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The new MMORPG's. Possible or not possible?

Started by Fredrik Jahnsson Aug 21, 2004 at 10:28 AM 49 replies 12.5k views
Original Post
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Hello there, I'm new to this forum so don't kill me for doing something I wasn't supposed to do ;) MMORPG, massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. You should perhaps see the video clips of the Half-Life 2 engine before reading on. These clips can be found here: http://www.planethalflife.com/half-life2/videos/ With the majority of today's MMORPG's it is not possible to role play. I mean, seriously, they are all about doing the same stuff over and over again and maxing your characters level. The interaction in today's MMORPG's is a joke. It is dwarfed to some stiff typing and a few predefined scripted actions. To call these games MMOG's would be a much better definition. Since I'd like to see a real large scale role playing game I'd really like to see some dramatic changes in the way MMORPG's are created. I'm not talking a MMORPG that consists only of conversation/interaction here. I'm talking a nice mix of the adventuring/fighting and interaction. I have this idea of an MMORPG that I think would blow most peoples mind and I believe the hardware, connection speeds and the software for it exists today. But I'm not sure of it. What I like is to get some opinions if the following is possible. Or not possible... If possible, do you have any suggestions as to whom (a company like EA etc.) could and would undertake such an endeavor? And please, bear in mind, what I'd like is opinions if these features are possible or not possible. I do not want opinions about the features themselves, like: "Duuuuuh that live voice thing is just ST00PID no one would never ever have time to stand around having conversations in a MMORPG!!!!!!!!". Also, if you back up your statements with something (an article?) it would be great! Below I'm only presenting some of the features of the game concerning the limitations of today's technology. Here goes. 1. The "live voice" Interaction system. The live voice interaction system would add an enormous presence to the interactions in the game. This Interaction system would be somewhat similar to the one seen in Counter Strike or compared to some live chat program like TeamSpeak. Just more advanced. Yes, I'd like to see and hear the online players you meet in this game talk. Via a microphone and with a wee bit better sound quality than seen in Counter Strike for instance. What I'd also like to see is lip-sync. Like seen in Half-Life 2. Yes I grasp the difference between a FPS and a MMORPG and that we are talking enormous bandwidth here. But consider this: How about a way to really limit the area of people you are hearing? (the longer distance the lesser/lower voices) And depending on what "mode" you are in (travel mode, fighting mode, conversation mode) you would hear only a limited amount of people. Perhaps even some peer to peer standalone client could be used to lessen the burden on the servers? Then of course, this MMORPG shouldn't have thousands of players per server. More like a few hundred players. Add some pitch and other filters to the sound and even teens with their breaking voices could sound like a battle hardened dwarf. 2. The "body language/facial expression" interaction system After seeing and experiencing the capabilities of the Source engine (Half-Life 2) developed by Valve I was truly amazed at how easily one could create your own customized expression "scripts", then save them to a small amount of data, I thought "To have this in a MMORPG would be magnificent". I won't go into too much detail here but, these interactions could look something like this: When you want to engage in a serious conversation with someone, the "conversation mode" is activated. Here you have a whole lot of controls for expressing yourself with facial expressions, body language and gestures. All taken from your already defined "scripts" or maybe by some way to effect your avatars expressions directly. This data could be sent to the game server or perhaps by some peer to peer connection. The limitations I discussed in 1. could also be applied here. You would control the avatars expressions using both mouse and keyboard using this "conversation interface". This would become an art to master but easy to learn. The visual expressions combined with the live voice I know would add dimensions to MMORPG's that no one has ever seen before. This is the next era of MMORPG's I'm talking about here, yes. The question is, do we already have the possibility to create MMORPG's like this or does the bandwidth or hardware issue stop this from happening? Possible or not possible? Well, is this possible with today's technology you think? Wouldn't a 10mbit connection or less suffice for all this data to be sent? Am I totally wrong in thinking the technology AND the software, like the Half-Life 2 engine, already exists? Well I'm asking the experts here I hope so just go ahead and shoot! Just try avoid hitting me ;) Sincerely, Fredrik
Permafried-
Permafried-
Hey,

In regards to your voice-over-IP suggestion, UT2004 already has this built in as well and doesn't seem to affect bandwidth at all. A server with 20 players all blasting the hell outta eachother can still talk while they're at it without any noticable fluctuations in ping times.

