Looking for dedicated people for new MMORPG

If you are just startin out with the Cspace engine Shadow I sugest you guys do a little testing with it for rendering outdoor landblocks. Make sure you are satisfied with it. It''s commonly known that Cspace can''t handle outdoor rendering and framerate bottoms out badly.

Indoor, caves, underground etc work out ok for it.Just giving you a heads up. I started to use it a while back and realised quickly it was a bust for me.

Anyways best of luck to you. You are in for a terrible rude awakening as far as trying to design a MMRPG but mistakes are best learned and not taught

Mark


Mark


Aakrana: The Forgotten Lands
Currently seeking help from:
C++ coder
ZeroC / ICE programmer

Thanks for the advice Sly, What other engines would you reccomend?

I''d recommend not using an engine at all for the most flexibility. It''s actually not that hard to use an API alone.

Well, I need someone to volunteer for that then, Which I''m sure will be hard to find.

Not using an engine at all gives you most flexibility, but also most work to do.
Working out just the engine can last as long as building the game upon an existing engine.
There must be a reason why many upcoming games are splitted: One company working out the engine, the other working out the game.

If you don''t want to build an engine just to have done it, I''d suggest to check an existing one and start upon that.

(*swears about writing physics for an engine*)
(*swears some more about friends thinking out 2 more requirements for the physic for each finished "todo"*)

I thought that Plane Shift uses Crystal Space engine, and they have some nice screenshots of outside scenes (altho they have no FPS counter on their shots).

Height Map Editor | Eternal Lands | Fast User Directory

Planeshift does indeed use Cspace and I strongly recomnend a person download Pshift and login before making up their mind about it. I have a 1.3 gig proc 512 ram and a 128MB nvidea FX videocard with DDR ram and I got less than 1FPS through most of the town. I tried playing the Planeshift world a few different times but the results were always the same. It''s completely unplayable in my opinion. The planeshift community are roleplayers though and they roleplay through the framerate probs heh.

As for recomendations on other engines, I believe Ogre was the best open source engine I found before I decided to purchase the Acknex engine. I gave up on open source for the simple fact that it''s someone elses work and the GPL licenses basically criple you from ever becoming successful or profiting from your years of labour.

One of the above posters was correct you should write your own API if there werent so many commercial quality engines available for cheap. There is no way Im going to pretend I could get a volunteer programmer to colaborate with me and write a better API engine than the Conetic engine. Why pretend. The A6 engine cost me $50 to get started in and $200 for the commercial version. It was a no brainer.

However. If you are absolutely insistant on embarking on a MMRPG project please do yourself a favour. Sit down with a brand new coil notebook, open it to page one and write down every single detail you can fathom about your RPG. I don''t mean things like "there will be lots of blood and guts!! and KILLING aND SKAREYMUNSTORS!!" I mean serious things like: How many mySQL servers will be needed to handle the 200,000 record item database", then write out each of those 200,000 items, "A rusty dagger, weight 1, value 10, damage=pierce, equipable by races 1, 3,4 ,6 ,8, equipable by classes 3,4,8,9, damage message "has sliced you with a rusty dagger." damage miss msg= "a rusty dagger whistles past your face." Now on to item 2... only 199,999 to go. Yes Im serious it is that nasty =) Well before you need to choose engines etc you need to decide on your item database, your quest database, your combat engine (and I dont just mean player 1 hits palyer 2 for 5 damage, I mean the real forumla, player1.str+player1.coord *damage mod of sword -player2.dex+player2.agility - player2shield.mod =to.hit. Just to give you an idea it took me 2 months to finish my pre.alpha combat formula. I coded it into an applet and ran various different numbers through it for weeks trying to see how balanced it was. Did it take into acocunt different palyer levels, would a lvl 20 stand a chance against a lvl 25, a 30? a 35? how much of a factor did I want armor to play, what about player stats...

Good luck on your project =)

Aakrana: The Forgotten Lands
Currently seeking help from:
C++ coder
ZeroC / ICE programmer

Yes, I know the hell that is the Database, I know it will require work and patience, and it will be free, I am dedicated to the project and I''m sure we will have lots of loyal players too. Thanks for your advice everyone. I really apprechiate it.

I don''t use any database server for my MMORPG, everything is in raw files. it''s faster, but not so nice if you decide to change some stuff later on.

Anyway, we have a community of about 30 people that visit the forums every day, and about the same that play the game every day. And we don''t get that much help for our formulas, and such. We are still in alpha, but it took us 10 months to reach the alpha stage...

Height Map Editor | Eternal Lands | Fast User Directory

Yes. It definately requires time. I''m willing to spend a lot of time on it, The hard part is just finding vilunteers, I mean, I can''t pay them, and I don''t have a legal company, so nothing is binding them to stay on the team, but providing a fun and friendly team will help the game even more, if you know what im talking about, just kinda blabbing on .

Anyway, I''m still looking for people if anyone wants to volunteer.

