Looking for MMORPG open world/spherical world/planet engine...

AFAIK that hasn't been done yet so you'd have to make your own engine.

AFAIK that hasn't been done yet so you'd have to make your own engine.

The engines are made to create games that hasn't been created, aren't they?

The engines are made to create games that hasn't been created, aren't they?

Not really. Engines are made to create games that are an awful lot like games that already exist.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1344034925' post='4965976']
AFAIK that hasn't been done yet so you'd have to make your own engine.

The engines are made to create games that hasn't been created, aren't they?
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Not really, good game engines are made alongside a game, not prior to the game, sometimes they're even made after the game in more or less a "Ok, this game is selling quite well, lets try to re-use as much as possible of it to make a sequel and get more cash" way and occassionally studios will allow others to use their old technology in exchange for some money.

If you want to push technology for a game you have to make your own engine (or get a sourcecode license for an engine so you can update it) because any engine that is allready on the market will be old by the time your game is done.

The big problem with your idea is the planet size, Jupiter is huge, 6.1419×10^16 m2 , so if you use 1 byte for every 1m2 of surface (very low detail, enough for a space MMO where you view the planets from a low orbit) you'd still need 61.42 PetaBytes of data, if you want weather effects, rivers, etc you need far more detail than that aswell.

This basically means that you need a procedural terrain generator. (Allthough i don't see why you'd want such a large world, even something as "small" as earth would be overkill for an MMO since even the truly great MMO backends will struggle if you try to push them past 100k players in a single world)

AFAIK that hasn't been done yet so you'd have to make your own engine.

That is a bit untrue. I have searched but the thing I found seem a bit unfinished. Like the amazing Outerra engine. But the problem is that with Outerra you cannot make your own land masses, continents, yet... But I do not have a few years to wait upon them finishing. I want something to work on now. I really do have 16 hours free per day. I have a lot of knowledge, I've been a year at computer science. I have a hobby of writing , drawing , modeling in 3D and animating , I know a lot of people that might be willing to help me with my project...

...so... I need an good Engine!

The big problem with your idea is the planet size, Jupiter is huge, 6.1419×10^16 m2 , so if you use 1 byte for every 1m2 of surface (very low detail, enough for a space MMO where you view the planets from a low orbit) you'd still need 61.42 PetaBytes of data, if you want weather effects, rivers, etc you need far more detail than that aswell.

This basically means that you need a procedural terrain generator. (Allthough i don't see why you'd want such a large world, even something as "small" as earth would be overkill for an MMO since even the truly great MMO backends will struggle if you try to push them past 100k players in a single world)

I like that word... "overkill" ... makes me imagine things beyond my time. In the future humanity will play MMO's with real living things on some what planet terraformed just for the sake of the survival of their artificial life forms created just for the fun of some rich kids in the year 200k.

But ofc, I have a plan in my mind, so Jupiter is a bit overreacting, or is it?(maybe, I still doubt myself, I have no idea yet!)... so I have a plan, and that plan in one idea is BiG!

Why not just start with a smaller area of "Jupiter", You could load the areas in levels instead of a huge open world. People could be presented to a map of a planet and then click the areas they wish to travel to and then load that area. Then suddenly a lot of engines would be fine for the job. Just a suggestion.

Why not just start with a smaller area of "Jupiter", You could load the areas in levels instead of a huge open world. People could be presented to a map of a planet and then click the areas they wish to travel to and then load that area. Then suddenly a lot of engines would be fine for the job. Just a suggestion.

Well... my vision is to get rid of the actual MMO style.No maps(Self made by players and sold to one and each other... keeping it a bit of secret!).No buttons.No clicks.No minimap.No leveling.No experience.Maybe I will reinvent the character walk.And definitely No! "portals"(but I will make portals available... only that will be required like 10 Mages to hold the portal open or gather all the Mages from all the realm to help enchant a portal linked to another part of the continent, the greater the distance the greater the power needed... and a lot of materials wasted to do magic, magic dust and wands! The reason I have this in mind with the open world.. is cause I just want to get away from the "hit the invisible wall" type of games.

But the idea of starting small is very wise of you.I was thinking of that.

But please I need help with idea's of some engine that I do not know of.

