Developers Corner

Originally posted by Blazeard

Hahahaha, this is just a funny post.  I'd like to know how old the poster is. 

Creating our own MMO is a dream most of us have here on this website, but it is just a dream.  Even those who are now "unprofessionally" working on their own games will most likely not succeed in creating a good game (by today's standards) and/or attracting players to it.  The technology level is just too high now to make a game on your own, back when the industry was only starting out - yeah you could do it, but not anymore.

Now I'm gona go and start my own thread on the topic I expected from this post...

This is a rather ignorant response. You seem to have the mediocre idea of MMOs, that it's all about the commercial market and they all have to live up to those standards. I'm here to tell you that your wrong. I personally wouldn't mind a modest player count of two-hundred. Since I'm working on the game by myself, I would hate to have 40,000+ players. I wouldn't be able to manage it.

Judging by what you wrote, you know absolutely nothing about MMO development or anything about the Indy side of it. There's nothing wrong with making an Independant project with a modest player count. Do I think my game will be a huge success? No. I don't expect much from it at all. But I'm passionate about it.

To prevent yourself from further looking like an idiot, don't try to tell people off about something in which you have very little knowledge of. You will continue to find yourself face down in the dirt.

I don't think the op realizes that any development people from this forum get into has 'we' 13 times in it's introduction post instead of 'I' 13 times in the introduction...  I'm pretty sure I counted that right.

I don't think that I am looking like an idiot right now, only because you got offended by my post, and am certainly not face down in the dirt.  You didn't even make a good argument for why my post was so offensive or why it is obvious that I know nothing about the industry.  Pretty strong words there on your part, which if I was a little more immature I would be tempted to return to you.

In any case, I certainly admire ppl who spend their time following their passion, and in this case I also sympathize with the passion itself.  I was simply pointing out that the poster who started this thread with a multitude of spelling mistakes and asked "everyone to help him create the best game evar!!!", when he has no idea about programming/game development, was not very realistic and seemed rather childish.

I, myself, do not know much about the innerworkings of the gaming industry, besides following the developments in it for the past 10 years, which is why I've started a thread on the topic.  However, I know enough about programming and the current state of technology to say that it is very unlikely for one or few persons outside of the industry without the sponsorship or patronage of a legitimate company to create a good game (as I said "by today's starndards").  It is not entirely impossible though, so by all means keep on working on your dream, but I will bet my house and my car that it won't be the poster who started this thread who will succeed in this.  If you and 199 other ppl enjoy playing a hopefully highly engrossing game in an amature (as I do not know of your professional qualifications) execution, then good for you my friend.  Please let me know when your game is ready, so I could witness your work for myself.

Why is everyone tearing down this kid's dream? I am assuming he's a kid... and a he.... I honestly don't have a clue... but anyways... you're all acting as if it's impossible for him to do this... while there are others who do it... yes, he's inexperienced, he's new... but you were all inexperienced at one point... but you soon learned... he probably has some good ideas that would make it... maybe you should start helping him make those dreams come true...

Originally posted by BurstDemon

Hello fellow programers, i´m kinda new in this so I am looking for some tips and help from the experts. I need to know which programs are good for doing this cuase I have no idea. But you may say I shouldn´t start of with something hard so can I help someone with there mmorpg? It´s cuase im about to explode becuase of all the ideas i have in my head so I need to release them, and no other way best for an artist to express them in a game so plz all you programers help me create an mmorpg so I can let go of all these ideas. You may even come to like the game...

here are some of the cualitys the game will have:

• It has to be 3D cuase all fun games are 3D (I might need experts to help cuase thats kinda too advanced for me)
• Yes, it will be PvP. But only in some areas otherwise you have to challenge.
• It will take place in a midevil/Futuristic Topic
• I will design the characters and worlds (with help of course)

The rest shall be decided in the middle of the building progress. Ok i hope you all help PLZ.

I am not a guru, I am a hobbist in game making like you. However, I think I can give you some advice here as I always have a plan of making a MMORPG.

1. Fund Raising

The first thing before you can do anything else is that you need money. Not only that you need money to make the whole game, but also that at least you need to buy decent game development tools even you'd like to build it yourself.

