This was a MMORPG based upon the “cute” concept, pioneered by Ragnarok Online, of 2D sprite [looking] characters in a 3D world. I had a lot of different aspects of both the server and client engines finished, but problems with the artists doomed my dream.

I had spent an extensive amount of time around 2002 playing with Ragnarok Online (alpha & beta), both as a game, and as a hacking project. It had a very impressive following for what it was (maybe because it was free at the time?) but the bottom line in my mind was that it was easily able to pull in hoards of people fervently despite the fact that it was a very incomplete system run by a very horrible, incapable, and corrupt company (Gravity inc in Korea). I had decided after finishing with Ragnarok to build this MMORPG based upon a similar visual concept, and I must note this is when MMORPGs were still a relatively untapped market, with World of Warcraft still mostly just a somewhat known about glimmer in Blizzard’s collective eye.

• An outline of the client engine in regards to security, graphics, and design
• Game moderator system
• Communication system (including planned integration with major IM protocols)
• The 5 “realm” system including economic plans and attributes for their people and races
• A list of the major towns and locations in each realm
• The experience and job level systems

My first goals were to have the basic networking and visual engine laid out, which happened relatively quickly. Then I started working on getting a database put together (see screenshot below) and populated. After that I started recruiting artists. I found and worked with two artists. One was very a dedicated artist who did not exactly share my vision but was a hard, productive, efficient worker. The second did share my vision but never really produced :-\.

I started working with the first artist heavily and he convinced me to turn the 2D sprite on 3D world into a full 3D world where all objects (then sprites) were to be rendered to look 2D real time. I must admit it was a very good idea and we got really far with it. I created one of the first good cell shaded and inking rendering engine for this, as I had pioneered many new concepts that had not been used before, to my knowledge, for this purpose. I quickly fell in love with the idea and what I had created after seeing it in action. It truly looked as the characters moved as if they were 2D sprites. This process also spawned a plugin for Maya to render created models real time in this style, and export all created content into the Eternal Realms custom file formats.

Time passed and not enough was getting done with the artists and things ended up falling apart with them, with a good deal of this being my fault too, and the project was abandoned. This has always been one of the biggest disappointments in my life because it was something I really believed in and wanted to achieve, but I did not have the creative man power to make it happen :-(. Oh well, such as life.

I have always thought about trying to revive the project, but honestly, I wouldn’t want to try and compete with the behemoth that Blizzard has created. One day, I might try cleaning it up some and releasing some of it for nostalgia sake. At the very least, when I have more time in the future, I’ll try to see to putting up more screenshots of the content from my source code and information from my logs.

Screenshots: Server console Original 2D character example (Originally characters were going to be 2D sprites) In Game (3D Test map, stand-in character sprite) Database House Models Basic Character (Not rendered inside Eternal Realms engine) World Map (Low-res version)

The story of Eternal Realms has been added to the content section of its project page. *Nostalgic and frustrated sigh*