And thanks again everyone for your advice and sharing your personal experiences with me. Hopefully it will help me with the development of my game.

Thats cool that you are looking into the reality of it Shadow alot of people don't. A couple things that may help you get more intrest in your project:

1) Website with forum.
Don't go for the bombshell here just get a working site up that you can post news on and run a forum. Check out netfirms.com if you don't know any good ones. (PS adsites are the worst but do what you can.) The forums will give people a place to give you quick feedback about your ideas.

2) Write up your project in some basic design docs. Use a public design doc describing the overall genre, gameplay and "hook" of your project. Then have a far more detailed doc (the detailed version I have is over 70 pages in word) to distribute to key project developers, IE team leads.

3) Timeline your project with realistic goals.
My original timeline was 24 months and that was base don having a core team of 5 people helping me. I'm pretty much solo at month 15 but I'm about 5 weeks away releasing the first trailer for the game. All my 2d clients are done, the game console is done and I have a working alpha landblock with a chronologically correct skysphere. Set short term goals so that you always accomplish somethign no matter how minute. I found that breaking pre alpha development into lots of stages actually made it go faster. I just did one thing at a time and before I knew it I was past pre-alpha,into alpha an dnow almost finished alpha phase 3 (of 5).

4) No matter what, if you are truely willing to put in 2 years of dedicated hard work, do not let anyone convince you that you are attempting the impossible. Improbable, definitely. Difficuly, indubidubly. Against the odds, most certainly. Possible with blood sweat tears (and a little cash never hurt ) ABSOLUTELY.

Good luck man. 16 months ago I was in your shoes. Just keep moving forward and you will complete your work. Oh yeah and if peopel tell you your game is going to be dumb.. Tell them to go paly Asherons Call 2

lol good luck

Mark

PS: I was going to edit the spelling but whats the point =) I type 100 words a minute but my my accuracy scores are below 80% heh. Kind of bad typing skills for a 33 year old network geek =)


Aakrana: The Forgotten Lands
Currently seeking help from:
C++ coder
ZeroC / ICE programmer


[edited by - Slyxsith on September 11, 2003 12:55:38 AM]

Yeah, I got most of it planned out. Got my best friend and designer writing the design document, everything that he can possibly think of that will be in the game will be in the document.

I bought a domain and I sell web hosting so that wasnt a problem.

Thank you so so so much for those tips. I''m glad I''m doing this project now. And I love GameDev, Such a friendly enviroment.

THANK YOU SO MUCH GUYS!

Your lucky, most get flamed heavily.


Anyhow, IMHO, if you want to go nice 3d, I would outsource your engine, writing a good MMORPG engine takes time, and ALOT of it.

quote:

---

Original post by Slyxsith
As for recomendations on other engines, I believe Ogre was the best open source engine I found before I decided to purchase the Acknex engine. I gave up on open source for the simple fact that it''s someone elses work and the GPL licenses basically criple you from ever becoming successful or profiting from your years of labour.

---

I was under the impression that Ogre was released under the LGPL.

Just to note that CrystalSpace''s OpenGL renderer is undergoing a complete re-write to take advantage of new options/technology. We expect good things out of it. It is true that PlaneShift does have some framerate problems in some of the open areas and we are working with the CS team to help fix those. There are several things that Crystal Space needs such as improved LoD and we are more then happy to have PlaneShift as a ''real world'' application to help develop these features.

In the end it is a good learning experience though as we can work on a game most of the time and dedicate time to the engine side when we need to.

ShadowFox40, if you do decide to use Crystal Space then be sure to give us a shout. We are more then willing to help out with any Crystal Space issues you might have. The more people that use it the better the engine can become.

A very good engine that i would suggest is Torque (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=1) (which I have). It is a good starting point to build off of but everyone who joins (that will program) your team will need to spend 100 dollars for it (Which is really cheap for what it can do). And if your company or publisher make over 500,000 dollars then you must pay 10,000 dollars to GarageGames (Only AFTER you make 500,000).

If you are in need of some designers I would love to join. Can i contact you through AIM or MSN???

L_F, I have over 3 years of experience with the Troque engine. The only problem I have with the engine is that the ghosted objects limit is 1024, And that can''t be raised.

By ghosted objects I mean the number of objects a server/client can have in the game at once. Wouldn''t be good for a MMORPG.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

ShadowFox: I''m not going to be using the Torque engine, but I would expect that you wouldn''t be using their server either way, thus you can set the number of ''ghosted objects'' as high as you want on your server while simply limiting the number in any particular area.

That would still be a pain, particularly in a city, but it would be a way around the limitation, since there is no reason why a game world would ever keep the client up to date on anything beyond a certain distance.

Nah.. just figguring out wich hooks are in the engine to disallow the raising of the limit about 1024 is much less work.

There was the more plausable idea of just groupping all or atleast lots of pieces into 1 ghost object however that would need a total rewrite of most basic functions concerning collision display ect ect..

Actually.. it''s better to fix something that''s broken than go imagine another solution.