IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released

Elonka writes "The Online Games SIG of the IGDA has released the latest in a series of White Papers on the online computer gaming industry. The 2004 Persistent Worlds White Paper (80-page, 457K pdf) had several contributors from across the industry, and gives general "developer to developer" advice, covering everything from a quick overview of major products, to design considerations on multiplayer gameplay and dealing with online communities, to technical considerations, to some stats about the international marketplace, including the rapidly-growing Asian market. Editors included Daniel James of Three Rings Design, makers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game talk at the 2003 Game Developers Conference."

Comments

WoW

[brianconnolly]

is WoW not in the report because of how new it is? how would WoW stats affect other MMO's rankings in this report?

Re:Good way....

[Bumjubeo]

Yes, as a matter of fact I did.

This will give people who wish to develop MMORPG, MUD...etc. but are just starting out the ability to see what has been succesful in the past. How much to charge per month, where they can release the games and be succesful.

If you want to develop an MMORPG, which im sure a lot of people do because they sure seem like cash cows. :) This is a very good starting point.

I think this is a good idea because im sure the MMORPG world is going to get even bigger and better.

Argh

[daeg]

I am bloody sick of the MMOGs as of late. I want some decent single player games that don't suck. I have enough FPS games to last until the draft of WWIII, where are the cool RPGs and innovative games?

I would consider playing an MMOG if it had a "single-ish" mode. I don't want to be disturbed by others, 90% of them are children anyway. Unfortuantely, they are necessary to support MMOGs as the primary clientelle.

Skimming that paper made me dislike MMOGs even more. Bravo, if that was the intent.

thesis project from 1999

[hin72]

My undergrad thesis with a colleague of mine, back in 1999, was essentially a very, very simple realisation of persistent worlds. We created a three-dimensional version of Pong where all activity in one-half of the arena (in our case it was a cube) was handled by one machine. The other half was, obviously, processed on the second machine. The communication between hosts only consisted of periodic heartbeats and the movement deltas of the paddles. Rendering, I/O, physics and the predictive calculations were all done locally (i.e., the machine on which the person was controlling his/her paddle). When we took one machine offline, the user on the still-active machine was notified but was permitted to simply bounce the sphere against the interior of the cube until he/she got bored.

Our game was written in C using Mesa (a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL). Our development machines were IBM boxes running RedHat Linux 5.x. We got the rendering code all working on Solaris machines too. For networking we used UDP and referred to the Stevens book alot.

The ultimate goal of our humble project was to split our arena into octants. Once all eight (8) machines were online we would remove N < 8 machines from the cluster and see how the remaining machines handled the loss of nodes. Because the network is no longer receiving heartbeats from a given machine, another machine would take responsibility and inherit all the process duties thereafter. Ideally, this transfer of duties is totally transparent to all who are watching and/or playing the game.

What drove our desire investigate persistent worlds back in 1999 was my interest in Quake 2 CTF and deathmatch. To hop from one server to the next the user had to explicity exit the server and reconnect to another. I would have preferred if I could seemlessly "walk through a doorway in the game world" and find myself in a different environment. In the background, of course, all network traffic came from a totally different host running a Quake 2 CTF / deathmatch server.

Re:Gordon Walton.. Customers come first

[Phrogman]

While there is no doubt that lots of problems can occur in these games, and that Customer Service tends to lack in its quality in most if not all of them - particularly on response times for instance, its also true that the players of many of these games seem to have unreal expectations concerning them.

These are the most complex computer games currently being devised. Balancing all the issues and features involved to try to produce something that feels fair to all players has got to rank up there with some of the more complex projects ever undertaken in programming. Players blame the developers when they can't resolve a balance issue, but they never take into account the complexity of those issues (because they lack the knowledge to undrestand them no doubt), nor the fact that for every single developer involved there may be 20,000 players out there generating problems or uncovering bugs while they play.

As well, these are now the crucibles for the new type of social interaction that is possible online - and many people elect not to act in a socially friendly manner but instead in a socially offensive manner due to their internet anonymity. As a result many of the complaints sent to Customer Service are in fact complaints concerning the actions of other players, not problems with the game. The games need to punish anti-social behaviour in the same manner that society does I think, and its going to take a while to develop models that let that happen. Most people are not into open PvP, or permanent death for characters although those features would resolve many problems if combined in a game :)