Gnollrunner said:
Your page says “unlimited size worlds”. Does that mean it supports 64 but coordinates?

Initially I wrote unlimited because there are no strict limits for the world itself, but there are however limits related to memory and processing power and floating point precision issues. So I've clarified that by changing it to “Huge Sized Worlds - The only limits are related to floating point precision and what your computer can handle”

BTW. I do have support for 64-bit float (double), but only for rendering part, but not for the built-in game world manager or physics engine.

Well that's like every engine then, except for the rendering part which IMO isn't that useful given current GPUs. I believe they are working on this for Unreal Engine, but it's not there yet. It actually isn't so difficult if you do it up front. I do this in my code, but I don't have a full engine. It would be nice if an indie engine supported it

GeneralJist said:
Why have you not been looking for someone earlier?

If you've read my other post, you can find out that I've started my programming journey since a young boy, as a hobby, that has steadily grown over time. There are many reasons why I was never looking for someone before

-I never needed someone else, I was learning at first, doing everything step by step, and all problems I've encountered, I was able to solve them. Yeah of course I went on internet looking for some information if a problem was complex, but never really needed anyone to do some tasks for me, as I was capable of doing them on my own

-so why have to look for someone, when everything is going well, and can grow more and more

-if I had earned much more money than I was getting, then yes I could think of hiring more people, as my employee or something, but I wasn't getting that much money, it was just enough for 1 person to have comfortable life

-also perhaps you're not considering the fact, that you're asking the question now, while we live in a different time, with plenty of engines available / high competition, while I was starting long time ago, when the market was much more open/easier for newcomers. And at this time, if you want to build something like a game engine, you have to do it in a bigger group, but in the past you didn't have to.

-many teams or companies form naturally, by encountering people in life that share the same interest, and they just join you naturally. I didn't encounter anyone in my life that had similar interest of building a game engine

-if you're open or not open into looking for more people, also depends on the experiences that you've had with other people. Example: when I've got some money for my first licenses, I've decided to build a better website for it. I've hired a company to do it for me, spent a lot of cash, but they constantly kept making problems, delays, didn't work well, not as I ordered, PHP code was humongous, bloated, icons missing. It was just a frustration dealing with them, and after they finally finished, I've realized that the only thing usable was just the background graphics, so I had to rip out everything, keep the graphics and write PHP by myself. I would have saved a lot of money and time if I just did that by myself from the start. So it was kind of a story like “If you want something done right, do it yourself”

Ok so I want to mention that like I wrote in my another post, I've decided to focus on working on my games. Anyone interested can still message me, but for now I'm going to focus on finishing my game projects.

Your saying you want someone to work with, but you also feel like you can do most stuff by yourself.

Your saying your going to work alone on your games.

This speaks to an independent mindset, that has issues working with others.

As i said, you should recruit to your game, and if people work out, you can see if any of them are trust worthy and fit your style with the potential of being a business partner.

If your not able to handle that, than your putting the cart before the hoarse with looking for a business partner,

Gnollrunner said:
except for the rendering part

The there.com engine used double precision for coordinates, and just subtracted the camera position to render everything in floats. It did a full earth-sized planet, from space down to the ground. It also did physics in double precision, to make sure everyone saw the same simulation. In 2001.

Turns out, this isn't a good enough feature to make a product stick. Content and experience is king!

@jon1

jon1 said:

Gnollrunner said:
except for the rendering part

The there.com engine used double precision for coordinates, and just subtracted the camera position to render everything in floats. It did a full earth-sized planet, from space down to the ground. It also did physics in double precision, to make sure everyone saw the same simulation. In 2001.

Turns out, this isn't a good enough feature to make a product stick. Content and experience is king!

