A New MMORPG Lurks In Hidden Waters

New Australian developer Hidden Waters has announced their first project, a fantasy based massively multiplayer online role playing game entitled Restless World. Utilizing a heavily modified version of Garage Games' Torque Engine, RW will offer a unique fantasy realm not tied to the more traditional Tolkien archetype. Players will be able to choose from ten character classes, increase a variety of skills through repeated use, and unleash death upon their foes with a mana based spell system.

Restless World is a MMORPG that is based on our own, original set of rules. It is set in a varied 3D world full of all sorts of interesting creatures, which are unique to this world and not drawn from a Tolkeinesque world. There are no standard fantasy races like elves and dwarves, but players have access to a character palette with enough variation of physical appearance that they may create a character that resembles one of these races.

The ruleset has been designed so that no one build is more powerful than any other build. The taxonomy of the plants and creatures, the crafting system, the kinds of damage that can be dealt, and basically everything in the world revolve around a system of four elements - earth, air, fire and water, split again by the three alignments of good, neutral and evil. No one player character nor any creature can become an all-rounder, they will tend to specialise in a particular element. We believe this system will discourage powergaming and powerbuilding and encourage parties that have at least one member from each elemental group.Developer posts on Hidden Water's forums reveal Restless World will not be a Windows exclusive title. Both OS X and Linux versions are planned, the recent purchase of a Mac Mini allowing testing on the Mac version to begin.

Rumpled Elf:
We took delivery of a MiniMac today, bought off the Apple website. Apple are pretty neat, they deliver free to anywhere, and since we are based somewhere that is closer to nowhere than anywhere its impressive that they deliver here at all.

Anyway. Its very small, silver, and does an extremely good impersonation of a small lunchbox with USB ports. Colourless has been playing Marble Blast Gold on it - another Torque-based game. Our test network now consists loosely of:
a minimac
a 64-bit PC
a 32-bit PC
and a linux box.

So fear not, we are not limiting ourselves to the Windows community only.

Colourless:
And after a solid days work, I brought the MacOSX code up to date so It compiles. I also took the time to implement refresh rate selection and multisampling (that's Fullscreen antialiasing for those who don't know) in the Mac port and it was easier to do than in Windows (Linux port doesn't support these yet).

Anyway, the Mac version runs quite well on what is a very low end machine.Restless World is still in development. Test accounts should be available sometime in May. Click on over to the Hidden Waters site to learn more about this unique new MMORPG.