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1.3 - What is the "Wish Engine"?

The Wish Engine is the software that powers the ultra-massive world of Wish. It is based on ZeroC's Ice technology. Mutable Realms licenses this engine to other online games. Sui Tang Online, developed by Shanghai Cartoon and Shanghai Animation Studio is the first title besides Wish that also uses the Wish Engine. See our press release for more details.

Income from licensing the engine would be a pretty good reason to not give it away, hmm?

1.3 - What is the "Wish Engine"?

The Wish Engine is the software that powers the ultra-massive world of Wish. It is based on ZeroC's Ice technology. Mutable Realms licenses this engine to other online games. Sui Tang Online, developed by Shanghai Cartoon and Shanghai Animation Studio is the first title besides Wish that also uses the Wish Engine. See our press release for more details.

Income from licensing the engine would be a pretty good reason to not give it away, hmm?

Re: http://www.mutablerealms.com/screenshots/full_062. jpg

I'm no graphics expert, but the main thing that struck me was the way the ground sort of 'blurred' as it goes into the background. I don't know why they've done this, even the buildings in the background aren't blurred, so you have jagged buildings sitting on smooth blurred ground.

On closer inspection, the edges are terrible. See the horse for instance, it looks like it's been badly cut and pasted from another picture, with the cutting-boundary drawn by hand with a faulty mouse. By a blind person.

The shadowing is backwards as well. Notice how the buildings on the right cast (bad) shadows to the left, but the horse casts a shadow to the right. Or maybe the world has several suns or something.

And these are character graphics. Chances are they were generated from a set of various choices... so perhaps those particular characters just look cruddy because the eyes/hair or something similar look bad together?

This one isn't too bad, except for the hands:

The other reason that it's not feasible with Wish is that it relied heavily on licensed libraries/code from third-parties. Those companies certainly aren't going to want their code to be tossed into the wild, so it's not just code that's owned by Mutable Realms that's at issue. Just take a look at the list of Partners on their About page for an idea of how many other people's technology they were using.

More screens. The environments seem to be on par with SWG.

Technically speaking the engine seems to be very competent.

I was just going to post the same. There's more to a game than graphics, but decent graphics is pretty much a requirement today to attract the large masses of gamers, which is probably required to fund a MMORPG as well. With screenshots as abysmal as this , it being a beta is not really an excuse. These screenshots are for example from Guild Wars, which had a beta weekend event end today.

Come on, it's a game for 2005...

It would seem that was just a really ugly screenshot. Some of their other stuff -- particularly trees and grass -- look pretty good to me. Oh well. I don't play these games anyway. But I have been trying to add trees and grass to a game I'm writing and have found it isn't easy...

Around July, Crack first missed payroll. August came and we moved out of the office. September offered no new news, so we decided to call it quits. Rather than letting all that hard work sit around and rot, we released it to the public domain.

Judging from this screenshot, I think I can see why. Sure, graphics ain't everything... but competing with WoW and EverCrack2 (to a lesser level) isn't easy... I hope they had a GREAT gameplay to compensate for such... graphics.

From their FAQ : "No decisions have yet been made on the specific pricing, but you should not expect Wish to be on the cheap side. We want to compete..."

Some new MMORPGs coming out next year, such as Dark and Light and Wish should address some of these issues present in current MMORPGs. Both aim to have only 1 common environment for all players (instead of multiple servers which are they're own self contained worlds). And Wish plans on having unique quests (not having the same old quests everyone has the chance to get and following some solution guide to finish it). Actual change to the environment can actually be done by the players themselves. Whether or not the implementation is good remains to be seen.

Cute guy with his shirt off

The cute one has his skin off, too.

- Dragon
- Cute guy with his shirt off
- A bunch of players chatting
- A troll

If you're really bored, there's a whole index.

- Dragon
- Cute guy with his shirt off
- A bunch of players chatting
- A troll

If you're really bored, there's a whole index.

- Dragon
- Cute guy with his shirt off
- A bunch of players chatting
- A troll

If you're really bored, there's a whole index.

- Dragon
- Cute guy with his shirt off
- A bunch of players chatting
- A troll

If you're really bored, there's a whole index.

- Dragon
- Cute guy with his shirt off
- A bunch of players chatting
- A troll

If you're really bored, there's a whole index.

However, I've also had a bit of experience with the Java mapping. Let me tell you, the Java mapping is just beautiful. If you can find an excuse I'd recommend working with it a bit if for no other reason than to experience what a good CORBA mapping can be like

The Python mapping is also very good. In both these cases, the people really understood both the language and OOP.

I don't know what those who wrote the C++ mapping were thinking

It's a long and sordid story.

My first reaction to seeing the C++ mapping, as a fresh graduate, was that clearly it was written by C programmers who just didn't understand the whole "object orientation" thing yet.

In part, I was right. The C++ mapping was deliberately designed to preserve binary compatability as much as possible with the C mapping. Back in the early 90s this probably appeared to be necessary. I've never heard of anyone needing this *ever*, but that's the official reason.

When the mapping was standardized, there was the mapping we ended up with, and a competing alternative that was OO, intuitive and just about as good as the Java mapping. But, the C style "non-OO" mapping was perceived as "more efficient" for some reason, there were a lot of politics, the company who designed the OO mapping collapsed IIRC, and some large and influential vendors had already implemented the "non-OO" one.

So that's how we got here. I did go to the trouble of writing a code generator that was intended to "wrap" the standard C++ mapping code in a nice OO layer (and that used strings and vectors!). That was OK, but I underestimated the number of gotchas involved in the C++ mapping. Trying to encode every single silly arbitrary rule was a nightmare. Basically, I wouldn't try that ever again. But who cares, I've got the Python mappings and Fnorb, right? ;)

Now, if you want to get some idea of what a good C++ mapping might look like, take a look at ICE from ZeroC

Disclaimer: I *don't* work for ZeroC, nor do I have any interest financial or otherwise in them. I have worked with some of their employees in the past.

ICE is basically CORBA redesigned from the ground up without the cruft, and with a decent C++ mapping. It's available for C++ and Java, and free for non-commercial use. It's being used as the underlying communications engine for a massively-multiplayer game, "Wish" by MutableRealms.

I've always thought these multiplayer online games would be an interesting field for people who know something about distributed systems, as the first generation of such games clearly didn't have much of a clue about how handle this aspect very well at all.