Eiradir is an open source online roleplaying game with a focus on textual roleplay and live character interaction.
Eiradir was founded in September of 2011 as an attempt to create a free to play enforced-roleplay online fantasy game put forth by a group of seasoned roleplayers.
The reason we created Eiradir is because we believe that true roleplaying games in classic medieval genre are quickly and surely plummeting into non-existence as a flood of new and graphically fancy MMORPGs swallows the gaming world whole, leaving less and less room for imagination and freedom of action. As new generation gamers plug themselves into the new advanced systems of level ups, raiding, pvp mechanics, gear farming, and hack-and-slash system variations the modern games offer, the core values and the notion of roleplay itself, as storytelling and character-centric, player driven plot, die and wither. We aim to create a world, where a character can truly be part of shaping history, accomplish something, and make a difference; where you as a player can really own up to something your character has done and reap benefits or suffer consequence that continuously exists until something else affects it. In other words it is a persistent open world sandbox rpg, where decisions of characters really matter, since that is the kind of game really needed at this time.
In Eiradir the player is assuming the role of their character and must act, speak, and think on behalf of that character as if they were a real person living in a medieval fantasy world, which means always staying in character at all times, and getting to know other characters to gain orientation in the surrounding world. Eiradir is not focused on equipment, skills levels, or mechanics, though those things are certainly provided to enrich the experience. The true focus of Eiradir is on the story and character interaction.
Being a classless sandbox game, Eiradir does not lock a player into a set of mechanics beyond the basic mechanics required to control the character. There are no PvP restrictions, visible item attributes, or guild mechanics. Guilds are created literally by characters coming together and agreeing to join. Characters in Eiradir may obtain a rather extensive amount of freedom and accountability, as long as players act in character and their actions are justified by a story. There is lots of room for growth, intrigue, advancement, betrayal.
Characters can conquer lands, build structures (from simple homes to defendable keeps), lay siege, and work on terraforming the land to create farmland. Skillwise, a character can in theory become a master of every art or craft, though their efficiency at using those skills depend on the chosen attributes.
The game features a multicultural geography, a complex calendar with seasonal events such as migration of creatures, resources (fish and game), a magic system, an alchemy system, and a blueprint based crafting system. You may find a few things about Eiradir to be truly unique. Although the game is playable now, it is still constantly in development, so expect many updates as the game goes on.
Being passionate roleplayers ourselves, we understand the importance of keeping the atmosphere alive to spark that magic flame which brings people together to write their history and connect their imagination into one exciting story, be it dark, or light natured.
We are happy to welcome you to this world, and we hope to create a fertile atmosphere for helping you develop your stories together, and write the tomes of Eiradir for years to come.
Those who are still following our development have surely noticed that things are just taking comically long, and throughout most of the time, we've been dead quiet about whether Eiradir was even still being developed. Today I want to clean the slate and let you know how things have been going, where the delays are coming from, and how things are looking like today.
Let's start by going all the way back. Within three months of development, we had a workable basis for Eiradir, and those who were with us during that time will likely remember 2012 as Eiradir's golden age. However, this was also just around the time that Konrad got pregnant and I was finishing school, putting us into a position where I was more worried about my next IRL steps, and Konrad's time would soon be overtaken by being a father.
Progress went stale, and even after I had sorted my real life out, I was yearning to learn new things. The remaining tasks that this version of Eiradir had to offer were unable to scratch that itch. I was unhappy with the codebase, which much resembled a jam game made in 7 days, even though it was more like 7 months. I was also disheartened by our inability to onboard and retain the team of devs that joined, and was battling anxiety surrounding RP, which is counterproductive when working on a game entirely focused on roleplay. In an effort to rekindle the flame, we played around with a potential 3D version of Eiradir, which was also dropped shortly after, putting Eiradir to sleep for several years.
In this time, I have worked on and released many unrelated things, became one of the most downloaded Minecraft Modders, and started my computer science degree. There was a short period of time in 2016 where me and Nihilus tried to revive the original version, but it lost traction just a few months after. Eiradir was put to sleep for another year. Sometime in 2017 I was experimenting around in the Unity Game Engine, and Eiradir, dead as it was, was still on my mind. A quick prototype emerged, and I got Nihilus and Konrad back on board. We spent the next two years working on this second iteration of Eiradir. The most notable differences were that this version was fully 3D, and that the map was no longer fully constricted to discrete tiles. We reached a satisfactory result, having most core features implemented, as well as a functional Tutorial Island that made Eiradir feel like a game for the first time.
