General: Atavism Engine Launches --- Build Your Own MMO

SBFord

Neojac has announced that its Atavism engine has officially launched on Steam. According to press information, Atavism allows builders to focus on the game world without having to be programmers. Atavism costs $70, though builders can snag a copy for $59.49 for the first two weeks of release.

“Atavism allows game designers to focus on making their game and to not worry about programming,” said Neojac CEO Jacques Rossouw. “In fact many of our clients have been able to have a prototype within a matter of weeks. You don't need to have a million dollar budget any more to develop an MMO game. Our team, along with Unity, has already done most of the heavy lifting with pre-designed plugins for every system. All you need to do is setup what stats you want to use with them.”

Check out Atavism on Steam.

WhySoSerious

This is interesting. Though I wonder if someone like me, with zero programming skills, could actually make something that is playable.

Loktofeit

 

"As we have been working on this we have had over 400 Development Companies test and use Atavism already in the closed Beta release to polish and make sure Atavism meets the needs of what game developers want from a engine like this."

Whoa! Very cool! But... hmmm... this is a Starter License! Aha! I found the catch!

 

STARTER LICENSE (This Package on Offer in Steam) $70 (USD) 
- 200 Concurrent Users 
- All of the server code is compiled, with exception to configuration files. This build allows for developers to quickly develop a MMO within Unity by using the GUI (Graphical User Interface). 
- Base Build Licenses includes: Chat, Quests, Skill System, Basic Combat, Pets, Mob Spawning, Factions, and all plugins listed below. You also get a demo setup which includes 2 characters, login and character creation scene as well as a pre-build island to start with.

 

Wait... that's good news, too. WTF, man? Where's the buggy 'but it's alpha' early access sales? the flounder packs? You're coming out the gate with a working product? Is that even allowed these days?

 

 

All kidding aside, mad props to you for all your work on this, Neojac. Good luck!

 

 

 

 

JamesP

what they fail to mention is half the stuff isn't there yet or barely works... The ONLY decent thing they have going for them is their Building System that's easy to get up and running and works pretty good.

Sector13

INB4 "OMG CHECK OUT MY AWESOME SANDBOX OPEN PVP FULL LOOT ONE MAP OWNAGE YOUR FACE HARDCORE MMO" 

 

JamesP

Also they claim it supports thousands of players... In it's current state it will NEVER support thousands of players. Right now your lucky if it will support a few hundred. Until they add in the ability to Dynamically Load Balance the Servers it will only support a limited number of players... They have said that they will be adding in that ability sometime this year so we will see. There is also at this point nothing for Server side Collision, Physics, Path Finding, or anything like that. It's currently all Client side so Mobs still don't work completely right and they will go through walls right now.

st4t1ck

does anyone know if multiple people can create work on a project at the same time or not?

Raapnaap

I haven't touched it, and I don't intend to. But my word of advice to anyone considering trying their hand on creating their own game; Build your game from scratch, or license a game engine with less strings attached. There are a number of solid engines out there you can even use for free and only purchase a commercial license when you're comfortable with it (which, by the way, will cost you a whole lot more than 70$).

 

The latter you can even do for personal entertainment purposes, and trust me it can be quite fun and educational if you follow the whole process.

 

Gyrus

 

Key Features
As we have been working on this we have had over 400 Development Companies test and use Atavism already in the closed Beta release to polish and make sure Atavism meets the needs of what game developers want from a engine like this. With that we have already developed over 18 different plugins that allows you to customize your game easily without any coding and linked them into a Editor that you open up in Unity for easy access. Here is a list of some of the plugin features that's been developed.

....<snip>...

• Factions Plugin: Use this plugin to easily setup your different factions in your game as well as what their standings are to one another.

....<snip>...

• Skills Plugin: A full skill system which allows you to open up skills when players level up with XP or level up their skill by using it like the old UO style game play. The choice is yours.
• Abilities Plugin: Create different abilities for your players that can get when they have a certain skill. They can use these abilities in a wide range of ways from combat to crafting to professions.

