The most moddable game engine to..
<div class="IPBDescription">Create an MMO on?</div>So I sat down and was reading about how people seem hate paying for MMO's and the started to think about free MMO's and how most of them are a piece of crud. Then I puzzled myself on if I were to create an MMO modification which engine would be the best to use?
I pondered some more and it was a toss up between UT2k4 engine and Source although when it comes down to it I guess UT2k4 for being able to support more players. Any other thoughts?
I pondered some more and it was a toss up between UT2k4 engine and Source although when it comes down to it I guess UT2k4 for being able to support more players. Any other thoughts?
Comments
You would be best off making a very simple engine yourself that runs off of server-side simple spreadsheets.
Okay guys going a little serious here was supposed to be a bit of fun using an existing engine to get the best result possible. There's alot of mod teams out there trying to do this and just thought we'd have some fun poking at it <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
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<i>Fun</i>? <b>Illogical</b>
Stability, framerate and Art style over realistic graphics please.
<a href="http://www.worldforge.org/" target="_blank">http://www.worldforge.org/</a>
probably not what you are looking for, but I think you're going to have to graft hard to produce a free MMO.
<a href="http://www.nevrax.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php" target="_blank">NEL</a>
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Thankyou for owning me like a four lettered crude word which is used as cursing for female genetalia in England <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
Where exactly do you get the development editors etc. for the engine?
I don't think so- Source was said to have an uncapped player limit. Its just not optimized for that many folks, however.
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I'm pretty sure Source has a 256 player cap. I could be wrong though.
But either way, good luck finding a server to run that...
The only way to do that is do MAJOR re-work of some network code...
If anyone here didn't think the two engines were capable of doing MMOs then you're sorely mistaken. Lineage II, the upcoming Huxley, Chronicles of the Spellborn and one or two others are all done with the unreal engine. There may be more.
As for source there's at least one MMO I'm aware of being built with it.
Thankyou for owning me like a four lettered crude word which is used as cursing for female genetalia in England <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
Where exactly do you get the development editors etc. for the engine?
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I honestly have no idea. I know very little about programing. If I recall, there is some interface for Blender tor level editing or some such.
My guess would be from CVS though.
<a href="http://cvs.nevrax.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/code/nel/tools/#dirlist" target="_blank">http://cvs.nevrax.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/.../tools/#dirlist</a>
So I sat down and was reading about how people seem hate paying for MMO's and the started to think about free MMO's and how most of them are a piece of crud. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Those people should play something like D2, or other games which have that "<i>You fight rats, level up, fight more rats, level up more, then fight more rats</i>" type of gameplay without the monthly fee. (<i>Refer to the last part of this post for reason</i>)
Now to actually contribute to your questions, I don't think you actually need a server to support many people at once.
Have an official site which registers and keeps tracks of all character and all servers. Anyone can host servers, you can join any server from any mod.
It'll be like Battlefield 2 and their ranking system basically, if you need more explanation I can add more but I assume you know what the BF2 ranking system is and how it works already.
This will solve the major problem of running servers and finding enough bandwidth to support many people.
But this will also create another major problem, and that is concerning server owners, admins of servers, etc to find some way to 'cheat' their way for many levels.
<b>On an off topic note:</b> I still don't see why people want to play MMORPGs if they don't want to pay. If you're going to play the MMORPG as much as possible(<i>in terms of gaming/free time</i>), I don't see why you won't mind simply paying 50 cents a day, or more or less depending on the MMO. If you want to play often(<i>every day for example</i>), you shouldn't mind paying a measly 50 cents a day.
If you don't want to pay, because you probably won't play it everyday, or often enough at all, then don't play MMORPGs. They're time consuming, they require much work and effort to get anyway.
Most free MMORPGs, or 'MMORPG-like' games with no monthly fee(like Diablo 2, Guildwars, etc) are good at being a more quick and easier way of MMORPGs. Instead of having to kill literally one million monsters which each take 1-2 minutes to kill just to get anyway, you only have to kill just one thousand and each monster takes only like 10 seconds to kill.
