61 replies to this topic

[imerso]

//
// Version 1.1
// AUTHOR: <insert your name here>
//
BOOL CUltimateAndEasyEngine::OnButtonCreatePress()
{
    // please edit the following parameters to customize your game.
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_DIMENSIONS, "3D");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_TYPE, "MMORPG");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_GAMEDESIGN, "ZOOMBIES | AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_SHADERS, "AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_OPTIMIZATIONS, "AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_SOUNDS, "AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_MODELS, "AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_GAMELOGIC, "AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_LANGUAGE, "AUTO_CREATED");
    pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->SetParm(P_ANY_OTHER_DETAIL, "AUTO_CREATED");
    // end of game parameters

    if (pUltimateAndEasyGameCreator->Create("MY OWN 3D MMORPG"))
    {
        pUltimateAndEasyBox->Show("Done!");
        return TRUE;
    }
    else
    {
        pUltimateAndEasyBox->Show("Something bad happened. Click button SOLVE_ANY_PROBLEM_FOR_ME to solve.");
        return FALSE;
    }
}

[imerso]

A comment about my joke: I never stated that a single person could not create alone an MMORPG.

The joke is because of the many many many many questions coming from people who CLEARLY show that they din't do a simple google search about the subject, then registered on forums asking TRIVIAL questions about how to create an MMORPG. Worse yet, asking for OTHERS to do the HARD WORK for them. For free, of course.

There is a pattern that is easily recognized by anyone who has at least a minimal experience with games development in general, of any genre: they are just LAZY PEOPLE, looking for the easiest path.

I will be sincere here, I don't like lazy people. And I don't like opportunists as well, those who enter a market with insufficient knowledge, motivated by money and/or fame.

That is my opinion, and the reason for my joke. And I don't care if nobody agrees with me.

EDIT: (and my english still sucks)

[alphadog]

sanman said:

Aphadog, I think there should be a thread that classifies the various games under categories which group them according to common characteristics.

The myth that would perpetuate is that the proper (sole?) gauge of an MMO's difficulty is the feature list. That may be useful for a small-scale, single-man effort, but on larger scales, it isn't relatively important.

[sanman]

"feature" is just a word. If you like, it could be a list of favorite landmark games that appeared, along with a description of why they were landmark titles. This could be another way to describe the evolution and trajectory of gaming.

[Luz Reyes]

Glad to see that this was made into a sticky!

[Nikke]

If you dream of making an MMO, go for it. No-one has the right to stop you into creating one. Just be prepared, and plan ahead so you know what you're up to.

[alphadog]

Furthermore, remember to sing "Kumbaya" for more cosmic energy to power your success.

Also, The Secret!

[Nikke]

alphadog said:

Furthermore, remember to sing "Kumbaya" for more cosmic energy to power your success.

Also, The Secret!

I'm sure your team did the same when they created this website.

[Dirus]

fireside said:

I think the real problem with stories in games is that the industry wants to let players ignore the story if they so desire, which makes it a useless fringe element. I've read all kinds of times in articles things like "they don't have to read this if they don't want, they can skip the cut scene if they want to and still play the game, you can do it the story way or just shoot your way through. If you can do those things, it's because the story is irrelevant. Trying to break up stories with branches, etc, really doesn't work out very well. It's just another way of washing out the story and making it basically useless. As much as we would like to think so, games aren't that much different than movies, however the player needs to discover the story rather than it being presented to a character in a movie. Which is where games seem to fail. They spoon feed it to the player in cut scenes that you can skip if you happen to drool and have an itchy trigger finger.

Actually.. Since this is a thread on MMO's The above scenarios don't really fit.

The main issue with "Storylines" in an MMO is that 99.9% of the time nothing the player does makes a lick of difference. There is a whole host of issues as to why, including persistence across shards/servers.

If there was an MMO that had a player influenced storyline I think a lot more players would actually pay attention to it. However as of today I don't recall off the top of my head a major MMO that has solved, or bothered to solve the issue of making the players actions actually effect the storyline.

[fireside]

Quote

Actually.. Since this is a thread on MMO's The above scenarios don't really fit.

Agreed. The topic had migrated to stories in games "in general", and that's what I replied to.