Yes this is common strategy. I do it myself. I have never been on there.com, however from googling it, it doesn't sound like an engine but rather a game and not even that, more like a virtual community. I suppose anything that's used to make a game can be considered an engine, but correct me if I'm wrong , the "engine" was and is not available to the public. The only real engines that do this that I know of are Unigen (used for Dual Universe, and high priced) and NeoAxis which is C# based. Unigen at least seems to be doing OK, but my impression is they it is mostly used for high dollar projects, most of them not being games.

jon1 said:
double precision for coordinates, and just subtracted the camera position to render everything in floats.

That's the same approach I chose in Esenthel Engine.

Gnollrunner said:
I have never been on there.com, however from googling it, it doesn't sound like an engine but rather a game and not even that, more like a virtual community.

It was absolutely an (in-house) engine, with an API to write addable objects (in C++) for selected developers.

High-performance scripting add-ins wasn't really a thing in 2001, although there existed a Lua integration used mainly for testing.

The engine supported many checkboxes for “modern” virtual worlds:

• Build big things from small “blocks” and get lots of instancing benefit
• Earth-sized world with ground-to-orbit navigation and simulation
• Dress-up avatars with body and facial shape variation and clothing conformance
• Lockstep based physics/networking engine that allowed late joiners, ran on a 56k modem at the time
• Divided zone simulation with “ghost replica" objects for distributed consistency, automatic geographic zone partitioning
• User driven marketplace for objects and clothing
• Virtual currency exchangeable with real currency
• Very early adoption of web tech for the services – in 2001, most other games/engines didn't do this
• Procedural terrain generation with artist-driven hints

The engine did not double down on graphical prowess, because the feeling was that a mass market product needs to run on integrated graphics. It also didn't have features like “a water renderer” for a long time …

On top of the engine, a virtual world was built, and inside the virtual world, a number of games were built. (Paintball arenas, racing tracks, etc.) However, what most users actually wanted to do, was hang out and chat. Some of the founders of there.com took that learning, and built IMVU, which had very little of the technical sizzle, but instead focused on the hanging-out aspect. Another branch of the engine adapted to mil/sim/training use cases, and eventually got bought by SAIC. Finally, the product-as-built kept operating for a long time by some early investors – it may still be up!

At the time, this was pretty cool tech. However, those features did not actually build a large business – it's not what people actually wanted. Roblox is much closer to something that people want; at least people in a certain (large) target age group. I think this works, because Roblox is much more about “this is the gaming experience we deliver” and much less about “this is a WORLD with HOMOGENOUS RULES" – the conclusion is that that bit is actually an anti-good, not a requirement at all.

hplus0603 said:

It was absolutely an (in-house) engine, with an API to write addable objects (in C++) for selected developers.

I'm not sure taking the lack of popularity one game built with an inhouse engine, is a good indicator of the usefulness of a 64 bit coordinates. A bad game can be written using Unreal Engine too, and in fact most hobby games using Unreal and or Unity have limited success if any. In any case comparing an game to an engine is like comparing a Mercedes to a Toyota UZ engine. They aren't the same thing.

Gnollrunner said:
I'm not sure taking the lack of popularity one game

That's not the argument I'm making. There exist many projects that try to do the “full world as a game/universe" thing, and the size just isn't a draw. A user cannot possibly experience the entire space anyway – it's too vast!

My point is: If “implements a really big world” was enough to make a game/experience compelling, then there exist many, many, projects that should have succeeded, and this is one of them.

My point is also, at the higher level: A technical laundry list tells me nothing about how successful your experience will be. People buy experiences, not technology.

My point is: If “implements a really big world” was enough to make a game/experience compelling, then there exist many, many, projects that should have succeeded, and this is one of them.

Nobody is claiming that it is “enough”. I think it' can be a desirable feature especially in online games, but the rest of the game has to be solid. Also it's useless if you can't populate a large world with interesting things. In any case if there is no good publicly available engine that easily supports it, it makes developing such games much harder. Finally I've seen quite a few threads on various sites asking for this. One of them is on Unreal Forum and they are apparently finally working on it. My current DirectX code supports it but I don't have anywhere near a full engine.