1. Setting

2. Gameplay
    Character creation  Combat  Magic 

3. Development

4. Reception

5. See also

6. References

7. External links

Setting

PlaneShift takes place inside a colossal stalactite named Yliakum.^[3] Players begin in the main city, Hydlaa, where they will start their journey. PlaneShift has 9 playable races,^[4] each of which have their own homelands and characteristics. The races feature standard fantasy types, like elves and dwarves, but also humanoids made of rock and winged amphibians. Though set underground, life is possible because a crystal named the Azure Sun draws light from the surface of the planet.

Gameplay

PlaneShift gameplay is based on classical Multiplayer Role Playing Game style, with exploration, magic, single player or team based combat and quests. A major goal of the game is to explore and learn. This can either be done by reading books or by learning about the world by speaking with the NPCs. The interaction with the NPCs is based on predefined answers the player can pick from a list, and also a freeform text entry, which uses natural language parsing to interpret the text.^[7] Some of these NPC's provide quests and guidance on how to proceed to gain items and powers. The quests are sequenced to allow character progression in the different skills of the game. There are also events, hosted by Game-Moderators, that allow for unique quests, festivals and happenings. Players increase their character's skills by completing these quests in the game. The game has strong focus on Roleplay and IC (In-Character) behaviour and speech is promoted by the Game Master team.

Players trade using the currency Tria, a triangle-shaped coin. There are denominations for 10, 50 and 250 Tria, named Hexas, Octas and Circles.^[3]

Character creation

The PlaneShift character creation tool features two options. The first option is to choose to make a "quick" character, in which a player chooses a "path" and the character's specific attributes are chosen based on the profession. A path reflects the career of the character in his youth, and has associated events which will set the starting skills and stats. The available paths are "Street Warrior", "Enchanter", "Fighting Monk", "Warlock", "Knight", "Rogue".

The second option is to make a character with the "custom" method. This method allows the player to choose many additional aspects of the character by describing the story of his or her birth, parents, jobs, house, siblings, and the life events that happened up to his or her adulthood. The choices made affect the attributes and skills the character has.^[5]

Combat

Magic

Development

The PlaneShift project is developed under guidance of Atomic Blue, a Texas-based non-profit organization.^[7] The PlaneShift development team is organised in several departments with corresponding leaders.^[8]

PlaneShift has been open to players for free since its first public release. The server side engine code and the client code is written from scratch by the PlaneShift team,^[9][10]{{third-party-inline|date=April 2012}} while the 3D rendering features are based on the Crystal Space 3D engine. Since the Crystal Space engine is no longer supported, the whole game content is currently being moved to Unreal Engine.^[11] The servers and the internet connection for the game are donated by sponsors.^[5]

The game uses two different licenses: the engine is released under the GNU General Public License v2,^[12][13] and the content is released under a proprietary license.^[12][14] The artwork, ruleset, dialog, and other non-engine content of PlaneShift are proprietary^[15] and licensed under a custom license: the PlaneShift Content License^[16] (PCL). The PCL prevents modifications, redistributions, and assigns the copyright of accepted contributions to Atomic Blue. This license also forbids using the content for profit or for unofficial hosting.^[14]

The original game idea came from Luca Pancallo in 1994, who released a 2D version in 1996. The development of this game ended 1998 as no commercial support or publisher could be found. In 2000 the development was restarted aiming for a 3D version with an international team of developers. The first major version (0.1) released on May 2, 2002 was codenamed "Atomic Blue".^[17] Four different public versions of the game have come out since then, with additional functionality. PlaneShift is currently in the alpha stage of development at version 0.6.3, codenamed "Azure Spirit". The current version "Azure Spirit" was released on April 7, 2014.^[18]

Reception

PlaneShift has been used in multiple studies regarding development of free software and video games.^[20][21][22] PlaneShift has been also studied as a collaborative software engineering organizational model.^[23][24]

See also

• WorldForge
• List of open source games

References

External links

• {{Official website|http://www.planeshift.it/}}
• Atomic Blue web site
• PlaneShift page at SourceForge

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