Network Games - Open Source the Server, Let Others Write Clients?

xihr asks: "I'm the developer of Interstelen, initially a turn-based, strategic Web game of interstellar conquest. As time has progressed, I've found that it hasn't gone much beyond the barely-usable, early-alpha phase, primarily because, as with most people, I don't enjoy making user interfaces. It's clear at this point that it's not going to get done unless something changes. So my choices are to put the game on hold, or to change the architecture and goals. It occurred to me that this might be a better approach: Architect a server and public protocol, as well as client libraries for a few languages to help people along and a trivial text-based client primarily for a code example and debugging, and 'recruit' (hopefully, just 'let') people to write various clients." Seems like a reasonable strategy, especially if time is a limited commodity. I'm sure there are Slashdot readers who are working on (or have done) similar project. How did things turn out?

"This isn't too different from my ultimate goal, which was to eventually release the code under open source anyway and to eventually put together a public protocol so that other clients could be created. In a way this would be simply reversing the order in which things get done.

This would be win-win, since it would play to my strengths and people who like making user interfaces could make them in whatever language they wanted. But obviously it's not going to get anywhere unless people are actually interested in writing clients, so there's a chicken-and-egg problem lurking here.

Does this sound like a project that would be of interest to the open source community?"

WorldForge?

[Chelloveck]

There's already a similar project, WorldForge [worldforge.org]. If you're interested in this kind of thing, you might want to join that project rather than starting your own.

Although, if this article [oreillynet.com] at O'Reilly's site is accurate, the idea hasn't exactly taken of like wildfire. All the more reason to throw your efforts in with them rather than dividing the development effort to start a new game.