I had a dream...

[morunas]

... for me and I believe for the large community of ORPG players...

Imagine the following:

- Persistent self-developed world: everything is cause-effect based and the world generates its own stories. This means if castle A is destroyed it won't be up again within hours or days... only if someone actually rebuilds it and yet won't be the same instance. And means that there won't be two players with the same "unique" weapon from a certain BGB (bad guy bob). NPCs should be intelligent to their level (artificial intelligence already allows SO MUCH more) and actually take action in the world by themselves. For instance suddenly there is a scheduled goblin avalanche for a certain day/time that the server generates alone and the server monitor team can then supervise but the players just see it almost as if each of those goblins was a PC and not an NPC.

- Literal freedom of movement and world area state change: jump, fly, swim, climb, spin, pass walls, dig, modify landscape (scorch, destroy, bury, water, etc) AND fight by ourselves "as a choice" (still under the 6 seconds interval D&D based way). Wouldn't you love an arcane fight in the sky?!?! Or creating Prying Eyes (d&d spell) and ACTUALLY see many places at the same time controlling the eyes!!!

- Full D&D range of possibilities and open source code: D&D is the masterpiece in complexity where you can both make a pure fighter in 2 minutes and go hack'n'slash like some players love to or you can spend more time out of game  then in game planning development of characters or whatever. The races, sub-races and classes scope range is gratifyingly valuable!!! NWN1 is yet only a flavor of this (and same goes for the epic fail NWN2) and in my opinion, after 9 years of playing... it gets really low on possibilities. The open source would allow player-side development though still controlled by the MMOSP (mmo service provider ).

These three factors are pillars to sustain a NEW BRUTAL NWN. I just wish Bioware had eyes for this... it's not only my wish but it would fulfill every single user's requirements. Like NWN1, it should sustain different kinds of servers... RP oriented... Action oriented... and Arena oriented.

Turn NWN into a cloud computed d&d based persistent worlds MMO and add this three pillars I have mentioned (along with a good range of graphic possibilities) and WoW will find its end soon enough.

Oh... if I only had a development team and financial support... I'm telling you there is a big juicy space in the market for this!!!

DDO is so badly limited :S... Other MMOs are so restricted as well (WoW, Lineage, AION, etc.) and far from D&D's polished and well recognized status.

And there is technology and knowledge enough to build an amazingly powerful business engine under this!

Donations always work nice, specially if in a MMO scale...
And one could allow the public (as small companies) to host their own servers and build their own business within decent contracts from the MMOSP. The MMOSP would still have its own servers/worlds running. The public servers would be as development ground for freelancers (take CEP for example and all kinds of modding)... allowing the game to grow "outside though still within" the MMOSP.

I had a dream...

[Acacea]

Oh... if I only had a development team and financial support...

And the source code, which Bioware has already stated they will not be releasing.

For dreams like this I'd move along right past this forum and to the MMO forum, if you are looking for rays of hope rather than downer dismissals.

[morunas]

Oh but if it was in my power it wouldn't be a sequel on NWN... the name is nice but has a really bad history.

Other then that I would prefer to first make the MMO platform that abides those factors I talked about and then you can instantiate games over it. Then you could have D&D servers, Starwars servers, Middle Age servers, Anime servers and who knows what else.

The MMO platform should be an abstract view of all MMOs (just like abstract classes in Java). Pretty much it would be another MMO game engine but properly dedicated to sustain the modular complexity of, for instance, D&D.

Hence I wouldn't need their source code xD I rather implement my version of D&D. Anyway NWN game engine is outdated by 10 years!!! New technologies allow SO MUCH more.

Heh regarding the place of posting perhaps you're right... I didn't visit yet the MMO forum... thing is I don't wish to give advices to my competitors xD hehehehe

[Acacea]

We're all the same forum, so it's not like you are invisible on this one as opposed to the other

And anyway, while good ideas and aspirations, they have nothing that is mechanical or implementation-specific, and believe me when I say that we as players have a hundred thousand lofty aspirations that float right over those that have to actually implement them. Besides, they have their own plans, which may be along similar patterns of thought or may be completely different... but either way they're unlikely to halt their own developments to jump on a dream-cloud. It's just wishes for fishes discussion until it goes somewhere.

As for going somewhere, grab one of several free game engines and tools and get cracking... !

[morunas]

I know enough IT tech to know what's possible that's my study area Information Systems and IT.

And believe this "wishes" I have settled are not cloudy. They are REALLY specified and doable.