A MMORPG is a truly complicated game, so you can't make it all by yourself. That said, you need at least 5M, better 20M to make a competing MMORPG. Correct me if I am wrong.

To save cost and to ensure the game quality, it's better for you yourself to take up key roles such as a server programmer or a 3D artist, it's because when you suffer from fund lacking, they will leave you. So at least you can continue to keep it going during the period when your fund is running out. haha.....

You don't need to gather any ideas at this stage, as your game may take at least 3 years to complete and during which, ideas may come old and needs to be renewed or refreshed. You start to gather ideas only when you need them to be dropped in game. The foremost thing you need is a good game engine smoothly supporting your game world.

2. Hiring and Teaming up

You can do 2 things in parallel, to develop or to buy a game engine and to start your artistic works. So if you are a server programmer, you partner with an artist. It's kind of danger if you are neither a programmer nor an artist. Of course, it won't be a problem if you are rich. hehe...

For convenience, I assume that your are a programmer in looking for a group of artists. Don't hire them blindly if you want your game to be a good game at all. You hire them blindly if you aim to make a medicre 2nd handed MMO. If you wanna make a good game, hire them with a standard.

Say, I set a standard that each 3D artist will be able to clone a model from Lineage II in both modeling and animation, if he/she fails to clone a model up to my satisfaction, I simply fire him/her. You hire them to clone first instead of creating, in my theory, only those capable of cloning good artworks are good artists, don't put trust on them that they can create anything good if they don't know how to clone.

The trick is, MMORPG requires not just beautiful models but polygon-efficient beautiful models with beautifully written animation. That is,

Truly beautiful models = it sucks

Truly beautful models + truly polygon efficient = it sucks

Truly beautiful models + truly polygon efficient + truly beautiful animation = good

So if an artist knows how to clone from the models in Lineage II, he's an artist knows how to make good models, else you are risking your whole game being ruined by bad character models. The same applies to item modeling, if he can clone swords from Lineage II (with animation), he's an outstanding artist.

The artists now can start to create char models, human, dwarf, orc, elf are almost a must in every game. item models like swords, axes, hammers, daggers and etc. are also of a must in every game. So you start with those common models.

3. World Building

Again, you need a game world as bright as it is in Lineage II. I said, you need a *bright* world, please never make a world with dull color as it is in today's MMOs. Some may think that dull color = realistic. But actually dull color = boring. You make your world just as bright as in Lineage II. The effect is rather sub-concious and psycological. Anyway, don't make a world with dull color then think it's realistic, just like some other games did. You can actually make a world as dark at nights as in reality where you can't even see your own fingers, that's truly realistic but your game like this will be with no players, for sure. Trust me.

If it's possible, you can spend 5M - 10M to buy a good game world. The point is you have to figure out how to code things onto a ready-made game world efficiently. A good game world is never a big world, as the big world technology is not mature yet. I can't know more details about this yet. Anyways, you need an up to standard game world either by development from scratch, or to buy a ready engine then to build your world upon it.

4. Driving the World

The biggest problem in failure games like Dragon Empire, Wish and Dark'n Light is that they failed to drive their own worlds made.

Again, I can't know more technically about this. But I think that if it's possible, and in parallel of crafting your world by those artists, you may find a server testing method to generate an ugly but testable world model such that you can do some experiements on it.

With such a draft world, you can then start your server side works by adding network codes then try to figure out how efficient it is for your world to accommodate the "players". I think that you can do the testing either by establishing a network testing model to emulate the thousands of logged in players performing at least some simple tasks, such as gathering together to have some chats.

Alternatively, you may start a player community then hire like 500 - 1000 alpha testers to test out how efficient your game world can be driven. If your world can't even accommodate the 500-1000 concurrent players together in a dense area, which simply means you may have to follow the same failure path as other vaporware like Dragon Empire, Wish and Dark'n Light.

Then you widen the area to allow players (or emulators) to logged randomly in various locations then jump into a dense area then scatter again then dense again and back and forth. Then you can calculate roughly that how many players are allowed in how large an area.

