[Bullfrogz]

Final Update on Wyvern - 11/24/2013
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Originally Posted by Rhialto

Greetings Wyvern fans,
I've at long last completed a comprehensive (and expensive) legal review of Wyvern with some of the best lawyers in the state where I live. Thank you for your patience while this was taking place.
There is good news and bad news.
The bad news is that I do not own Wyvern -- not even a majority stake. And the other owners are unreachable, out of the country and nowhere to be found. This means I can't do anything with Wyvern itself, not even open-source it. The game is, for all practical purposes, dead.
I've been instructed by my lawyers that I'll need to make a new game. It can, of course, be inspired by Wyvern -- there is a long history of games that borrow ideas from each other. But it will have to be a different game. The more different, the better. And I won't be able to use any of the existing Wyvern technology or Cabochon-owned content, which includes the music (which makes me very sad!)
The good news is... well, there are several pieces of good news. See? It's not all bad!
One bit of good news is that the wizards own their content, so 95% of the content from Wyvern (maps, items and so on) doesn't actually belong to Cabochon, and should be reusable in the new game (if I can make the technology work). I am working with the Wizards to design the new game using their existing content.
Another bit of good news is that the courts have ruled that API compatibility does not violate copyright. So the new game will be able to host Wizard code (which they also own), including the code for quests, guilds, many spells, and a bunch of other stuff.
Finally, Wyvern's technology is actually so old that it's almost useless today anyway. Creating a new game is a much, much simpler proposition in today's environment, because a lot of the core technology that Wyvern had to invent is now readily available in the form of open-source libraries and public hosted services.
My new game will not be the same as Wyvern. I am legally obligated to create a new game. The existing player base will have to be wiped, and the underlying data model will change incompatibly anyway. I will not be able to reuse any of the music -- I am thinking of setting up a Kickstarter to start getting donations in the form of music and capital to get the business expenses covered.
The last bit of good news is that because it has to be a new game, there is plenty of room for new ideas! Anything you didn't like about the old game, we can look at changing. The more different this game is from Wyvern, the better.
I haven't yet picked a name for the new game, but as soon as I do, I'll set up a subreddit for it and you can mosey over there to start contributing ideas. I'll also be scouring this subreddit for ideas, as I know you've all posted a bunch of interesting discussions here.
Please be patient with me as I get this new game up and running. I have a ton of people who are willing to contribute to it, so the coding should go fast. But it's still a lot of work, so I'm not really expecting to have it available for general availability until next summer. I'm sure we'll have it open for limited trusted-tester previews before then.
I want you all to think of the new game as being heavily decentralized, unlike the Wyvern model which had centralized content and moderation. Think of it like Minecraft meets RPG meets reddit. I want people to be able to set up their own servers with their own rules, and federate them together (or block each other) as desired. I will consider any and all ideas here.
Put your thinking caps on!
I'll send an update once I've secured the registered trademark for the new game name.
Cheers,
R

Originally Posted by Rhialto

Not too different, though!
Think of it like Duke Nuke 'em and Doom. Or Rage and Borderlands. Or Minecraft and all its clones.
Clones are fine! It just can't be the same game.

Email Update - 7/29/2013

Originally Posted by Rhialto

Hi Bullfrogz,
Long story short: it's tied up in legal right now. I don't have full ownership of the game, and I'm working with IP lawyers to figure out what I can do. I can't even talk about it beyond that much. Feel free to share that with the players.
R

Wyvern Status Update - 05/27/2013
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Hello all!
I have successfully finished moving into my new house. Probably the house I will live for the rest of my life, actually. It was a lot of work, to say the least. The whole thing had to be repainted and recarpeted, and walls torn out and repaired, and so on. It was a major project. We had contractors basically living in our house for about 6 weeks. (Like, they took up whole rooms with their paint cans and tools and stuff.)
Anyway. We're in. I'm settled. The last of the furniture is arriving on Tuesday. I have a place to work, and my computer is set up.
On the work front, I managed to get permission to join a special cut-rate program for Google employees running their own applications on Google's cloud. So I'm going to start working on getting the game server running on it next.
Getting the website up and running on Google App Engine is going to be a long process, so I'm not going to hold up the game server on it. I've already forgotten everything I know about the Python templating system I was porting it to before I started my move. I'm staring at the code now and it's all coming back, but it's going to be a slow process.
There are lots of advantages to putting the website on Google App Engine. Once it's actually there, it'll be incredibly stable. The site will come back up automatically whenever it goes down. I won't have to worry about it much. But it does involve rewriting every single page on the site. So it's a long project.
As far as the game server goes, there are a bunch of problems I need to figure out how to solve before I can get it running. Wyvern used to treat data and code the same: all the artwork, player data, etc. was all in the code directory. But for various reasons I can't do it that way anymore. So I need to rework the "backend" of the game to load its data files from somewhere else. Maybe Google Drive or Google Cloud Storage.
I would also prefer not to run MySQL anymore. I wasn't using it as a relational database. A NoSQL data store is all I need. And happily, Google offers one. All I use the database for (aside from backing up player data) is running the high-score list generator. I can do that with a mapreduce on a nosql store. So all that old crufty code can go away and be replaced with some nice clean new code. No more Perl!
There's other stuff to do. Character creation screen is a big one. And where to save the game logs. And how to distribute the client for download, and so on, and so on. But I'll start working on it now that I'm settled into my comfy home.
Still on track for a launch in Fall!
-R

Weekly Update #4 -May 2013
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Originally Posted by Rhialto

Hi folks,
I am MOVING to a new house. I have been in my old house (condo actually) for 8 years, since I started Google. My wife and I bought a new house closer to work and it finally closed escrow. We are starting to move this weekend.
Wish us luck!

Weekly Update #3 - May 2013
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Originally Posted by Rhialto

I think this is #3, anyway. I'll number them from now on.
As you can see at the site[1] , I've uploaded a tiny bit of new content.
There's more than meets the eye here. I completely switched the site to use Python 2.7, webapp2 and Jinja2. In combination, these three offer a lot of the core functionality of Ruby on Rails.
So I've been painstakingly learning how each Ruby on Rails doohickey translates into the AppEngine/Jinja2 equivalent. I have it moooostly figured out now. But I had a whole bunch of tiny utility functions written in Ruby that need to be ported to the new framework.
The pace will accelerate as I finish porting all the utilities. The website has over 200 individual pages, and I'll need to rewrite the code in each one individually, but it'll get a little faster each time.
Plus I'm not going to be bringing back all the content right away. Everything to do with playing the game is worthless until the game is running again. So I may only need to port around 100 pages to get the site reasonably complete. It'll take a few weeks.
Edit: I know most of the links are broken. I don't need bug reports just yet. Once the site gets a bit more fleshed out, I'll ask for your help identifying bad links. Thanks.

Originally Posted by Rhialto

It's a good question. Several reasons:
I need to figure out Google App Engine first (for work reasons), and it's ideally suited for running the website, but not Wyvern itself.
I've had feedback from many players that they want to see something "real" as a sign of good faith that I'm really working on it. It's easier to do this with the website than the game.
As Albinoxmas points out, we need a website for signup and character creation, etc. as a prerequisite anyway.
As for the "pretty" details, all that stuff has been worked out already via stylesheets and javascript. I'm not messing with any of it. In order to get the basic content structure in place, I need to do template-porting work that brings the pretty stuff along automatically.
There's also the problem that Google Compute Engine (which will run the game) is really new. It only opened its doors to the public last week. If I wait a little while it will stabilize a bit, and the pricing may come down.
Hope that helps.