I'm sure in the case of a MMORPG this could possibly become more of an issue, particularly if hundreds of people are all standing in the same area and decide to all talk at once. Even with your proximity suggestion it could still happen (guild meetings, etc). which may cause a few issues here and there. As far as the seperate application goes, I wouldn't recommend this approach as it just forces the user to keep track of one more thing on startup, instead, maybe create a seperate socket for voice-over-ip only which could be connected to a "voice chat" server to take the load off. Most MMORPGs as far as I understand it have seperate servers for the following:

Login server
Zone server
Chat server

For every zone server there will also be a chat server which will handle all incoming messages for that entire zone. This might also be an option with what you're suggesting to take a load off the gameplay server.

As far as custom scripts and facial animations go, this shouldn't be too huge of a problem because it's the client that handles this operation not the server. Once the server has transmitted the data (much like HL transmitting arm patches) it's done with it. There should probably be some sort of cap on the size of the script allowed, not to mention a cleanup utility to get rid of them if you don't run into character x in y number of days, otherwise the user's PC would become so flooded with crap it would get out of hand. The same goes for lip synching, once the client receives the voice message, it will simply update the mesh's model based on what it knows about words and syllables, the server really wouldn't have to worry so much about this aspect.

Permafried-
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Thanks for your reply Permafried-. I'm happy to hear that you believe these features are possible.

/Fred
hplus0603
hplus0603
As far as MMOGs go, the virtual world "There" already has both of those features (real-time voice with lip sync and attenuation, and body language / conversation modes): There Website.
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Quote:
Original post by hplus0603
As far as MMOGs go, the virtual world "There" already has both of those features (real-time voice with lip sync and attenuation, and body language / conversation modes): There Website.


Thanks! I'll go check it out right away.
TheDarkening
TheDarkening
When i played my last MMORPG (lineage2) i got together with a group of friends and we all used ventrilo and lot of other guilds out there use this too. This may be a temporary solution to your problem. And the best part about vent is that NCSoft didn’t have to spend a bunch of money setting up servers (which would have went down a number of times) and writing the code to support it.

It won’t solve the lip sync problem but it really helps out with coordinating attacks.
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Quote:
Original post by Fredrik Jahnsson
Quote:
Original post by hplus0603
As far as MMOGs go, the virtual world "There" already has both of those features (real-time voice with lip sync and attenuation, and body language / conversation modes): There Website.


Thanks! I'll go check it out right away.


I did try it out and was stunned to find out that the only important feature of this otherwise quite common MMOG, the live voice bit, had been left out from the demo!
So I had no chance of experiencing it. hplus0603, have you tried it? Was the voices inregrated 3d voices in the game? Or were they rather like some utility such as Ventrilo, which from the game idea I have, would be useless.
Megahertz
Megahertz
Vanguard (http://www.vanguardsoh.com) will have in game voice chat from what I've read.

-=[ Megahertz ]=-
-=[Megahertz]=-
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Quote:
Original post by Megahertz
Vanguard (http://www.vanguardsoh.com) will have in game voice chat from what I've read.

-=[ Megahertz ]=-


Unfortunately this game's voice chat seems to be very similar to Ventrilo, which I mentioned above, just isn't good enough.
Thanks anyway!
hplus0603
hplus0603
Quote:
Was the voices inregrated 3d voices in the game?


I guess that's how they get you to pay ;-)

Yes, There voice chat is integrated such that it uses 3D localization to position avatar chat, and attennuates chat from avatars further away. It also drives the lip sync and, to a limited extent, the gesticulation of the avatar.