A name please!

[quote name='Dwarf King' timestamp='1344044718' post='4966009']
Why not just start with a smaller area of "Jupiter", You could load the areas in levels instead of a huge open world. People could be presented to a map of a planet and then click the areas they wish to travel to and then load that area. Then suddenly a lot of engines would be fine for the job. Just a suggestion.

Well... my vision is to get rid of the actual MMO style.No maps(Self made by players and sold to one and each other... keeping it a bit of secret!).No buttons.No clicks.No minimap.No leveling.No experience.Maybe I will reinvent the character walk.And definitely No! "portals"(but I will make portals available... only that will be required like 10 Mages to hold the portal open or gather all the Mages from all the realm to help enchant a portal linked to another part of the continent, the greater the distance the greater the power needed... and a lot of materials wasted to do magic, magic dust and wands! The reason I have this in mind with the open world.. is cause I just want to get away from the "hit the invisible wall" type of games.

But the idea of starting small is very wise of you.I was thinking of that.

But please I need help with idea's of some engine that I do not know of.

A name please!
[/quote]

I just wanted to take a minute to mention that if you are making a game, you have to consider making it fun. Everyone has different tastes but if you are going to invest "years" creating something, it might be wise to perform market research to decide if something like you describe is desirable to actually play.

You mention getting rid of experience and leveling. In my mind the character progression and trying to achieve a more powerful character is what makes MMO type games "fun".

One of the aspects I consider to be the most tedious when it comes to such games is travel times. You are talking about increasing travel times by a very large margin. If you make a fairly mundane planet like Jupiter, what is to stop people from becoming very bored and fatigued by the environment?

For instance imagine I was at the bottom of a crater and you decide due to movement speeds and scale, that it is going to take me 4 hours or so to travel out of this crater. Do you think someone is going to bother to keep playing?

One of the main reason for the "invisible" walls is to provide the illusion of a larger game world, while reducing the available area to something that can be interesting/practical. There is no way you will have the time or budget to be able to make an area the actual size of Jupiter interesting.

If I were in your shoes I would opt to use Unity for my game engine. Not because it would be able to handle all of what you describe, but because it would provide a solid technical foundation that would allow me to create something fairly quickly.

To me this sounds like your first game, generally MMO + first game don't go together too well, neither do RPG + first game

There simply isnt really an engine for indie MMO developers... indie and MMO dont work that well. The only MMO engine I ever heard about that is not an in house specific propriety one is the Hero engine, which was used with SW:ToR ( as a development aid, allegedly the ToR devs moved onto thier own engine later ).

You can still just code some basic level, putting the whole MMO aspect aside and experiment with the features you want to add while you wait for an engine / research an engine.

This was done using mostly algorithms to generate geometry and texture.
If you are a oneman-army of developers, looking into procedural generation will probably be the way to go due to massive cut of development time.
You do however have to be a bit of a genious

Best of luck though

I'm not really a 1 man army.But I'm glad for all the feedback for all your concerns.All the "what if that goes wrong!?" subject intrigues me.It helps perfecting things.So keep up it going.



For now I found 1 engine(Outerra) .. and I'm observing closely the progress. It might be promising!

This is a very interesting topic. I am currently discovering the same delima; that sperical terrain generators are not available. The fact is, there really isn't a spherical coordinate system that will allow fractal (or plasma) height mapping. I am currently attempting a new approach to this and would "love" some feedback. Basically there are several (80 that I have found) mathematical polyhedrons.
Concept 1:
Each FACE of the polyhedron would then be a 2D plane which could be 'mapped' using a standard terrain generator. This would get us close but the result would still not be a sphere (or ellipsoid). Also, we would be applying two separate coordinate systems, one for the polyhedron and the other for its FACE.
Concept 2:
This is similar to Concept 1 with the exception of the use of a standard terrain mapper. Basically, (and I have still not resolved all of the math) the polyhedron-function would continue to attempt to create a polyhedron of more and more FACES. Similar to how the recursive plasma function works, a recursive function would resolve down to 1R resolution.
Like I have stated, I have found 80 mathematical polyhedrons but I am not certain that my second concept (above) will enable the creation of a recursive polyhedron function of n-FACES....

Any Ideas?