The Future Of MMOGs - You As Designer?

Posted by simoniker on Saturday November 15, 2003 @12:21AM from the all-your-bad-game-design-are-belong-to-you dept.

Thanks to GameSpy for their feature discussing user-created content as the future of massively multiplayer games. In one section, Will Harvey of There Inc. discusses potential problems with more exotic player-created features: "If third-party developers [A.K.A., gamers playing the game] write games for an MMPG, will the code for those games also run on the servers? What if it crashes?" Elsewhere, Will Wright talks about quality issues after players create content: "Once we have the ability to leverage the creative process, how do we move that content between players in the most efficient way? There's always some content that a small number of players create that will have the most appeal."

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He does what? by quandrum · 2003-11-15 02:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

From the article:

Will Harvey of There Inc. discusses potential problems with more exotic player-created features: "If third-party developers [A.K.A., gamers playing the game] write games for an MMPG, will the code for those games also run on the servers? What if it crashes?"

This is a simple matter of programming. Your MMOG is a platform, just like any computer, and you should be able to allow user-space code to run and crash without affecting the underlying system.

I worked on a mud in college that allowed user specific code. The head programmer had written a light VM that ran most of the actual mud code. It sandboxed the user land stuff and your code could do whatever you wanted within the context of the syntax and you weren't bringing the MUD down. However, the VM was very memory hungry and really needed to be re-written by someone who knows VM's. He made it all up as he went.