If you think the an entire MMO engine should be written from scratch these days, you obviously have no programming experience or real world development experience. Sorry.
Someone has to do it or revolution will never happen DblDribbl, plus legacy code is really unwieldy and at times just plain bad. There must be progress and sometimes progress means starting from scratch even *gags on the word* Microsoft did that with Vista. It was funnily enough written from scratch (scratch doesn't mean they didn't reference of course).
What makes you think Vista was written from scratch?
What makes you think new code is going to be less "unwieldy" than legacy code? What makes you think new code isn't going to be as bad as legacy code?
The fact of the matter is that any mature development shop reuses as much stuff as possible and buys as much stuff as it can.
If you think the an entire MMO engine should be written from scratch these days, you obviously have no programming experience or real world development experience. Sorry.
Someone has to do it or revolution will never happen DblDribbl, plus legacy code is really unwieldy and at times just plain bad. There must be progress and sometimes progress means starting from scratch even *gags on the word* Microsoft did that with Vista. It was funnily enough written from scratch (scratch doesn't mean they didn't reference of course).
What makes you think Vista was written from scratch?
What makes you think new code is going to be less "unwieldy" than legacy code? What makes you think new code isn't going to be as bad as legacy code?
The fact of the matter is that any mature development shop reuses as much stuff as possible and buys as much stuff as it can.
I guess thats what object oriented programming is all about, but to me it just seems to make things more complicated because there is a lack of good docmunentation on how to use the objects more often then not.
MMORPG developers spend a ton of time making an engine from scratch, and THEN making the game that will run on that engine. Shouldnt' they spend their time and effort on the game design, and less time making the engine if there's one they can just purchase and use?
Vanguard sort of did this with the Unreal Engine, but they monkeyed around with the Engine so much they screwed it up and made it laggy and buggy.
Dark and Light was a flop. They used the BigWorld Tech engine. The engine sounds solid, so I'm not sure, but I think the devs of Dark and Light managed to take a decent engine, and use it to make a piss poor game. On the otherhand, perhaps the Bigworld Engine isn't suited for making a good MMORPG?
I think Vanguard should have used the Bigworld engine, instead of trying to jury rig the Unreal engine to make it do what they wanted. They spent a lot of time trying to make the Unreal engine jump thru hoops, but if I'm not mistaken the Bigworld engine already does most of what they would have needed. Then they could have concentrated on just making the game, and actually adding all those features they listed, instead of trying to fix bugs and worrying about "chunking" problems.
I know MMORPG engines might be a sort of esoteric subject, but I'd like to see someone else use the Bigworld engine to make a good game. It looks like it has a lot of potential in the hands fo the right developers.
They didn’t monkey with the internal workings of the Unreal engine other then to give it the capability to work within a seamless world, something it can’t do out of the box.
The performance problems in Vanguard are a result of pushing view distances and the number of objects and textures far beyond what the Unreal engine can handle. When the data required to render a game fits nicely in video memory the Unreal engine runs great, but Vanguard goes WAY beyond this because of the large number of objects, textures and characters long view distances and seamless worlds require.
Simply put today’s computer hardware simple can’t handle high resolutions and ultra long view distances in a large seamless world. You have more leeway if you don’t make the game seamless but otherwise you need to keep view distances short, resolutions relatively low and textures/objects localized and limited in number.
Dark and Light was a flop. They used the BigWorld Tech engine. The engine sounds solid, so I'm not sure, but I think the devs of Dark and Light managed to take a decent engine, and use it to make a piss poor game. On the otherhand, perhaps the Bigworld Engine isn't suited for making a good MMORPG?
Just a clarification, they did not use the BigWorld Engine, they only used the BigWorld server technology. They have their own engine that is called Mafate.
And Mafate is actually Vworld, or some such stuff.
Both companies tried to modify an engine they didn't create.
This is actually a subject I have a lot of interest in.
The first issue is of any game is the engine. Now the engine can work for you or against you as a game designer. Let’s look at some examples where a good engine can work against you. The first example that springs to mind is DukeNukem Forever. There is a perfect example of where you can get lost chasing the perfect engine for your game. After being on track in the game development ID decided that they needed to go next gen so switched game engines halfway through development. That was 10 years ago and look at the game now. Ok, is the reason there is no game is the right question but you can not blame it on the engine because great games have been developed on it since then.
