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Build Your Own MMOG
yebb writes "CNet reports about a company called Multiverse that has just begun beta testing of its platform for creating and integrating online virtual worlds. They are allowing developers and companies to use their online framework to expedite development of online games. Their network is free to use as long as you don't make any money from it's usage, but they also provide open source client applications to use or modify as you see fit." From the article: "'The business model is long-term,' said Richard Bartle, one of the pioneers of online games and an editor of Terra Nova, a leading Web site about virtual worlds. 'Although Multiverse's software will help speed up the to-market time for companies, it's still going to take developers ages to create content.' While Bartle is cautious about Multiverse's business model, he's fascinated by its potential."
What are the technical details? Platforms? What apis are available? In what language?
It could be good if it works out. If not, at least it will let more people see that game design isn't about eating donuts and throwing darts at the "Nerf This" board.
What is really needed is a standard so that multiuser virtual environments can interact with each other and the communications protocols and graphics engines needed to implement server and client.
I say we should consider something like Ogre3D, some open physics models, take a look at various UDP based protocols and work out the multiuser framework.
If the Internet standards bodies don't take this up then Valve will end up owning the only viable engine that can.
If we ever want to have an open multisuer virtual environment like Neal Stevenson's Metaverse, then we better start now.
Comments?
How long before somebody creates a knockoff of World of Warcraft (ala the bnetd fiasco), and this company gets sued by [insert Blizzard parent company here]?
But seriously, what's to stop people from implementing their favorite games here, and what kind of liability is assumed by this company for providing the platform? With the current legal climate, services (such as Kazaa, morpheus, even bit-torrent) have been held accountable for copyright violations despite not having any control over the contents.
How long until the same issue effects this system?
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
I would think that Blender would be an ideal match for this, since they need a way for potential users to create content - models and animations, cheaply and easily.
LetterRip
True, the EXP model is perhaps the most outdated aspect in all of MMOGs, and user created content might just be the thing the push it forward.
If a certain MMOG consisted of a patchwork of user modules conventional EXP and loot wouldn't work as it is. To build off of my last post, maybe there could be some sort of economic or regressive reward system. Somebody creates their instance or whatever and a formula approximates the reward that each mob gives, or the reward for completing an instance or a quest in the instance, and this estimation would modulate as people run the instance. If people are having no trouble running the instance then the rewards and requirements become weaker, and vice versa.
This would also modulate things like Molten Core in WoW where people have it mapped out to be just loot farms. When an instance becomes formulaic like this, under my model, the reward formula makes the reward less and less appealing (as it is, Blizzard has to continue introducing harder mobs and better loot to deal with this).
And of course, it would help (in a way) to make all the modules "open" so obvious bugs or problems or impossible encounters could be fixed.
Maybe a part--but the biggest is sharing an avatar across multiple rulesets.
All you need is one renegade sysop handing out +127 boltlightnings or modifying stat points and the entire site is gone, all users have to reset. Do you trust others with that much control over your system?
I suppose if you really had to do something like that you could introduce realms where attributes didn't carry over (say, air, fire, water, spirit or some such garbage). The problem is that to make it work your stats and items can't carry over, but I'm sure that's exactly what people think they want.
Sounds sorta like the dream behind Neverwinter Nights multiplayer where you could build your world and link it to other servers via portals. In theory it would create a zoned MMORPG if you had enough people working together to build and host content. In reality though, it never came to be since it required more work than the average user wanted to put in.
User generated content is only good if it's made so insanely easy to do that it's a no-brainer. As soon as you make it so users "design" the content, you're toast.
The general solution is to have pre-fab structures and templates for users to plop down and then to some limited extent fill in *some* custom content (usually smaller prebuilt objects the devs provide).
Player generated content is the holy grail of a lot of MMORPGs, but the trade off in a system like that is so much work has to go into making a workable world for players to create within, and a system robust and simple enough to make creation accessable to players, that there is almost always very little GAME built. Look at Star Wars Galaxies for an example of that. It's a beautiful sandbox system (prior to NGE) that allowed the users to define a vast majority of the game world through the economy, player towns etc... But there wasn't any gameplay or real content in there.
The portion of MMO players who want a toolset to create a universe is vanishingly small. Most people want a game to play, so devs like Blizzard don't bother with the player creation and focus solely on game content.
Half life was built on a heavily modified Quake I engine (which still looks gorgeous to me). Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Jedi Knight II were built with the Quake III engine. Those were fairly popular games, as I recall. A good list of games derived from the engine can be found here.