....<snip>...

• Player Character Setup Plugin: Setup what races, stats and classes you want your players to start with as well as where you want them to spawn and how you want starter characters to look like.

EXPERT LICENSE Full $600 (USD)
- Includes Veteran License & Starter License
- 1500 Concurrent Users
- The Expert Build License is same as the Veteran License, but with up to 1,500 Concurrent Users.

 

And then there's this:

 

I think there is a game that needs to be added to your list. How do I submit this?

First, let us say thank you for taking the time to help us to maintain an up-to-date Game List. In order to get a game listed, whether you are the game's developer or just a fan who thinks the game belong here, there are a number of steps that need to be followed both in making sure that the game meets our requirements and in getting us the information that we need in order to list it:

Does it meet our requirements?

1. Make sure that the game isn't already on our list. We know that this sounds simple, but there are a lot of them and sometimes they get overlooked.
2. The game should have the capability to support at least 500 congruent users on a single server. This is not a reflection of the game's current subscriber count, but rather reflects the capabilities of a game's technology.
3. The game must include some form of common area where players can interact with one another inside of the persistent game world. This excludes lobby and chat room based interaction. Exceptions are made where logical (such as sports MMOs) that still fit within the spirit of what an MMO is.
4. The game must make use of persistent characters. This means that you should be able to log in after logging out and find your character as advanced as you left them (or more).
5. The game must contain some form of advancement.

So, what do we need in order to list the game?

When submitting a game to MMORPG.com for review for our Game List, we require the following:

• A visual representation of the game
• A transparent .psd of your game's logo
• A textual overview of your game
• A professional website, name of publisher, name of developer, press contact information.
• It can also be helpful (but is not required) to provide us with a 1,000 word + developer journal introducing the MMORPG.com readers to your game. Just a general overview of what the game is about and some information about what you feel are the stand-out features of your game.

...

 

So, for $600 you can now buy a developer kit that gives you a game that will get you listed as a developer on MMORPG.com.

All you need is a 'professional website' (gee if only there were tools for that too huh?)

 

MMORPG.com - you want to look at those rules yet?

Considering there are players who will spend $3500+ to get 'fame' by owning an inn, an island or a 'dragonwhale' I wonder how many will be prepared to pay $600 to get their own game and sub forum here?

 

st4t1ck

realized after, delete post

Pratt2112

Neojac...

Weren't they working on that Islands of War MMO a little while back?

 

 

F0URTWENTY

Great that's all we needed even more Indy mmos /sarcasim

 

seriously tho I don't want to hear about more amature developer's Indy projects trying to sell their alphas because they can't get an actual paying job in the industry. Looking at you pathfinder online.

Neojac

We discontinued Island Of War a few years ago as we moved to using Unity as a client instead of the one we where using and it was not viable to convert everything over to Unity. We are hoping with Atavism we can open the doors for small indie companies who might have a amazing idea but not the budget or man power to create it as the MMO industry is not a easy one to be in.

SlyLoK

Nice. Need to get the performance fixed though. It was bad to start then got even worse after the modular house was built.

I read that this was for Unity? Would people need Unity Pro to use this?

Quizzical

A game created by a studio that doesn't have any programmers?  What could possibly go wrong?

In my view, the biggest problem with the games that are released is that far too many of them are far too similar to each other.  This isn't a new complaint; it's been that way for a long time.  But when you pick up a "new" game and you're already 90% of the way to being sick of it because of similarity to other games that you've already played a lot, that's not a good thing.

The solution is games that go off the beaten path and try something new.  I think that's part of why I liked Uncharted Waters Online so much:  it wasn't just a knock-off of something else, or even kind of similar to anything else made in the decade that preceded it--or the decade since it launched.  So I wasn't 90% of the way to being sick of it the day I picked it up.  It's about the same reason why some people around here like some early MMORPGs so much, even if they had played plenty of non-MMORPG games before that.

