Can Blender do a MMORPG

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
21

I agree with Social.
But if you still plan to develop a MMO, then I recommend you to take a look at these:

“MMOG Considerations”
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2100.asp
This article seeks to provide an overview of some of the issues you should consider when thinking about an MMO project; to give you some of the questions you should be asking, as well as a few possible answers.

A Beginner’s Guide to Creating a MMORPG
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/building-mmorpg/
This article will focus on the first steps in building your own Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). It’s target is the indie game developer, with limited resources and experience. After reading this article, you should know what it takes to get started, and some advises regarding what to do and what not to do.

– This article was written by Radu Privantu, lead programmer and project leader for Eternal Lands www.eternal-lands.com, a free, open source client MMORPG. –

And maybe you find these articles intresting too:

Eternal Lands’ MMORPG Postmortem: Mistakes and Lessons
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.php
The postmortem of ‘Eternal Lands’

Interview with Radu Privantu
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=301023
Interview with Radu Privantu detailing his experiences creating the very succesful indie MMORPG ‘Eternal Lands’

Tutorial: Pre-development Planning.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78643
An intresting tutorial written by Social explaining how to ‘plan’ a game project before you ‘jump into it’, and why that is important.

Inspired by that tutorial, I wrote how I plan a project.
You maybe want to read it also…
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=79328

The Art of Computer Game Design
http://www.erasmatazz.com/free/AoCGD.pdf
Your game has to be fun… And developing a fun game is much harder then you maybe think. This is a very good (and free) book that will explain you how to do that.

Your technical skills are also important:

A Byte of Python
http://swaroopch.info/text/Byte_of_Python:Main_Page
This book will help you to learn the Python programming language, whether you are new to computers or an experienced programmer.

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary:
http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:
http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

Maybe these are intresting:

The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO:
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/index.html

Development in a Virtual Environment: A Beginner’s Guide
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/virtual/

Links you should check out:
www.gamedev.net
www.gamasutra.com
www.erasmatazz.com/Library.html

Good luck :slight_smile:

– Fenryal

22

My advice is to research the shear cost of setting up the hardware to run an MMORPG before you attempt to make one. This isn’t something you can setup and run on your average home computer. Here’s quite a good article I found after a quick search.

http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/busmodels.shtml

" Deploying the servers. This can also be millions of dollars, believe it or not. For one thing, the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have at home, because you want lots of redundancy, the ability to hot-swap parts out, all that jazz. You’re writing to disk constantly, you need a hefty RAID array, tape backups, etc."

23

That paper is so old and it is not true of today!

Just look at the many EMUs that are running of which one is swgemu that is getting along in it’s development. Oh and what about the free mmog’s where you might only buy for 90 days the right to have a pet that picks up your loot for you. ie Silkroad.

[quote=]
" Deploying the servers. This can also be millions of dollars, believe it or not. For one thing, the boxes needed tend to be pricier than the kind you probably have at home, because you want lots of redundancy, the ability to hot-swap parts out, all that jazz. You’re writing to disk constantly, you need a hefty RAID array, tape backups, etc."[/quote]

Also not true…

24

Old or not, the principles will never change.

Sure you can setup an amateurish online RPG hosted from your home computer with capacity for a few people. However when you aim for MMORPG levels… 1000+ people on a single server, do you have any idea how expensive that is to maintain? You need dedicated connections which don’t suffer from any blips in available bandwidth, or your whole server gets cut off. You need failsafe data storage so people won’t lose their characters, raid arrays and frequent backups. You need to constantly fix bugs, exploits, and add new content so people don’t get bored and quit playing. You need to support the players and listen to their feedback. You think a single person working in their spare time can manage this?

How many free MMORPGs hold thousands of players and don’t have a revenue stream coming from somewhere?

25

Just pay someone else to host it. Not going to cost millions of dollars unless you:

A) Buy a really well maintained server (i.e., they have their own sysadmins who run it for you)

B) Have really bad programming skills

or
C) Both.

Even still, I don’t see this costing millions of dollars. Maintenance is what costs the big bucks, not servers. Paying people to program games is why it costs so much to make a commercial game. Man-hours.

26

you tell them saluk… man i wish i had my specail apple back… lol

27

Not so sure about that as I remember when a PC was around three thousand bucks and now you can get one for what 600 bucks and is does way more.
All I mean by that is in time all things get cheaper .

Ahhhh deep breath, true if you are a BIG company that is what you do, but if you are not all you need to do is rent space on anothers server there are now about three companies I know of that maintain game servers for small game developers and they each have a business model that you can live with.

Well as you grow so should your cashflow so start small have a good game and business model you might look at SL to see what one person can do as there are some doing it.

Don’t think I am saying this to argue with you but encourge you that if you look hard work hard and just do it you would be suprised what can be done.