN World license always when it does not contradict licenses of the software it is based upon.
Since the project is opensource and free we understand that we can't stop You to use it for Your goals whatever they are. However we ask You not to use this for "anti-kawaii" purposes, such as extreme violent gameplay, bad outlook (including gut and gore), hardcore hentai content (bordering with porno), or "uncute" prices in case of establishing payment service.
THE PURPOSE
There are many online RPG's. There are even a few 'cute' anime-styled ones. But... Something is absent. Something important. Players come to feel themselves as anime characters. To be cute and find cute friends. And it really happens... for a while. And then all becomes common and usual. Grinding instead of communication. PK, KS and offence instead of fun. Thousands of equips and nothing to wear (or either you will look quite different from what you want).
Can we change this to the way we want? We possibly can't, but it would be sin not to try. We (developers) treat the game as an advanced kind of cosplay, where you can shine as you wish, and where you aren't limited by borders of physical (real) world.
"Every nyaky soul can be nyaky character and find nyaky friends" - is our motto.
THE GAME
#under construction#
THIS GAME IS (BEING) MADE BY FANS FOR FANS ONLY
A while ago we thought that 'the face' of server is mostly defined by its players. Good people - good world. The truth had became clear later. In fact players will do what the world allows them to do. If they can use they use. If can abuse they abuse. If players can do differend things there is a choice. But the general rule stays unchanged: if there are many good choices and a few bad ones, the players willmainly be good guys and rarely bad, and vice versa. So the good friendly world is a must for a good friendly society.
Then since we consider the playing as a kind of cosplay the next results are following:
- The game must be online. (Whats the cosplay could be if nobody sees you?)
- However the 'massive' online is probably not the choice, because not so many people enjoy cosplay, anime and especially 'cute' anime. 200-300 players per server would be very nice.
- Every nyaky soul must be able to find suitable nyaky face and body. So the game should have a decent choice of character appearance.
- Every nyakee must be able to live in world that suits his (hers) preferences. Hi-tech nyakee will choose hi-tech futuristic world and fairy nyakee will select a fairy tale. So the game contains 3 worlds:
- Confederation of the United Suns (aka The Star Empire).
- Border Worlds Planets (aka Wild West Prairies and might be others later)
- The Hidden Worlds (aka Lands of Dragons).
Skills, jobs and equips are dependent to the world You live in.
- Most of us are fond of some definite anime character, and we would like to cosplay him/her. So the next features are the must:
- Free character name system. (Just imagine if in reality the name 'John' was occupied forever?)
- Recognizable outfit. Well, we don't mean the exact copies, (it would be a plagiarism and violation of author rights) but there should exist ingame items that resemble ones once used by favourite anime characters (including clothes, hair styles, weapons, etc...) allowing to cosplay the choosen ones.
comment1: For now with limited resources in design and development we of course can only cover only a few designs, but if somebody wants to add the features of beloved character feel free to contribute and some day you will be able to see almost any known anime char in our game.
comment2: the same is related to the popular weapons and devices, but with one difficulty - it may appear that technical abilities of the game engine (or reasonable limits of their extension) do not allow to realize the device of your dream.
Well, you can try to provide an extension of the game features and if it has reasonable requirements (system, network and others) it will be accepted and applied.
- decent choice of appearance - now it is realized as possibility to select your gender, face, age and build
(str looks as strong, int looks as weak, agi looks as slim and so on)
- player must be able to feel as the char. So the minimal solution is the First Person Camera (FPC) oriented gameplay and "self-visibility" (such as u can see Your hair or hands from FPC view, You can see Your reflection in mirrors and so on.) Be sure that even a bit of feeling as really being an anime character feels really good. The same thing keeps us from making "already-dressed" characters. Of course it makes it harder to avoid "hentai glitches" and one can say that it's too bold... But I, personally, feel at least strange when pants are natively welded to my body...
And the same thing again prevents of doing traditional 'point-and-click' RPG interface. In our game You will move and turn as in good old first person shooters.
THE TECHNIQUE
Well, of course the first of all we thought about VR-helmets and gloves, full motion free 3D models of characters with advanced forward and inverse kinematics combined with modern physical engines. We thought that 5-th gen shaders will also suit. Heh. This would be great. But we have been working on the game creation not one year and quickly realized that if the game simply will not appear to life it will be worse than lack of physics or shaders. Sorry about this. We are trying to do what we can and trying not to do what we can't.
So the present concept is: THE MOST SIMPLE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MOST NECESSARY FEATURES THAT ALLOW TO FULLFILL THE PROJECT PURPOSES.