Regarding development as soon as I finish my MSc thesis have no doubt I'll hit this area hard nevertheless I'll need to before find a decent trusted group of friends to develop this with. I want to make it first as a hobby but who knows where it will lead

[Hellblazer]

Eh I'm sure the Mmo dev team for Layo could always use someone with knowledge. Not saying they don't have people already, but the more the merrier and the faster things gets done.

[morunas]

Btw, if you wonder how they're doable, in large words goes as follows:

Persistent Worlds: relational databases can hold this already. problem is the games are not developed to be persisted! All it needs is a big juicy implemented model of the world focusing on "thing" and expanding to "space", "actions" and "entities". A world is after all a system of entities that do actions in a space (entities that have no actions are passive, e.g. a basic rock). This removal of abstraction should stop right before you make the final abstraction so that the instantiation of whatever games over this platform can make their own definition of the final class. And how this relates to the persisted world is simple... every "space", "action" and "entity" has attributes... so if you cast a fireball on basic grass area XPTO123 it will be a "scorched" basic grass area permanently or until you water it or time passes and it goes to a "non-scorched" basic grass area again. Of course you won't host every single detail as that would be too heavy... but there are solutions for this ^^ you won't mark each branch an elephant passed by as broken... instead you will mark the area as "mid-broken" and then the game applies a certain visual change to it. Detail scale control allows you to host this and as well other stuff such as caching (the nearby user's computers have that area visual as scorched but the main server doesn't know that anymore as it will go out with some short time).

Freedom of movement: This one is easy -_- it's all about the physics engine and implementation over it. If you can move things in space you can do whatever you want in the implementation. The controls to abide this freedom is as well an ok peach to work with (for instance space=jump, double-space=jump+fly).

Full D&D range of possibilities and open source code: Oh come on! If you can put the race and class ranges of NWN why can't you put the hundreds of classes that exist in D&D and then world developers can play around restrictions?!?!?!

[Acacea]

I didn't say it wasn't possible; sorry if my reply gave that impression. I was responding to the notion that it would be giving advice to "competition," based on what you posted.

[morunas]

Ups hehe sorry then! Interpreted wrong indeed ^^

Who's developing Layo MMO?

I actually only "looked it over" long ago seemed nice... but I wonder if they have their eyes on the market trends or if it's just for fun

[Dorganath]

I don't think anyone's debating what's possible as opposed to what's practical.  It's the practical aspect why the available game engines either tend toward (nearly) everything you need to make a game in genre X (i.e. one genre only) as a sort of turn-key thing, or they give you a flexible but uncommitted framework, free of things like game mechanics, where you can make whatever you want with sufficient time investment.  To have both is a major project.

But if you end up doing it, rock on!

And the amount of artwork needed, meaning textures, models and animations, is definitely a non-trivial challenge to producing a turnkey game platform...or any game, really.

One thing also to keep in mind is that going for the AD&D target means a ton of licensing to be paid to WotC/Hasbro.  Even if you don't use the AD&D name, you will need to license any game made with a d20 sort of system....which is why our MMO will feature our own mechanics, designed and built from the ground up.

We are, of course, keeping our eye on the market trends, but that's about all I'll say for the moment. *winks*

[morunas]

Hehe well I definitely would choose to make my own game engine. In my opinion using already existing "free" game engines usually tends to be just nice playgrounds for creativity and innovation but non marketable stuff.

As you mentioned game engines tend to "type of game X", but if you want to be REALLY in control of your innovations you have to make an engine to "your type of game/business". I know that there are some really good, though paid, physics engines. Building over a decent one should be, imo, the best hit for starters.

I'm of course thinking without regards for financial support heh xD but my perspective is from some already known game company that should be able to support this. Regarding licencing... I am aware of that of course... but again I am not looking into financial details. For instance WotC/Hasbro themselves could launch this I gues...

Btw... who owns DDO?

I am definitely curious regarding Layo MMO ^^ but I must say that, as someone who played D&D and NWN since 12 yo (22 atm... so juicy 10 years) D&D is hard to put up with if not nearly impossible. It's more polished then the Queen's nails!

Ah and regarding the artwork development the business model of my idea should include players to be able to make their own stuff you would just provide the service to run it be an mmosp! Of course best would be to have your own servers already but using the Web2.0 effect would be the smartest way ^^

You partially do that as far as I know in Layo MMO forum don't you? I must look more into that. My idea was that you were relying heavily on drinking player experience/ideas to obtain a decent mapping of the mind models of what is good and that's awesome but it should be more awesome if you can make business of networking and network effects ^^

[Dorganath]

DDO was developed by Turbine under license from WotC/Hasbro and published by Atari, I believe. Speaking of recent history anyway, WotC/Hasbro hasn't seemed interested in actually making computer games, but rather only in licensing their IP and such to other game studios.  Atari's kind of the same way, opting to be more of a publisher than an actual game developer.

