How would i go about starting a mmo

[ariejan]

Figured I'd chime in... (all of my second post)... creating an MMO is my desire, sure, but (in the unlikely event the original author is still here), my current project is "Making my 3d image render in a window", my next will be "Rendering multiple 3d images at specified points"... my first game goal is "two-player-no-ai chess in 3d with camera controls".

Unless you can make a game, and its playable, you cannot make an MMO, regardless of how complex said MMO is.

(For naysayers to me eventually developing an mmo, my idea for an mmo to eventually develop is, at least so far, a niche market that isn't inundated with big titles, and will require simple assests... though I'm not about to attempt it without help... but alas, its far distant... for now, I'll be happy when I get irr to like my ms3d files)

I think this is a *very* good approach. Know you limitations and start working towards your ultimate goal.

After you have learned a lot about 3D Programming, game design, maybe some AI and so on you can make a better decision about making the MMO you wanted. Either you reconsider making your MMO, and if you do make it, you'll make a better quality MMO at that.

[Ein]

I agree 100% with that, if you want to make a MMO,and you are happy to learn and are not in a hurry then great ^_^ you learn what your doing and make your way up to a working MMO, and also as long as your main aim is to see your MMO idea in 3D and playable, you can look back and see how much you have learnt ^_^. Thats what i'm doing anyway ^_^

[yamashi]

I am making a 3D mmo myself and the hardest part for me is not the mmo part but the 3D part ^^ .
Seriously the networking part wasn't that hard (I even wrote a paper on it, you can find it on the CUDA zone "Massively-Parrallel Game Servers").
But I am having some difficulties with the 3D part... probably because I don't know exactly how irrlicht works, I think that I wouldn't have problems if I made my own engine but it's too much work...
So I think that the mmorpg is over rated...
"yes you can !" but again with years of experience and a lot of reading.

PS : I am the only coder, I made everything using system APIs except for Irrlicht/PhysX/CEGUI/MySQL. So it's quite possible for everyone I think...

[Valmond]

>yamashi

That is cool, do you have a demo (or screenshots)?

And, why do you use PhysX?
I always thought that as there are latencies you'll be better off coding movement yourself.
Not that hard as you can't have Player/Player collision because of latency (tell me if I'm wrong here but
if I have a 500msec ping and you too, we will just snap around if we try to push each other for example).

[yamashi]

>Valmond

I am using physX because I want to use procedural animations and be able to get the characters to walk on walls/trees... And I also wanted to be able to have realtime destruction (but I will try that when I am done with the game ^^ ).
And no I don't have screen yet, I started the 3D part a few days ago now that my networking frameworks are done and that my server works and is stable.
I am having a few problems with the VBOs right now so I am kinda stuck but once I am able to figure out how to get rid of this problem, I will probably release some videos...
Also I haven't tried to load the models specific to my game so making a demo would be pointless ^^
You can have a look at our videos on youtube : Naruto Abunai

[SSShvb]

Hi
I need a little pointing in the right direction with mmo devlopment.
I want to use all free softwere in the devlopment but have it as a cometrioal product in the furtue, it needs a admin scripting engine and would use a cross platform server
Vbitz

check it out

http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorp ... /part1.php

[FreakNigh]

Well I actually do run an MMORPG and it is 5 years in the making and the playerbase still cry for me to feature crawl to my death. I didn't make the core graphics base though but I have expanded on it. I coded it 100% by myself so it's not impossible but I also am a super freak so. And ya people even pay and it's 100% open source.

I have no doubt I am such a super rare case that the next post will just be a continuation of how it is impossible for one man to take on the task of creating an mmorpg.

My quick words of wisdom (and should be taken seriously) would be to make the smallest core version of your game idea because it will still take months to a year so. Also make sure you keep giving out test clients and keeping people interested because that will be your motivation. Once you are done with the core game, THEN feature crawl till your eye balls bleed out!

Also there are many websites coming out that provide graphics asset packages for games, if you are a coder and not an artist then BUY ONE! To do the economic math for you, if it costs $200 to get what would take you 500 hours to make yourself, and your time is professionally worth $20 / hr. If you made them your self it would have cost $10k worth of your time. You actually save $9.8k, valuable lifetime, and your game has a hope of getting done AND looking smoking hot.