We are very glad to announce that we have now opened a new website for NeL, our core 3D MMORPG engine technology.
We know that many of our players are developers or otherwise interested in opensource affairs, and this news will be especially interesting for them. If you’re not interested in such things then don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the things you read in this post as it is for developers and they are used to this.
To summarize, NeL is a C++ programming framework at the very foundation of Ryzom; NeL contains the 3D Engine, the Networking Engine, the Sound Engine, and much more that is at heart of our MMORPG Ryzom. NeL is multi-platform and works on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
NeL is under the GNU GPL, because we strongly believe in the “Free Software” philosophy which governs this License. In a few words, this basically means that everyone in the world can access NeL’s source code, modify it, create new things based on it and release it freely.
We are the first and only commercial MMORPG to provide the source code of the core foundation of its game and we are very proud of that.
We intend to support all of the new NeL community by giving it as much time as we can alongside our game, Ryzom, in order to create a strong community of developers. As the first step in this direction, our whole new website dedicated to NeL: http://dev.ryzom.com contains everything that’s needed for new developers; a forum, a wiki, an issue tracker, a doxygen, a repository browser, and a lot more besides.
If you are a developer and have any interest in NeL in general or in our 3D MMORPG engine specifically, please feel free to join our community. Your second stop after this new website should be the IRC channel; you can find it at #nel on irc.freenode.net where you will be able to express yourself.