There are professional-level game engines that one can buy for relatively cheap as an indie developer to serve as a basis which come with all sorts of fun things like shader support, physics engines and all the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts that, if you started from scratch, would likely take you years to catch up.  So a good starting point is to actually license one of these things with a developer's license and use it as a basis, even if you modify it heavily.

Anyway!  Your dream is certainly possible, but it will definitely be a challenge.

[darkstorme]

This thread reminded me of a really good article I read the other day (I'm going to drop you in the middle but I recommend reading it all.  Heck, I recommend reading everything the author has to say - he's got a great narrative voice and experience in the game industry):

Five Game Development Myths Debunked - Should I Start From Scratch?

He makes a very convincing argument as to why building your own engine from the ground up is a bad idea, and I'm inclined to agree.  If it's what you really want to do, then go for it... but I'd definitely lay odds against you ever seeing a game go live.

I would disagree on your assessment of existing game engines:

• The UDK - The Unreal engine is gorgeous, and has been employed in (just for example) Arkham Asylum, Bioshock (I, II, and the new one)Borderlands, Mass Effect, Singularity, Stargate Worlds... and those are just the games I have some limited experience with.  Oh, and it's free to develop on.  They take a 25% royalty on any profits you realize over $5000 on a developed game, but given that they've saved your dev team anywhere from five years to two decades of development work, that seems fair to me.
  
• Ogre 3D is a solid, well-developed engine which has a number of commercial products successfully built, marketed, and released using it.
  
• Crystal Space 3D is not widely used by the commercial community, but it does provide the backbone behind what is arguably the most successful open-source MMORPG currently active, PlaneShift.
  

Any one of those would save tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of developer hours in their employment, and nothing restricts you from implementing your enumerated dream items within their constraints.

Also, DDO is jointly owned by Atari and Wizards of the Coast, and was developed by Turbine Games.

(Addendum: Incidentally, if all you want is NWN with all the D&D spells, classes, races, etc. (even the really broken ones), you need look no further than the PRC.)

[morunas]

Thanks Dorganath for the info on DDO

I admit I do not yet acknowledge the full extent of existing game engines nor their usage policies. Thanks darkstorme for the great insight!

Regarding Angry Joe (LOL) I've read it smoothly and I have my own quotes to give I'll just say something about the first one cause I don't have time to write more hehehe

Myth #1 - If you can code, you can make games? NO

Imho... his answer is a bit incorrect . Obviously the answer is no! A big round no... But regarding design process and development process... the actual best scenario is that they coexist. The existence of hardcore programmers made people think that design and programming are not aligned... that one is making the conceptualization of something... and programming (or developing in broader terms) is the instantiation of that conceptualization. That is WRONG.

The design process starts by exploring opportunities creatively (diverge) AND converging into product delivery (simple design process model). The development (including programming) is therefore part of the design process (check the design council)... so when he says "There's a section for programming, yeah, but there's an entirely different one for design" it's not such a clever statement.

Obviously one can make better games by experiencing the making, like everything else within human reach! But that doesn't mean one that never made a game can't make a really good one. I've seen companies being raised by guys still at the univ that had an idea and hit the success button.

Although experience is obviously a bonus for a game developer (who can program or not, that doesn't matter... he just follows the process) the main things, imo, that anyone needs to make games is (and I think this is clear to most people):
- General gaming experience (user perspective within the field)
- Capacity to target the market niche (who will play this?)
- Capacity to recognize user needs (known and unknown ones)
- Creativity and innovation
- Recognize concepts such as learning curve and user friendliness
- Make good iteration on the development divergence, convergence and testing steps with constant update of the first "diamond" of the process.
- AND Nice people such as yourselves to give external insight

And ya... I know... it all seems beautiful and once I hit the ground it hurts and seems impossible... and I haven't even developed games above "Asteroids" if you know it xD but I certainly have developed other distributed systems with soa and whatever blabla and I've recognized that "it won't be easy but you can do it, just focus on your process" makes it all a lot easier

[morunas]

Anyway I do petty that my study area isn't exactly game development :S so although all this "theoretical "...

... I recognize I have a long (but entertaining!) road ahead btw if I can be of any use for the Layo mmo count on me! ^^