However, good things would not last, and this time we were finding trouble on two fronts: the tools we had available for mapping the actual game world posed a hassle, making mapping progress slow to non-existent; but more importantly, Unity had progressively gotten worse with every update, to the point were it would take anywhere up to an hour to load the project or test changes. This was entirely on Unity and there wasn't much we could do about this at our stage of development other than attempting a large refactor to try and make our project work better with Unity's build processes. To this day Unity is aware of the performance problems and does not foresee a timely solution. Needless to say, endless iteration times did not make the mapping progress any more enjoyable. Eiradir slowly died and we went to focus on other things again.
This puts us into our current position. The reason I've been avoiding talking about Eiradir progress over these years is because it would be reasonable to expect much more progress and results after so much time has passed. But unfortunately, the only thing we have to show is some outdated screenshots of projects that are no longer running, and a huge amount of experience, including what not to do when trying to release a game. That said, we do still want to create Eiradir, especially after the great turnout of Season 4 of our Project Zomboid roleplay server. This isn't a "we're giving up" post, it's more so an acknowledgment of "we know it's taking forever and it's indeed ridiculous"; so that when we do share further information or launch a server, you won't go in expecting to see the fruits of 12 hard years of work, because that's not how the fruits grew. :)
With the project being picked back up this year, we've now also decided to make the sources of this latest iteration of Eiradir open source.
We've considered the positives and negatives of doing so and have found that the potential benefits far outweigh the downsides:
- ✅ External developers can be onboarded more easily, as there is a lower bar to entry.
- ✅ It is now possible to contribute to Eiradir without the commitment that comes with having to join the core team.
- ✅ Even during times of inactivity among one or more of the core team members, development of the project is not forced into a halt, as the infrastructure is now in place to accept contributions without directly relying on the core team.
- ✅ Our developers are encouraged to document things more thoroughly, as internal word-of-mouth is no longer a sufficient way of knowledge sharing when allowing external collaborators.
- ✅ We can make use of many of the perks that platforms offer to Open Source projects, free of charge.
- ⛔ We lose exclusivity; however, not only would a claim to exclusivity be in direct contrast to our mission statement and core motivations, but we've also come to the understanding that exclusivity alone is not a means of retaining users, and given the rather niche nature of a game like Eiradir, we also don't have to worry about losing out on any monetary gains.
- ⛔ We lose secrecy; this drawback seems more reasonable than the lack of exclusivity. In a game with a strong focus on story-telling and the ingame atmosphere, putting everything that makes up that world out into the open carries the risk of breaking the illusion and prevents us from implementing secrets, surprise encounters, or preparing ingame events without doing so in the public eye.
To address the lack of secrecy, we will likely be setting up an additional private content repository whose purpose will be holding all the scripts and data that are strictly specific to Eiradir (i.e. our official development strain and game server), while the client and server itself as well as any content that is not (or no longer) deemed in need of secrecy will be published within their respective open source repositories.
A notable and necessary exception to this decision comes to our graphical assets and audio assets.
- Some of our assets were specifically licensed for use in Eiradir, and it is not within our rights to broaden that scope without individually having them relicensed by the original author.
- Some of our assets are not ours but were published under (different) open source licenses themselves - these will still be distributed in our repository, but the differing license will be noted and included.
- Some of our assets are heavily edited derivatives of amateur photography that we cannot individually attribute to their source material. While we feel confident enough in using these graphics for our limited and small-scale purposes, we cannot in good conscience offer them up for others to use under our permissive license terms.
For simplicity, we include even these restricted assets within our repositories. They will be noted as having separate licenses in the repository's README file. Under GitHub's Terms of Service, you are allowed to fork these repositories even if they contain All Rights Reserved assets. This allows external collaborators to interact with the repository and sources in the same way that core team members do. However, you may not redistribute these assets in any form beyond that of a GitHub fork, and must retain both the copyright notice and All Rights Reserved notice on them.
As for previous iterations of Eiradir (such as the Unity 3d version, or the 2012 Slick version), we've decided to keep those closed source. This is mainly a question of the effort it would take to individually verify our ability to redistribute/relicense their content, and since development of those versions has been discontinued, it's not worth the time it would take to get them ready for publication.