But things like this go in the opposite direction.  Not only will your game have kind of similar mechanics to someone else's.  It will have exactly the same mechanics as a bunch of others doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way because they're using exactly the same source code.  Any creativity that could have made the game cool gets squeezed out because you're using an engine that doesn't support it and don't have the capability to modify the engine and add what you want.

I'm not saying that you need to roll your own everything to create a good game.  If you can license libraries that do exactly what you want for chunks of the game and do it well, then sure, do so.  But it's very, very important to have the capability in-house to do the heavy lifting for anything you'd like to do where such libraries don't exist.  If you don't come across any situations where you can't find the libraries to do exactly what you want, your game is a mediocre clone and should be canceled immediately on that basis alone.

Certainly, licensing someone else's game engine can increase the chances that you'll manage to create a game.  But sometimes I think it tends to decrease the chances that you'll create a good game.  And what we really need are more good games, not just more unoriginal knock-offs from people unable to implement anything original.

And that, of course, is assuming that Atavism works flawlessly with highly optimized, highly efficient code that is very well documented and completely bugless.  Which will never happen with a software package of that size, as any programmer could tell you.

JamesP

Originally posted by SlyLoK

Nice. Need to get the performance fixed though. It was bad to start then got even worse after the modular house was built.

I read that this was for Unity? Would people need Unity Pro to use this?

No it can be used with Unity Indie as far as I know though graphics won't be any where near as good.

JamesP

Originally posted by Quizzical

A game created by a studio that doesn't have any programmers?  What could possibly go wrong?

In my view, the biggest problem with the games that are released is that far too many of them are far too similar to each other.  This isn't a new complaint; it's been that way for a long time.  But when you pick up a "new" game and you're already 90% of the way to being sick of it because of similarity to other games that you've already played a lot, that's not a good thing.

The solution is games that go off the beaten path and try something new.  I think that's part of why I liked Uncharted Waters Online so much:  it wasn't just a knock-off of something else, or even kind of similar to anything else made in the decade that preceded it--or the decade since it launched.  So I wasn't 90% of the way to being sick of it the day I picked it up.  It's about the same reason why some people around here like some early MMORPGs so much, even if they had played plenty of non-MMORPG games before that.

But things like this go in the opposite direction.  Not only will your game have kind of similar mechanics to someone else's.  It will have exactly the same mechanics as a bunch of others doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way because they're using exactly the same source code.  Any creativity that could have made the game cool gets squeezed out because you're using an engine that doesn't support it and don't have the capability to modify the engine and add what you want.

I'm not saying that you need to roll your own everything to create a good game.  If you can license libraries that do exactly what you want for chunks of the game and do it well, then sure, do so.  But it's very, very important to have the capability in-house to do the heavy lifting for anything you'd like to do where such libraries don't exist.  If you don't come across any situations where you can't find the libraries to do exactly what you want, your game is a mediocre clone and should be canceled immediately on that basis alone.

Certainly, licensing someone else's game engine can increase the chances that you'll manage to create a game.  But sometimes I think it tends to decrease the chances that you'll create a good game.  And what we really need are more good games, not just more unoriginal knock-offs from people unable to implement anything original.

And that, of course, is assuming that Atavism works flawlessly with highly optimized, highly efficient code that is very well documented and completely bugless.  Which will never happen with a software package of that size, as any programmer could tell you.

With Atavism you have the option of paying more for your license which gives you the ability to create your own Plugins... Problem is though that everything they have done is so closely tied together that once you start coding your own Custom Plugins you basically have to code all of the plugins custom and your unable to use any of their Plugins which defeats the whole reason for using Atavism...

I created a Crafting Plugin for them that was included with Atavism for a while... They then decided to create their own Crafting Plugin and it broke the ability to use my Custom Crafting Plugin. They really should work toward making everything more modular so you do in fact have the freedom to replace different Plugins with Custom Versions of those plugins.

MMOman101

I think these types of projects will really help games and MMOs in the long run.  In the short term my guess is they will not be advanced enough. 