I believe it works by sending you the voice streams for all avatars that you can hear at least a little bit of, and then telling your client where they are, and the client figures out the 3D stuff and how soft to make the sound. Thus, the servers shouldn't need to process the sound at all, except by passing it on to people within earshot when you speak.

Now, if there were only a GAME there, too, it'd be perfect!
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Hehe, yes, the dirty little b*******

Sounds very interesting, I'd love to see it in action. Hovever, I'm not going to pay for a MMOG based primarily on chatting ;)

I agree it would be very very nice.
I mean, if these guys, the "There inc." have managed to pull this interaction bit of theirs of so "easily" it makes you wonder why it isn't used more in MMORPG's. It must be that the larger companies are afraid of implementing these new features in their MMORPG's since they believe it would scare off many costumers.

/Fred.
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
You don't have to be sorry -MrChimp. Thanks for some new intel about HL2 that I didn't know about!
I guess I'll have to do a bit further reading on the HL2 engine.

Could the HL2 Source engine, or some modified version of it, be used for a smaller MMORPG? Lets say, a few hundred players/server? Maybe some people have already thought about this and are making plans for a new MMORPG?

Does anyone know?

/Fred
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Quote:
Original post by Anonymous Poster
I don't think it's a question of bandwidth but of server load. If you're going to have the audio based on how far away each person is, you'll have to mix a seperate audio channel for each player on the server. That's going to end up being a LOT of server load, even with a dedicated server.

-overflowed (I'm at work and forgot my pass)


This isn't the truth is it? Wouldn't the mixing of audio channels and all the rest concerning CPU load be handled on the client? The server/s responsibility for the audio would only be recieving and sending data wouldn't it? (or maybe this could be handled via peer to peer connections?)

/Fred.

[Edited by - Fredrik Jahnsson on August 22, 2004 9:41:23 AM]
Fredrik Jahnsson
Fredrik Jahnsson
Quote:

Oh, come on! The reason it's not on most MMORPG's is because it's boring and a waste of money compared to what ELSE they could spend their development time on. Look at how much money an MMOG costs to develop without this feature, and the problems of justifying that expenditure, then try and work out how any producer is going to manage to squeeze an extra million dollars to implement this.

There are also some major reasons why this whole concept sucks on the gameplay side, e.g. internationalization: most games have people playing together who speak different languages, and with text it is not only easier to understand what people are saying (learn a few words in the other person's language - they type it once, you now know it; if you try and learn it from their pronunciation alone, it will typically take you a much longer time to get perfect), but many online games also do automatic linguistic translation. I.e. they run something equivalent to babelfish against the chat text; obviously they don't spend enough money to make it able to cope with slang etc, but it's enough to play with people whose language you don't speak at all - it's very easy for a machine to translate the core words in a chat message.

Another problem is censorship (swear words), illegal abuse (incitement to racial hatred), etc. These can be policed largely automaticaly with perhaps a 90% success rate with text; with speech, they are unpolicable. Such a pity, then, that in most countries local laws prohibit the extremes of free speech (and not just the extremes: c.f. libel). How much cash can you set aside to deal with the court cases?



Ok, some people find it boring socializing with other people. I agree, these people wouldn't find this kind of MMORPG very amusing no.
Can you back up those claims you make that it would take "an extra million dollars to implement this"? Can you also refer to some article that treats immersion of games and in what way adding more realism to them make them worse?

You mentioned internationalization. Yes, wouldn't it all just be great if we all looked the same, had the same values and spoke the same language. The world would just be a such a fantastic and foremost INTERESTING place! (irony).
I'm firm in my belief that adding a little spice to the live voice chat like internationalization, if imbedded correctly into the game (yes I have a few ideas as to how), would further enhance the immersion you would experience in the game.

Of course the censorship would have to be dealt with and I'm sure there are plenty of ways to do just that with even the live voice system, any suggestions?
For example, one way of dealing with censorship could be with a player-admin reporting system or some new form of ingame game masters (admins/DM's).

