Gregory Ray, a lead organizer of LivingArcana.com announced that he has hired the Brazilian programmer, Gutemberg Ribeiro, of "Conceptus" an open source game engine, to port his engine over to Apple's iPhone platform. The idea of LivingArcana.com came about last year while our local gaming group was dining at our favorite Chinese restaurant. We like MMO's but hate sitting alone isolated in our basements.
The port of the game engine will remain open source and will be available under LGPL license to allow true 3D game development on the iPhone. Well if the idea of wandering around your local streets, looking for your next big adventure isn't rewarding enough for you, we will be asking those who really help propel the game forward in these early stages to come and officially join our team.
When asked why Gregory would make this available for free and pay for it out of his pocket he was quoted "I am trying to stay true to the LivingArcana.com ideal of having a free community ran online game. The 3D engine is vital to the project but it is also only a very small part of a very large project and once we integrate it into the LivingArcana.com project I have no other plans of using it for other projects. Why would I want hundreds of hours to goto waste?"
The first public release of Conceptus for the iPhone is scheduled for early 2008. The Conceptus game engine which already runs on the Windows, Mac, Symbian and even the Nintendo DS platforms will bring ParticleFX, BSP, Octree, PagingLandscape, Zip Compression, GlGenerator, GlPostProcessor, OpenAL, and an Extension Loader to the new iPhone.
This benefits of these is that it will enable game developers to focus on writing game code and will leave the low level hardware code to the Conceptus engine. It should also be mentioned that this project is being done without the support of Apple. Apple has said they will be offering official 3rd party support for native applications February 2008, however, the developers behind LivingArcana.com have been developing for the iPhone platform using a community released SDK for the iPhone.
Gutemberg was quoted "We will need to update our engine to run off the the official Apple SDK when made available. Until then we will continue to use the community based SDK and just cross our fingers that Apple will appreciate what we are doing for their mobile platform." So that's when Living Arcana sprung into life, a real life MMO that runs on your mobile phone, and the best part is that it's FREE. While the game is running it syncs your real life position to our game server, you can see when there are other people playing near you and interact with them by talking, fighting, stealing, or trading and also you can battle against your local wild life including Orcs, Trolls, Goblins and hundreds of other creatures either solo or with your friends.
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