I don't know what this is, but I am intrigued.

Looks promising. Something to keep an eye on for sure.

Oh, and for those who like MUDs, check this out. Nice little SR3 MUD. Not a ton of people, but still has some regular players.

That MMO project has been around forever. Insofar as I know they don't actually have any rights, and haven't done much more than produce some somewhat interesting art.

Smith and Tinker have the electronic rights to Shadowrun, but they're busy with their own game, which isn't really my cup of tea, but seems pretty successful in their own sphere.

Once upon a time, I'd dismiss Shadowrun Awakened as irrelevant, not a serious project, but ever since Eskil Steenberg managed to ship LOVE, a fascinating MMO he wrote entirely BY HIMSELF, I'm not saying anything's impossible anymore.

I'd eat my hat if I thought I'd get a great new Shadowrun game out of it. The Genesis game is what introduced me to the universe, back in '94. 13 years old, and hooked for life.

If it's good, I'll play it. That said, my experience with most "Free" MMOs is that they aren't my type of game.

Don't be. Freaking switch and bait -- the main website doesn't say anything about how it's all apparently a giant hoax, just a website that's been collecting valid email addresses for a few years now. I wish I'd used my faker email instead of my real one. They have no permission to do anything -- they apparently had some permission from Microsoft to do a noncommercial thing back in 2007, but Microsoft hasn't had the license for some years now.

And yet if you do searches on certain SR terms or names, they have help files that list all sorts of interesting details.

I ran into one of their "wiki" pages about three weeks ago. The background info was interesting stuff, though beyond that it seemed to just be plot hooks for GMs.

It doesn't appear to be just a scam. The sourceforge repository (here) has a lot of work in it. Valid Unreal graphics stuff, game logic, physics, you name it.

It's not a usable game, by any means, but they appear to have been doing something for the last few years.

Their stance on the rights is kind of silly, but the idea is essentially that their video game will simply implement the pen & paper rules directly, and allow you to run a server in which to run shadowrun table games. noncommercial transference. It all breaks down, of course, because there are defined electronic game rights, and they're licensed entirely to Smith and Tinker.

Personally, I kind of love the idea of an open-source pen and paper RPG "simulator", where you could rig up situations and let em run, or play through modules with nice graphics, but I think any such attempt will run into the problems the first Neverwinter Nights had, which is that RPG rules aren't actually sufficient to construct a 3d physics simulator, so you end up houseruling a lot of things, and walling off others that are too hard to model. (you're not going to see a Knowledge or Build/Repair skill used properly in any videogame anytime soon).

Plus the project is the hobby of some dudes that apparently have day jobs and haven't checked much in recently, so, hopes are low in that sector.

Not entirely true. B/R is fairly easy to implement via the ability to repair damage and add vehicle/weapon mods. Knowledge skills can also have uses, though less than they have in PnP games. Like if you're in the 'abandoned warehouse district' having certain knowledge skills may make certain buildings (which are actually black markets) light up for you, or could give you extra dialog options, or might give you various circumstantial bonuses (Your fine wine knowledge gives you a bonus to etiquette and negotiations when in a fancy place by impressing people with your knowledge).

With medical type knowledge, you might be able to get a better idea of how injured a person is.

I know other people have other ideas for what format would make the perfect Shadowrun videogame. Personally? I think an MMO... one with a competitive budget, a solid design team, and a mission statement to stay true to the setting ...would be amazing! I have so many ideas for how various mechanics would work and how well (I think) the game would adapt... I think about this game *all* the time. I've already promised myself that if I ever won a major lottery prize I'd go after the license and throw a bunch of my own money at it.

This is a sign of how delusional I am. I work in AI research, and one of my pie in the sky insane ideas I think about to apply my work to my hobbies is to somehow get both the pen & paper rights AND the electronic rights and merge them, so that you have a gigantic MMO where everything that happens is CANON in the game's metaplot.

You'd need heavy duty NPC AI to run everything, and way more GMs than MMORPGs generally have, as well as a permissions system for local GMs to run mission, but I honestly believe it could be done. (And of course, delight of delights, the vice versa must be true, so that when a new sourcebook or novel came out, GMs would have to setup so that the events described actually happen in the game universe as well). (one of the interesting technical problems is that almost every character in the world would need to be puppetable by GMs or run as a character, or by NPC logic.)

If I ever got such a thing off the ground, I have a feeling half of everyone would hate me for how complicated it would make everything, but I think it would help combat a lot of the feeling of minimalism in the game, that everything happens to the same twenty people, or could get done by one Troll with enough minimax applied to him.

Plus, it would mean that if you were an incredible badass in the MMO, you might get your exploits written up in the next sourcebook or novel. How cool would that be?

Just imagine if Bioware got ahold of it...

I've been following Awakenings for awhile now; I think their real hope is that once they get it up and going an actual game studio will see that it's a feasible idea and run with it.

Ah, that makes sense. The "Youtube" model of development. Make something really cool, ignoring rights issues, hoping it becomes valuable enough that someone will buy you and fight in court on your behalf.

Don't say that, I may become 'inappropriately' excited.

Kind of like City of Heroes/Villains has now?

ha ha ha, Nothing in that game could be called AI, even in the most charitable sense. It's all scripting, which is interesting, but ultimately way too labor intensive to allow detailed behavior on the scale I'm interested in.

Now, some games have interesting narrow AI in them, but few on the scale I'm talking about. There are game toolchains these days that include powerful content creation tools, but none with self-motivated NPC tools.

I found this projectin net some 2 years ago and I hope it will come to life. I'd like to help with it, but my Computer skill is nothing more than Default...

Well, it's not Shadowrun. In the City of Heroes world, though, it does all those things. Make custom bad guys, outfitted with certain powers, in custom missions...