Again, I can't say for sure how many concurrent players are allowed in other games. I assume that it's 3000 - 5000 per server under the current networking and server technology. If you aim for 5000 concurrent players, now you can calculate the largest size of your world which can efficiently accommodate those 5000 concurrent players. You make a world larger in size than this,  you will be doomed as Dragon Empire and etc.

5. World Size and Game Nature

If by test that you can have a relatively large world for the 5000 players, which means you can have a seemless world design. Alternatively, you can achieve a seemless world using multiple servers with each tackling a certain area, so to speak. You need detail tests again if you decided to adapt a multiple server model, as Dragon Empire failed to handle the multiple servers driving the game world.

If you don't want to take risks, then you may choose to create a non-seemless world, and a level-based system to put your player majority into those predictable areas matching their player levels. Level-based game with a non-seemless world is always the safest model to bet on. Correct me if I am wrong here.

Like I said, the big world model is not yet mature. So I assume that you are going to make a non-seemless world. That is, you somehow divide your world into segments and to drive them separately. The techniques, you will have to try your best to make this much less obvious to the players. Ok I am trying to make one here with my limited knowlege.

6. World Map

You can finalize your world map now on paper, then technically divide the map into fragments which will be driven by your server array efficiently. As you may have noticed, if the world is not a seemless world, I think you can make a very large non-seemless world driven by server array, the larger the non-seemless world is, the more servers will be added to the server array. Correct me if I am wrong about this.

That said, with a non-seemless world model and a server array design, you can virtually have a very large world. Now you/I start to desgin the world segments made up the world map.

In the game world, there will be 6 kingdoms, each kingdom may have like 2 to 3 cities and some small towns and villages. So I will end up with around 15 cities, some 40 towns and villages. If it's too time consuming to make them artistically, you may reduce the number of kingdoms, the number of towns and so on. Here I assume that you are rich enough to hire a large group of world builders to build the game world.

As in EQII, large cities are segmented, that is, when a player enters a city, he will experience a loading time as in EQII. It also says that the world is not seemless but zoned. Outside each city there will be a large suburb area, as large as it can be driven by one server. To double the suburb area, you may use 2 servers to driven two segments then make large mountains or rivers to separate these two segments. Then you make a road or bridge acting as an entrance between the 2 segments. These way, you can trick the players to think that it is seemless, as no loading time is needed to go from one area to another. However, you can't go across the mountains or rivers to make it a true seemless design.

I am not a guru, it's from my speculation that how thing are worked out hehe.. In fact, if the above "seemless" trick doesn't work, you can always make a gate to trigger a game loading when players go from one area to another, as in EQII.

To simply put, the game world is made up of segments. And game loading time is needed for a player to go from one segment to another. I think technically speaking, the player's toon is moved from one server to another in the server array. You need to make mountains or rivers and so forth to separate the segments. On the other hand, you leave roads or road blocks or iron-gates to allow players to go from a segment to its adjacent segments. I think this is how EQII and even WoW's game worlds work. Again, please correct me if am wrong about this.

You can also set up something like moongates in UO for traveling beyond adjacent segments. Say, in the kingdom design mentioned above, you can set up a moongate in each kingdom such that players can go from one kingdom to another through the moongates, as in UO.

7. World Conflcts

Now the following are designed;

You have 6 kingdoms, each kingdom has 2~3 large cities (zoned), each city has a suburb area made up of 1~2 segments, each segment is isolated with mountains and rivers with roads and bridges connecting a segment to its adjacent ones.

I also need a bundle of large rural areas. Each rural area are made up of 3 to 5 segments. I used these rural areas to separate the kingdoms, such that kingdom wars will be carrired out between 2 kingdom alliances. I also need another set of rural areas to form the base station for each race, say an elven wood is built in one of the rural areas as the base of the High Elves. A large underground cave reserved for the Dark Elves, and so on. Such that wars amongst races can be implemented later on (or put it in patches if it runs out of time or fund, hehe...)

Then I need several sea areas with islands of difference sizes,  each sea area is made up of 2~5 segments. So that the under sea scenaries can be implemented with treasure hunting, exploring, grinding and under-sea battles (more like implemented in successive patches). Two of the sea area is reserved for the pirates, such that there will be pirate wars amongst pirates and between pirates and the kingdom navies (so that your game will be hyped by gammers and fanbois as what Dark'n Light had, haha...).