 

When barriers to entry are reduced there is an increased chance that someone will create something that makes an impact.  The larger the pool of developers the better the chance of a great game.

 

Yes there will be more crap out there.  That was the case anyway.

Melecon

Originally posted by JamesP
Also they claim it supports thousands of players... In it's current state it will NEVER support thousands of players. Right now your lucky if it will support a few hundred. Until they add in the ability to Dynamically Load Balance the Servers it will only support a limited number of players... They have said that they will be adding in that ability sometime this year so we will see. There is also at this point nothing for Server side Collision, Physics, Path Finding, or anything like that. It's currently all Client side so Mobs still don't work completely right and they will go through walls right now.

 

 

Here you might want to try this for your load balancing issues.....

 

https://f5.com/glossary/load-balancer

Myrradah

Originally posted by MMOman101

I think these types of projects will really help games and MMOs in the long run.  In the short term my guess is they will not be advanced enough. 

 

When barriers to entry are reduced there is an increased chance that someone will create something that makes an impact.  The larger the pool of developers the better the chance of a great game.

 

Yes there will be more crap out there.  That was the case anyway.

^{Advanced how? Graphically? immersion wise?}

^{Sometimes simpel things can be a lot of fun - Look at Candy Crush....}

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

ArChWind

oh cool another engine.

No programming needed just klink and play.

I wonder how many new kickstarter projects we will see this year.

Quizzical

Originally posted by JamesP

Originally posted by Quizzical

A game created by a studio that doesn't have any programmers?  What could possibly go wrong?

In my view, the biggest problem with the games that are released is that far too many of them are far too similar to each other.  This isn't a new complaint; it's been that way for a long time.  But when you pick up a "new" game and you're already 90% of the way to being sick of it because of similarity to other games that you've already played a lot, that's not a good thing.

The solution is games that go off the beaten path and try something new.  I think that's part of why I liked Uncharted Waters Online so much:  it wasn't just a knock-off of something else, or even kind of similar to anything else made in the decade that preceded it--or the decade since it launched.  So I wasn't 90% of the way to being sick of it the day I picked it up.  It's about the same reason why some people around here like some early MMORPGs so much, even if they had played plenty of non-MMORPG games before that.

But things like this go in the opposite direction.  Not only will your game have kind of similar mechanics to someone else's.  It will have exactly the same mechanics as a bunch of others doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way because they're using exactly the same source code.  Any creativity that could have made the game cool gets squeezed out because you're using an engine that doesn't support it and don't have the capability to modify the engine and add what you want.

I'm not saying that you need to roll your own everything to create a good game.  If you can license libraries that do exactly what you want for chunks of the game and do it well, then sure, do so.  But it's very, very important to have the capability in-house to do the heavy lifting for anything you'd like to do where such libraries don't exist.  If you don't come across any situations where you can't find the libraries to do exactly what you want, your game is a mediocre clone and should be canceled immediately on that basis alone.

Certainly, licensing someone else's game engine can increase the chances that you'll manage to create a game.  But sometimes I think it tends to decrease the chances that you'll create a good game.  And what we really need are more good games, not just more unoriginal knock-offs from people unable to implement anything original.

And that, of course, is assuming that Atavism works flawlessly with highly optimized, highly efficient code that is very well documented and completely bugless.  Which will never happen with a software package of that size, as any programmer could tell you.

With Atavism you have the option of paying more for your license which gives you the ability to create your own Plugins... Problem is though that everything they have done is so closely tied together that once you start coding your own Custom Plugins you basically have to code all of the plugins custom and your unable to use any of their Plugins which defeats the whole reason for using Atavism...

I created a Crafting Plugin for them that was included with Atavism for a while... They then decided to create their own Crafting Plugin and it broke the ability to use my Custom Crafting Plugin. They really should work toward making everything more modular so you do in fact have the freedom to replace different Plugins with Custom Versions of those plugins.

There is an enormous and important difference between:

a)  a library that has some limited purpose but makes it clear that if you give it this input here, it gives that output there, and you can stick it in whatever larger program you want, and

b)  something that wants to be the over-arching program that everything else that you do plugs into.