I'm not really an MMO player so it's hard to have a discussion on this. Mainly, stories are a group of independent missions that are under a higher mission, which could roughly be called a story. It gives the game cohesiveness and a goal and helps to maintain interest after the repetitive game play starts getting a little dull. Most games I've played, none of which are MMO's, the player had some input in the story. I don't think the player should be a little god that decides how everything works out because that's not how life works. Much of what we do in life, we have very little control over, but I still feel that story elements shouldn't be totally optional, because that, in itself, causes a separation and makes the game less interesting. I've always been a fan of point and click adventure games for that reason. You had to play the story, and because of it, the story was more interesting. You had little or no control over it, but that didn't keep it from adding a lot of interest to the game and that's something I find lacking in modern games to varying degrees. I think games cater too much much to people who are not at all cerebral. It's like a lowest common denominator but it goes too far and we end up with kindergarten stories. Bioware is kind of an exception and I'm interested to see what they do with Knights of the Old Republic MMO.

[rouncer]

An mmo isnt harder to make than any other game, in my opinion... its just that you cant even make a single game, let alone an rpg.

[fireside]

I think there's a natural progression form short games, to games with NPC's, which are sort of like other players, to social games that actually have other players and NPC's. I'm still at the NPC stage and I'm not that interested in social games because of the money involved in setting up the servers.

[rouncer]

I wouldnt know how possible it is or not to start an mmorpg all on your own, if I did go for it, and actually finished the game (what most people cant even do) who knows how successful id be or if it would crash and burn completely.

Id be rich if it did work tho. ;)

But im still working on modelling, I havent even got up to finished game stage yet... id have more luck trying to distribute a novel modelling package.

[alphadog]

rouncer said:

An mmo isnt harder to make than any other game, in my opinion... its just that you cant even make a single game, let alone an rpg.

There's a huge world (pun intended) of difference between an MMO and, say, a Tetris knock-off.

[rouncer]

I spose, I meant average aaa game on the shelf of the video store... nah, i dont think you could make anything there, mmo or not. right?

[fireside]

It's probably easier to do an MMO than get on the shelf of a video store. One person can pretty much forget either one of those things. In the realms of possibility, one could probably do a game for an online distributer like BigFish or something, or a flash viral ad game. Anything bigger and it's backers and teams and all that.

[Dirus]

Having worked on an MMORPG that was sold in stores across North America and Europe I'd say that the 3 main difference between creating an MMORPG and an offline RPG are $$$, Netcode & Database. With the $$$ being the biggest issue due to the Hardware/Bandwidth & upkeep costs etc. Netcode would be the next biggest issue.

You can forget Art, & Storylines as they're pretty much identical, tho a Offline RPG usually has a bigger investment in the Storyline. They both require a ton of art assets. Same goes for Character related issues like classes/professions, as well as skill trees etc. Items as well, both are pretty much equal. Quests.. same thing.

On the terms of a guide to creating killer MMORPG's I think another thing that a lot of people underestimate is just how many DB Tables an MMORPG requires. The first one I worked on we had 37 different tables with some aspects of the game requiring interaction between 3+ different ones. The current pet project I'm working on has 52 as of this moment.

[gillvane]

I think the original post is somewhat dated with the indie release of the Hero Engine (5K), Big World Tech ($300.00), and now the IdeaSys release of Hero Engine for no money up front, and a 70/30 split.

[ville-v]

People usually say here that programming an MMORPG is easy (like the first post did), but you need lots of money to have enough players or you can't call it an MMORPG. They say that means making an MMORPG is impossible and you shouldn't do it.

On Devmaster.net people usually think MMORPG means something with millions of players. But in practice MMORPGs usually have 2-4k players per shard (world). Because of their design, one shard may have different parts of the world on separate server machines and one server machine can have parts from different shard. Login servers are usually separate from gemaplay and chat servers.

Eternal Lands has 1.5k players on one shard, which is running on one server machine. Chat, gameplay and login are on the same server process. Login is threaded, but all gameplay is in the same thread. The server has been programmed by a single person. When the following blog posts were made in 2006, the game was 3 years old and he had programmed it on his free time. He is a professional though.

Some facts about Eternal Lands:

http://eternal-lands...s-complete.html
http://eternal-lands...new-record.html
http://eternal-lands...ers-online.html

"The new server is a Dual P4 Xeon 3Ghz
The old server is a Dual P3 1.2 Ghz"
"The actual server process [on the old server] took about 6.5% of the CPU with 600 connections."
850 players online, server load stays under 20%.
750 players online, highest peak in bandwidth was only 1.1 Mbps (out).

This means you can run 1k players on a $50 machine (not per month; in fact today you can get machine with hardware above for free) if you have 1 Mbps connection. I would count that as an MMORPG. In fact, I would count any game with over 200 players per world as an MMORPG.

[Reedbeta]

ville-v said:

People usually say here that programming an MMORPG is easy (like the first post did)

Not really - *certain* people repeatedly claim that MMORPGs are no more difficult to program than any other game, but the majority of us claim that they are hard to program.