Read this post before we delv any further in discussing the specifics of this game idea I have since the game idea I have would be somewhat similar to it:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=97047
hplus0603
hplus0603
I deleted a double-post by Anonymous.

For the record: I work for Forterra Systems. Not being a financial guy, I belive we spent significantly less than a million bucks to develop our voice feature, including training CS and testing hardware compatibility as well as stress testing (which can be done by machines just fine, AP!). However, we already had avatars and a real-time data streaming system in place -- each of which cost more than a million to develop.

Also note that the Forterra platform is based on real-time, distributed simulation (with physics), rather than most MMORPGs, which are more like a MUD, so a traditional RPG might have a significantly harder time integrating a real-time technology like voice.

It also helped us that we don't have any NPCs ;-)
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };
hplus0603
hplus0603
We've looked at HLA, and I believe it's not quite a comparable technology in either networking or physics simulation support (well, it doesn't have any to speak of, really ;-). You could conceivably use it as a transport for your own messaging within the server cluster, in real-time mode only, but that's pretty weak.

However, our platfor can happily look like a federate to co-simulate with existing HLA systems, with a little bit of glue. Of course, you won't get the full benefit of our co-simulation technology if you do, but, hey.

Things like issued message handles that you can retract, and that the RTI is supposed to make it all go away, doesn't gel well with my idea of high-performance, real-time, interactive, distributed simulation. The HLA also seems to force threading upon the platform, which means that every federate needs to deal with thread safety, which adds a tremendous amount of needless locking.

And then there's those users on dial-up -- we have significant technology that allows the dial-up experience to be surprisingly good. I believe there's a patent on some of it issued -- search for "Ken Duda" (the CTO) and something like "Distributed Physics" to find it. HLA... didn't make that a design goal :-)
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };
Moolicious
Moolicious
I have to agree with Anonymous Poster, the implications of the voice system far outweight the benefits. And plus I thought that Fredrik Jahnsson said that he wanted to improve the MMORPG genre? Why is voice communication so important. Surely if you just added those two features alone, it would still be the same "boring" game, but with lip sync and 3D positional voice chat. Surely there are far more interesting game facets that could be improved or invented to improve game play. If chatting is your thing, maybe you should invent a virtual chat room, with lip sync etc.

I think it's a blessing when voice is not supported in some games. There are many people out there looking to destroy the gaming environment for other people and voice is one way of doing that. It's bad enough that people have to implement all these anti-cheat programs (like punkbuster etc.)

I think typing for MMORPGs is classic and it maintains the role playing element. I would rather imagine that a dwarf speaking to me, has a deep voice when I read his text than hear his little squeeky voice. And as was already mentioned, the factor of harassment is HUGE, once players catch on that someone is female, she will encounter sexual harassment, no doubt! There are many desperate gamers out there! <-Sorry don't have an article for that one. :P

If ya got something important to say, or worth reading,
TYPE IT! ;)
hplus0603
hplus0603
AP posted the following, and I deleted what looked like a double post, but then the entire post was gone. Sorry 'bout that. Btw: AP, you might want to go register and post with your own handle. It's free, you know :-)

Quote:
By Anonymous Poster
Don't get me wrong - I think HLA is the worst possible starting point for online games (hence OpenSkies == bad idea best ignored by the games industry). The people I've met who've actually built or maintained real HLA systems sounded reminiscent of assembler programmers working on large OS's - rapidly losing the will to live ;).

But it just seems like most of the distributed simulation stuff seems to jump on the HLA bandwagon or be spun out of something that was originaly US DoD and hence HLA-contaminated.

Do you have a link for your technology?


The public link is http://www.forterrainc.com/ but that doesn't say much.
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };
hplus0603
hplus0603
That's weird; I've stayed logged in forever. Do you have your cookie preferences set to only allow session cookies perhaps? Have you tried asking for help in the forums bugs forum?
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };

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