In order for (a) to be useful, it can do one thing or a few things, do them well, clearly document what it does, give you the full source code, and call it a day.  If you need what it does, you use the library to do it, and everything is good.

In order for (b) to not sabotage a game, it's going to have to be extremely versatile to not block you from doing what you need.  That's much, much harder to do, especially given that whoever designs a game engine can't possibly anticipate all the game mechanics that anyone will ever want to implement.

Quizzical

Originally posted by greenreen

Originally posted by Quizzical

A game created by a studio that doesn't have any programmers?  What could possibly go wrong?

In my view, the biggest problem with the games that are released is that far too many of them are far too similar to each other.  This isn't a new complaint; it's been that way for a long time.  But when you pick up a "new" game and you're already 90% of the way to being sick of it because of similarity to other games that you've already played a lot, that's not a good thing.

The solution is games that go off the beaten path and try something new.  I think that's part of why I liked Uncharted Waters Online so much:  it wasn't just a knock-off of something else, or even kind of similar to anything else made in the decade that preceded it--or the decade since it launched.  So I wasn't 90% of the way to being sick of it the day I picked it up.  It's about the same reason why some people around here like some early MMORPGs so much, even if they had played plenty of non-MMORPG games before that.

But things like this go in the opposite direction.  Not only will your game have kind of similar mechanics to someone else's.  It will have exactly the same mechanics as a bunch of others doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way because they're using exactly the same source code.  Any creativity that could have made the game cool gets squeezed out because you're using an engine that doesn't support it and don't have the capability to modify the engine and add what you want.

I'm not saying that you need to roll your own everything to create a good game.  If you can license libraries that do exactly what you want for chunks of the game and do it well, then sure, do so.  But it's very, very important to have the capability in-house to do the heavy lifting for anything you'd like to do where such libraries don't exist.  If you don't come across any situations where you can't find the libraries to do exactly what you want, your game is a mediocre clone and should be canceled immediately on that basis alone.

Certainly, licensing someone else's game engine can increase the chances that you'll manage to create a game.  But sometimes I think it tends to decrease the chances that you'll create a good game.  And what we really need are more good games, not just more unoriginal knock-offs from people unable to implement anything original.

And that, of course, is assuming that Atavism works flawlessly with highly optimized, highly efficient code that is very well documented and completely bugless.  Which will never happen with a software package of that size, as any programmer could tell you.

Bah bah bah bingo.

I've been in Web Development for long enough that I saw the rise of the framework. I can go on and on about this so look away if anyone is squeamish so I'll try to keep this shorter than usual.

The basic gist is that over the years more people jumped into web because of frameworks. What has happened is that the quality of websites has decreased. It's getting to the point where people scoff at learning Javascript because jquery exists. The main problem I've seen in frameworks is firstly it is such a rapid development tool that people don't take the time to learn what they can optimize... after all... their goal is not to learn code ... but create something NOW. This leads to bloated pages which are not coded well and are even less likely to pass validation because no one understands how to fix the validation problems since they don't write code. Why does validation matter? In the top of every document you have a doctype and that says - this is the language I will speak when I talk from my server to your browser. 90% of the cross-browser issues are resolved when the browser knows what language to work in and how you will be talking to it. You can liken it to a driver in computer terms. No but our designer will just add -moz this and -webkit that because they don't know what they are doing. That's just causing errors and unneeded parsing for the other browsers who don't use each proprietary tag making their shim even worse!

Secondly, the average webpage has grown to over 1mb as the average. Not just because of the frameworks but because the people making websites don't even know how to optimize images. They can't even tell you when you use a .jpg over a .gif - basic things like knowing about transparency and why you would use a .png or even the strength of SVG.  If their framework won't do something, they don't take the time to learn it - see responsive design. Ask a new dev what Bootstrap is and ask them what it runs on and they don't even know what media queries are and that they can do them themselves. All they know is Bootstrap does it, they don't care how or that they can do it themselves with 4 lines of code and some CSS.