But that's always how iD has been. John Carmack is a dyed-in-the-wool algorithm wizard. He writes very elegant and optimized code to solve problems, and researches data structures and algorithms heavily to build his tools the 'right' way. If you read Michael Abrash's Grpahics Programming Black book, he notes Carmack's obsession with optimizing his spatial organization routines and data structures - how he stayed up late nights trying out different data structures and algorithms to get the most optimal rendering time out of his engine. Unfortunately, while the engines are superb implementations of advanced concepts, for the most part iD doesn't push out the same kind of content that people like Valve can 'pump' out. They're just more programming-centric. But when a content-centric entity publishes a title built on one of iD's engines, it's usually pretty rad.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
If you've looked around any game creation forums, the idea has been mentioned at least a dozen times, but it ends up being too hackable, too bandwidth limited, and leads to fragmentation worse than a server split in IRC.
So no, I doubt anyone will ever get around to making a truly distributed MMORPG. Keep in mind that all MMORPGs are distributed by nature (as the client and the server both have a set of responsibilies), but as far as distributing the server part, it just gets too complicated.
But then again, there are different attacks to every problem, and distributing is just one way to deal with it. Others include clustering, and centralization, and both of the latter have proven to work better in the MMORPG case. Just because it works really well for sharing movies and high bandwidth items doesn't mean it'll work great for sharing game objects and such.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Plenty of NeverWinter Nights servers attract larger consistent followings with no advertising.
The only real difference between this idea and NeverWinter Nights is that:
This product supports ANY setting (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it support anything other than the vanilla fantasy setting they first thought of)
This product supports ANY ruleset (although it probably requires a ton of work to make it not support something other than the default fantasy ruleset)
This product is MASSIVE whereas NWN isn't. Although NWN or a descendant probably will be before they ship anything.
This product provides developers with an SDK. NWN provides developers with a fully functional IDE allowing a person only one skill (e.g. writing / programming / art) to contribute to or create a world.
This product provides a revenue model for content developers. NWN kind of does (they can commercialise a module you develop) but so far this hasn't worked out well for anyone except the developers of NWN.
This product doesn't exist. NWN does.
MMOGs already have huge issues with synchronization and lag even with servers directly connected to each other, it would just add a huge level of overhead for keeping everything together. Also, as soon as they don't have direct control over servers and all game information, the potential for cheating explodes. As it is, the servers only have to validate input from clients; if it became distributed, then calculations would have to be validated as well. Currently most games have worlds in multiple states/countries, so you can find a server with optimal ping. It makes the most sense to keep an entire world in the same area, so everyone on it has a consistent connection.
Yup, this wouldn't be exploited at all. First rule of online play: Never trust the client software with ANYTHING important.
Based on history, I would assume if it's not being developed for both Mac and Windows simultaneously, then it's highly unlikely that it will ever support Macintosh (or Linux for that matter). As a general rule, it's not economically viable to take an already-developed MMOG and make a Mac port of it. (That was the official answer to our question about a Mac version of Star Wars Galaxies, in fact.)
Almost all the MMOGs that have appeared on the Mac platform came out of a combined PC-and-Mac development process: WW2 Online, Shadowbane, Second Life, and World of Warcraft.
Of MMOGs that began on PC and were later ported to Mac, the only one that comes to mind is Everquest. It was so late arriving that EQ2 and WoW were already knocking at the door, and it lacked compatibility to allow Mac and PC users play on the same servers.
Another example is Neverwinter Nights, which is not quite really a MMOG but is similar in some respects. It was ported to Macintosh, but the whole Aurora toolkit was left out -- excuse being that it depended on some developer library provided by a vendor who promised Mac support but never came through with it.
Multiverse are setting themselves up to be the same kind of obstacle. Basically, they're creating an ecosystem that locks out Macintosh not at the consumer level, but at the developer level.
Apparently I'm starting to get too old for the /. crowd.
I made it through the entire page of comments (ok, only 2+, didn't read the others) and not a single person mentioned where this has all been done before in the MU* (MUSH/MUX/MUD/etc..) realm. You know, hundreds of players at a time in a multi-user game. Game services that did nothing but rent game accounts for you to build and run your own. All of the software highly customizable, with the better ones (Like PennMush, TinyMU*, etc..) having an in-game programming language that still has list and string functions easier to use than most high-level languages today have.
You know, the things that today's MMOG are built on top of? Heck, if you looked at Everquest, you could tell it was just a MUD with a GUI thrown on top.
This "Multiverse" is simply bringing the current crop of graphical MUDs back to the previous realm of how things were before some big budget guys starting spending the cash necessary to stick a GUI on top of some MUD software.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.