Now you have your world conflict model dropped in, except for the clan/guild wars and conflicts which will be designed separately.

8. Demo and Test

Now you have a well-designed world with some char models including human (M/F), dwarf (Male only), Orc (M/F), Light Elf (M/F), Dark Elf (M/F), Gargoyle (M/F), Pixie (Female only). Some item models are also available such as swords, shields, axes, daggers, and some armors like platemail, chainmail and etc.

So you can put your char models to your world made, then you can do a demo in E3 and to perform another round of alpha tests to see whether your world is driven smoothly with 1000 players in each kingdom, which making up 6000 players in different races. Then you put all those 6000 testers into each single kingdom (one at a time) to see if your engine works properly or not. The you scatter and gather back and forth to further test the smoothness of game engine.

Since you already built your engine and char/item models successfully, don't miss your chance to squeeze some money/fund. So you give out some empty promises such as the pirate wars, kingdom wars, racial wars, clan wars and so forth to attract those big bosses then to raise fund out of them. At the same time, you further boil up the community by setting up empty milestones to say that, well, your game will be launched soon the fall this year, and so forth. Then slowly push the schedule to spring next year and so forth. Such that the hyping will always be kept up.

9. Game Features

On the other hand, you know that your game is quite empty yet without a single bit of contents. So you start to add features to the game. Now you need to decide whether mounting and housing are allowed in game. If mounting is allowed, you will need another set of char animations. While more likely, the housing should be done in zoned segments.

You can design the hundreds of mob models, and those rideables with char animations. Houses will be zoned and instanced. You can also design a house hierachy such that the higher a player in the kingdom's official ladder, the larger the house he is entitled to purchase. Say a common soldier can only own a small house, while a war commander can own a large castle and so on.

If your game engine is good enough in performance, you can even allow very limited houses in suburb areas or rural areas, or small towns and villages. They are thus not the instanced type houses. This kind of houses will be made to be the most expensive ones in game, with a dear upkeeping cost to sink money from the in-game millionaires.

10. Dungeons and Fortresses

Before you design the dungeons, you need to first decide roughly what kind of UI you are going to employ. Whether it's mouse driven, or WASD or both. Whether it's point'n click or other mouse control methods, and so forth.

This is because your UI choice will affect how you will present the in game camera views to the players. In the original specification of Dark'n Light, there's simply no dungeons at all. They didn't know how to design the dungeons before the UI was finalized. The fanbois didn't like the point'n click provided, while whether point'n click will be employed will decide how your dungeon design will be.

Point'n click is used in Lineage II, so that all the dungeons in Lineage II are so designed that they all look like a big hall, the big hall type dungeons are designed such that the camera views will be correct for a point'n click mouse control system. On the other hand, much narrower and realistic dungeons are designed in WoW, as WoW does not use a point'n click mouse control.

11. NPC and Monsters

Your game engine cannot be considered as a stable one without the spawning of NPCs and monsters. So you need to just randomly spawn the NPCs and monsters in large numbers such that your game world can be stress tested along with the alpha testers hired.

Then you need to place the monster and NPC spawners one by one in game, in accordance to your grind treadmill design and other features such as your economy design which may decide where the NPC shops are located with the shop merchants.

If you have a decent game engine with good performance, you can place more NPCs of various kinds into the cites, towns and villages to make your game world a bit more realistic. If on the other hand, performance is a potential issue, you reduce the number NPCs and make them standing like a log, as those NPCs in Lineage II.

12. The Grind Treadmill

Basically all you need is a standard sandwich battle system. You can make it abit fancier only when both server and network performance are allowed. You need to very carefully test out the viability of a combat system other than the standard sandwich one.

With your battle system at hand, you can now design a class tree then work out its balance, such that each class will have its own role in grouping or soloing or both, and/or in crafting. You may clone this from EQ or WoW to call your own game an EQ clone or WoW clone.

If on the other hand, you want your game to be innovative, you simply put all the viable ideas into crafting a brand new battle and grinding system, provided that your engine performance can accommodate its implementation.

In a grind treadmill, you have to carefully design the balance amongst how different classes climb up the treadmill, wh