Thirdly is the inherent nature of a framework. It is built to do lots of things. Do you NEED all those things. Maybe not but you can't decouple those things from the system without something modular. In web frameworks I've seen this with memory usage increase because of define variables which are constants - the system running your framework has to account for all the things it supports whether you use them or not unless it's outrageously micro-defined and structured well for turning things off which aren't needed.

Then there are the hacks... oh the hacks... at our web company we regularly have people searching for the login pages of websites which are based on frameworks. It's the number one visited page on any of the domains using them. You see, when you have a system and it gets an exploit and it's a template or a framework, the information about the breach spreads all over the web, into those dark places. Security by obscurity is not dead. How do I deal with my SQL injection. Only I know and it's not parameterized queries.

We also have the same problem with websites where so many look alike. I can sometimes guess the framework just from the way the site is designed and I can confirm it by viewing the source. 

This is the clearest example I have for a framework versus code. Company wants a website. Designer sends me over their prototype and it's littered with frameworks. I rip out all the frameworks, recreate the icons in SVG, optimize the images, and I take their prototype that was 2MB with over 40 HTTPS requests and I knock the whole site down to under 100kb and use my sprites along with CSS for anything I can put there instead of an image and it has 4 HTTPS requests. That's the difference of someone who programs and someone who uses a framework. It's monumental, I can't imagine how much impact is there on something as large as an entire back-end system. That company is large that outsourced us to do this because they knew that the sites their designer was producing were not good enough but didn't know how to say they weren't excelling. I looked at their prototype and I knew instantly, they were a designer, not a developer.  The users wanted everything fast and now and they deserved it.

Back to those people who won't learn Javascript, they are lost when they see my AJAX. They have no idea how I can process over 10k records into the DOM and progressively load things. For starters, I don't use jquery as an obfuscation layer. I go right to the core with the web standards from the W3C. This sort of thinking isn't something they comprehend. It's so disheartening that people think that programming is something you can buy pre-packaged and it will work better than what you can make when you care about it and this isn't your first month doing it. People don't get paid 6 figures doing code because it's so very simple. Once you get into optimization you have to think about every system involved and once you have to break out of using library functions because they aren't good enough, then you are getting your hands dirty.

Code in any form - especially traveling over the internet needs to be understood to be done well. I think what a framework will produce will sound similar to this. I don't see that gaming can be exempt to what has happened in web once frameworks were introduced. Those who don't learn from the past ... you know, doomed to repeat it. I expect a lot of MMOs to be like this if you won't learn any programming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2WH8mHJnhM

It's not a knock on this software specifically but the whole theory of a framework has so many deficiencies that it gives people the wrong sense of accomplishment because there will be hard things to overcome in producing any software and if you are waiting around for something you can copy and paste to make it work or something to download to do it for you then you aren't programming - you're playing legos with things other people programmed.

If you want a box of legos, that's what you'll get but it might not build the bridge you envision with the strength needed for cars to pass over it at your desired rate.

 

I've never done any web development, but I totally believe you.  Too many web pages manage to run so slowly as to convince Windows that the process has hung, even when all they're doing at a high level is simple stuff that would have been basically instantaneous fifteen years ago as implemented then.  Inserting enough layers of bloat, abstraction, and stupid coding can make that happen.

That said, it's far less damaging for web pages to be similar to each other than for games to be similar to each other.  If I go to a web page for, say, one newspaper, and the layout and structure of the page is very similar to another newspaper, I'm not going to be upset that the two web pages have a similar style.  If the site has articles I want to read, the style isn't a problem unless it manages to creatively break things.

With games, that's not the case.  If I pick up a "new" game and it's just like an old game that I've played until I was tired of it, I don't want to play the "new" game.  Changing the quest text and artwork isn't enough; I want different game mechanics, too.

ElRenmazuo

Can I use it to make single player games?

nebb1234

it only took 10 minutes to throw together that building in the video

 

*cough*