Petco, your 'website' idea is what's known as a login or character server. The website is still hosted on a server that you'll end up having to fork out for (a free website wouldn't cut it) and the bandwidth hits in the end would still be pretty big as your website would be the central bottleneck for the game. This is the dilemma for any online game with persistant characters not stored on the client though.
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I know that you still need a good server to host the site and to gather information for each person's character, but it's a lot more easier and practically than the idea of having one server try to hold 200-500+ players at once and keep track of each person's stats, experience, etc and hold the gameplay at the same time.
I once considered a method of using IRC to even get past the problem of having to own a login/character server XD
/Neocron doesn't count.
//no, not ever.
You can make an rpg on most platforms, and people have, the question however is in regards to mmogs.
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There were these wild claims that you can make HL2 into a MMO. I think there was a few mods that were oriented around this belief before the game was released. I doubt anyone really put much consideration just how much work that would of been though.
The big thing is bandwith and netcode in my honest opinion. Then just make a server for whatever event is going on (For example, Warcraft Servers are structured off into clusters. So you have a character sever, a couple of raid servers, and two powerful realm servers, to my knowlege).
There were these wild claims that you can make HL2 into a MMO. I think there was a few mods that were oriented around this belief before the game was released. I doubt anyone really put much consideration just how much work that would of been though.
The big thing is bandwith and netcode in my honest opinion. Then just make a server for whatever event is going on (For example, Warcraft Servers are structured off into clusters. So you have a character sever, a couple of raid servers, and two powerful realm servers, to my knowlege).
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I don't know much about WoW servers, but getting hl2 as an MMOG would be a ridiculous feat achievable only when the game looks nothing like hl2 as it was meant to be played [i.e simplified to allow bandwidth and server calculation to cover everything occurring], or when servers and bandwidth have advanced so far that half-life 2 is equivalent to the modern day pong. It just wasn't ever meant to be an MMOG, regardless of the moddability claim.
I don't know much about WoW servers, but getting hl2 as an MMOG would be a ridiculous feat achievable only when the game looks nothing like hl2 as it was meant to be played [i.e simplified to allow bandwidth and server calculation to cover everything occurring], or when servers and bandwidth have advanced so far that half-life 2 is equivalent to the modern day pong. It just wasn't ever meant to be an MMOG, regardless of the moddability claim.
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Well, i'd assume you wouldn't be working around HL2, you would actually be working around the actual source code of Source. Meaning you can take any aspect of the game and work with it.
Turning HL2 into a MMO simply sounds like madness, the money you would spend around that alone it would be worth just using the Source Code and working from there, like many MMOs have in the past have done.
The source code is pretty well-defined. It wasn't an engine tech demo like doom or far cry, it was built around and for half-life 2. Yes, they intended to make it easily modable, but it's still a graphics intensive FPS not suited for MMO. You'd have to modify so much that you'd be better off creating your own engine -- not all that hard if you know how, but still a lot of effort.
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Cheaper, that's the big thing. It all comes down to money.
I've been eying Eve Online, then I hold my head in shame every time I look at it. Because my video card sucks and I want to play it.
I'm not quite sure why you bring up 'graphics intensive' though... if you're modding it you can set your own graphical standards and as far as servers go; they don't much care about what graphics are there as they merely handle the nitty gritty stuff.
As for 'complex movement', with the exception of unreal tournament (which has dodge moves and crazy jumping systems and stuff) most FPS games don't have movement any more complex than WoW; the problem would be more how movement effects the game when you have real-time collisions.
I'm somewhat curious what Planetside is like now :3
As for 'complex movement', with the exception of unreal tournament (which has dodge moves and crazy jumping systems and stuff) most FPS games don't have movement any more complex than WoW; the problem would be more how movement effects the game when you have real-time collisions.
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Well in WoW you have comparably large "minimum" movement distances so that there are only so many places you can be standing, where as in many FPSes the minimum movement range is MUCH smaller. WoW covers this up by allowing your computer to decide where you are standing within a certain range of this grid point before the server has to acknowledge that you have moved your character far enough to require that your grid-point by re-located. Or at least that is my understanding of it.