- The target platform is x86 compatible PC with windows ME or above. However we keep in mind maximal portability (as we don't know if you want to compile the game for your favourite GameStationBox or even microcontroller.) Support of Linux is simply the must.
- As the basement of the project the Irrlicht 3D engine (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net) and SDL library were taken.
These ones provide good hardware abstraction level, highly portable and can be compiled by mingw c++.
- The project has its own game engine written upon Irrlicht and SDL with keeping in mind possibilities, compatibilities and limitations. The accessibility of engine source code is the main property allowing to modify and upgrade the engine when gameplay requires one or another feature.
- The limitations are the next:
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- Traffic must not sufficiently exceed 1 Mb/hr
- The client must be at least playable on PentiumIII 800 MHz Geforce2 system (maybe with low-poly models and loosing some graphics quality)
Well this may be too strict now... Let's consider that the game must be playable on low-end netbook or on hi-end smartphone.
- The graphics must base upon meshes with not more than 2 textures. Animated textures video-textures and render-to textures are allowed. Other features (such as bump-mapping, shaders, etc must be treated as 'optional' and must be able to be switched off without drastic degradation of appearance) Usage of light sources must be optional too.
- All physics is calculated on client side. Too expensive to force the server to do such a heavy work.
- The server must stay standalone (without help of irr or other 3D or physical or sound engine.) The SDL platform is an exclusion until we haven't found better portable network solution. (to let you know the previous network solution was Indy)
- All code must be compilable by minGW c++ (exact versions of compiler and libraries are discussible)
- Supported versions of Irrlicht begin with 1.3.1 since the 1.3.1 version is the most simple among acceptable ones and it means it is the most suitable to adopt in case of necessity
- However for now the code is to be written without an 'intrusion' to Irrlicht (in fact too often it feels like things were simplier if you could rewrite some narrow places of Irr... but it immediately will cause fail of compatibility with all subsequent versions of it... so clench teeth and write #ifdef's)
- The size of alfa release should not exceed 1 CD (700Mb)
- The size of beta release should not exceed 1 DVD (3Gb)
- The size of packed downloadable version of the game
(beta release) should not exceed 1Gb.
THE PROGRESS.
| #forever under construction# |
| engine |
 |
70% |
|
| characters |
 |
60% |
(incomplete animation set, incomplete hair styles set, incomplete face styles set, incomplete body textures set, lack of LO-RES models) |
| equipment |
 |
10% |
(in fact only do exist: novice suit, summer suit, swim suit) |
| locations |
|
10% |
|
| mobs |
|
01% |
(in fact only wolves in fairy forest do exist) |
| npcs |
|
01% |
(in fact only shops of empire town do exist) |
| gameplay |
 |
30% |
(there are chat, some skills and of course movements, also u can kill a mob) |
| bug hunting |
 |
00% |
(will start after at least alfa release) |
| documentation |
|
10% |
(spare and rare... very many topics not covered, some parts are obsolete) |
THE RULES.
#under construction#
It is too early to speak about the ingame rules. Let's settle ones about taking part in NNN project development.
Yes, any help is appreciated, BUT: there is a strict "face control" - big anime eyes and kind soul are the must. And any person whose contribution was accepted in the project authomatically becomes a "GM" of futuregame. As a reward or punishment - depends on point of view.
All code-writers, model and interface designers, help-text makers, PR-helpers and other contributors must be aware that they work for free in the name of our best future in our best game. (THIS GAME IS MADE BY FANS FOR FANS ONLY.)
Needless to say that all contributed executables/modules must be provided with full source code and with all dependencies that allow to compile gracefully by any user of the project's sources.
Not so evident but the must that all models (3d meshes) are to be provided not only in 'native' binary form (such as md3, b3d, 3ds, etc) but also in one of the known textual 3d model formats //at present time they are: smd (Half-Life Valve standart), smd2 (Half-Life2 standart), x (text form of Microsoft DirectX standart), md5 (Doom3 standart)// For now usage of Irrlicht .xml irrMesh format is undesirable due to lack of importers and exporters for popular 3D modeling software.
All textures must be in form of bmp or jpg files. In very special cases (such as alfa-channel abuse) the tga format can be accepted.
All videos must be in XVID 1.0 format playable by nnn-project engine.
Note that currently the project already contains prefabs for most features it should finally have. (Including skills actions animations and even guilds and parties) So before trying to add some feature do study sources carefully or simply ask developers how to do this better to suit the accepted system.
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