A different example of where a game was developed from a game engine was Tribes which was based on the garage games torque engine. This is one example of where a game was successfully developed using a purchased game engine. Now one could argue that Counter Strike is another example of where a game was developed on a game engine not developed in-house but CS is actually a TC (total conversion) much like the TCs we used to build off the old Ken’s build. (DN3 engine). Now this is kind of an important point, does a game need to make money to be considered a viable game? Let me qualify my statement here. One of the first TC I created was a conversion of all of my old D&D games. Using the Ken’ build engine I took every map and created them as well as creating all the monsters as sprites so that you could actually play all the AD&D encounters as long as you had DN3. My second TC was the old Sega genesis ShadowRUN. I recreated all the maps of Seattle as well as the wilderness for DN3.
The point is I do believe that you can purchase a game engine and make a game. Making a game is easy on a 3rd party engine, making a game fun is not. I mentioned two of my TC’s because while these were actually easy to make, time intensive but easy, they were only fun for the first run through. See that’s the trick, making the game have replay ability and that has nothing to do with the game engine.
Before I move on to talking about game play I want to clarify that there are actually two issues, fun and replay ability. Now while the game engine does not affect replay ability that much it does affect fun a lot. If you use an engine that was not designed for more than 60 players in an area the effect is lag, glitches and CTD and that’s no fun.
This brings us to MMOGS and MMORPGS in particular. As long as the game engine is designed to handle a MMOG then it should be no problem creating a game. The thing to keep in mind is that a game engine is simply a platform which is all the hooks and tools and OPS you need to build a game. Now coding and importing models and skins as well as effects are a different issue but in most cases done by the game designer not the engine developer (who only provided the hooks). The point here is that a laggy game could be that the game engine can not handle the load but usually is simply poor programming or improper use of the hooks by the developer.
This brings us to game play. This is what actually makes or breaks the title, is the game play sufficient to balance out any “supposed” deficits in the game? What makes WOW such a popular game is the perfect balance between graphics, ease of use, stability and replay ability. On the flip side, what hurts Vanguard is that the graphic by them selves do not balance the rest.
One last thing, people talk about instances as a bad thing, this is probably because they don’t actually understand what an Instance is or they assume that instances mean closed instances such as WOW’s quest ones. Instances can also be open such as the tramway in WOW or any of EVE’s systems. EVE is a perfect example of the use of open instances. The common misconception is that EVE is one server and one seamless universe it is not, it is 1 shard comprised of open instances across a lot of servers. When you go from one star system to another you are not only going from one instance to another but often are going from one server to another. A closed instance can reset an open one does not. IE: in an open instance game if you drop a sword it will stay there until it is picked up by some one or some thing. Another example of this is a D2 map, you could go drop an item in a corner and as long as someone is in the game you could come back a week later and your item would still be there. Also everyone that was eligible (map has no lvl rest) could have come into the map (instance) played while others cycle through for the week.
eRR back on topic, in this case I do not beleave that the Unreal engine was designed for MMOGs as I have only see a max of 128 people on any game that used it, and really more than 64 on the map was laggy.
Comments
What makes you think Vista was written from scratch?
What makes you think new code is going to be less "unwieldy" than legacy code? What makes you think new code isn't going to be as bad as legacy code?
The fact of the matter is that any mature development shop reuses as much stuff as possible and buys as much stuff as it can.
What makes you think Vista was written from scratch?
What makes you think new code is going to be less "unwieldy" than legacy code? What makes you think new code isn't going to be as bad as legacy code?
The fact of the matter is that any mature development shop reuses as much stuff as possible and buys as much stuff as it can.
I guess thats what object oriented programming is all about, but to me it just seems to make things more complicated because there is a lack of good docmunentation on how to use the objects more often then not.
And Mafate is actually Vworld, or some such stuff.
Both companies tried to modify an engine they didn't create.
Wish Darkfall would release.
An so it begins
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.[/CENTER]