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The One Man MMO Project

onemanmmo.com

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Re: The One Man MMO Project

#91

Post by Jaruzel »

jerf wrote: post #48
hombre_fatal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy. A weekendware prototype isn't what people are talking about when they say gamedev/MMOs are hard. It's 0.001% of the work, it's trivial. Just as you, too, stopped at the actual hard part: building the game.

I'd also observe that an "M(ultiplayer)ORPG" isn't too hard anymore; not trivial, but something the tooling has gotten a lot better for over the years and something a lot of people could put a prototype together for fairly quickly. In fact we've seen a number of "Show HNs" over the years that amount to this. But the "Massive" can be a real killer. Even if there are to some extent off-the-shelf tech that can handle fa…

This is where the fakery in most MMOs kicks in - they are not really 'Massive'. Most of them have sharded servers where only a few hundred players are actually in the same world together. Players think there are a lot more as the underlying chat system (originally just IRC in a lot of cases) runs on a separate server for all the players.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#92

Post by romland »

cabaalis wrote: post #23
crtlaltdel wrote: post #14

love it! i spent YEARS playing and coding for MUDs and ran a few games as a solo admin/coder. imo it is so very satisfying to watch the global chat channels after a new feature/area/weapon/mob gets rolled out...and what the community thinks of it. i can recall more than one occasion where a well planned quest resulted in interesting dynamics after players started interacting with it. an example; one quest would add a…

Any suggestions on protecting credential transfer in a MUD? I have been wanting to build one but honestly I'm used to the convenience of HTTPS and the passing of credentials over a socket is preventing me from starting.

https://github.com/dworkin/dgd and https://github.com/dworkin/lpcssh

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#93

Post by Iv »

Looks nice! MMO RTS nonetheless!

A word of advice: if you want to make an easy immense graphical update, add shadows to your vehicles. Even just a dumb, circular flat alpha gradient under each vehicle. You would not believe the amount of immersion this adds.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#94

Post by Pmop »

Back in the day, I used to play a MMO called Faldon, which was developed mostly by one developer. I'm still astonished by such projects being done by one person, since game development requires so many skills; MMOs takes this to the next level.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#95

Post by __s »

bullen wrote: post #88
ThalesX wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the intro water texture, is it procedurally generated or artistic?

Ah, that's artistic and "stolen", so I guess it's not going to be a One Coder MMO: https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-analysis-a0... Actually it won't for sure because the skin mesh animation code was also "stolen" from a former colleague (they will all get mentions though) but I'm a bit ashamed to discover that I'm not good enough to do anything from scratch... at least not the first time around, is th…

Also make sure to implement your own programming language & OS for the game to run on. While you're at it you should figure out how best to craft transistors to create your own CPU. But don't make use of anyone else's ideas, you should figure this all out on your own. In fact, don't read this comment, it might give you ideas

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#96

Post by oestrich »

cabaalis wrote: post #23
crtlaltdel wrote: post #14

love it! i spent YEARS playing and coding for MUDs and ran a few games as a solo admin/coder. imo it is so very satisfying to watch the global chat channels after a new feature/area/weapon/mob gets rolled out...and what the community thinks of it. i can recall more than one occasion where a well planned quest resulted in interesting dynamics after players started interacting with it. an example; one quest would add a…

Any suggestions on protecting credential transfer in a MUD? I have been wanting to build one but honestly I'm used to the convenience of HTTPS and the passing of credentials over a socket is preventing me from starting.

You can wrap a telnet session in TLS pretty easily which then protects the plain text password floating by.

I've also been playing around with OAuth inside of a telnet session, but it's a little wonky as you might guess. If you're signed into Grapevine (mentioned above as well) this link will have you auto signed into a telnet session: https://grapevine.haus/games/Spigot/play

This is my draft spec (it's not completely filled in but the idea is there) https://gist.github.com/oestrich/1fc022a448c36ac2aa5a099f4ca...

Spigot and Grapevine are also open source if you wanted to poke around.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#97

Post by jhj »

MMOs are happily two orders of magnitude easier to write today. Before game engines you can license or get for free really existed, it was just you, the compiler, and a text editor, which rapidly turned into many people, the compiler, your editors, and pain.

I worked at Turbine off and on from 2001-2012, and was the MMO game engine tech lead in the time period up to when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online shipped (2003-2005). Both were based on the same game engine core, which was a more or less complete rewrite of everything in the game engine (client and server) from the original Asheron's Call. Many of the concepts carried over, but the implementation was completely different. To this day, I still think this "G2" engine got many things right in its internals that many other game engines (MMO or otherwise) didn't really get, probably because everyone who worked on it was crazy but actually pretty nice and reasonable to work with. Some friends who ended up working at Unity or Epic from Turbine that I've talked with think the same. It certainly made many questionable assumptions as well.

I got quite burned out from the rewrite (well over 1 million lines of C++ redone between 5-6ish people) and went part time/remote in 2006, left in 2007, came back in 2009 part time/remote again to help port the stuff to PS3 and Xbox 360 for projects that eventually got cancelled. My last six months (I stopped giving a shit at this point) was doing nothing but porting much of the client code to Mac OS X, which consisted of fixing endless compiler errors and patching up library/API differences in hundreds of thousands of lines of client code. This was actually kind of therapeutic because much of it was mindless.

I do smile a bit when realizing that code I wrote on ~16 years ago is still plugging along in some datacenter somewhere and on people's PCs, long after the company and the people who worked on it have scattered to the winds. Many of the core team that worked on it back in that time period went on to found some companies (game or otherwise), are working at places like Google and Facebook, or remained in the industry at Epic Games and Unity and various game studios.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#98

Post by vehementi »

jhj wrote: post #97

MMOs are happily two orders of magnitude easier to write today. Before game engines you can license or get for free really existed, it was just you, the compiler, and a text editor, which rapidly turned into many people, the compiler, your editors, and pain. I worked at Turbine off and on from 2001-2012, and was the MMO game engine tech lead in the time period up to when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragon…

Thanks for this. You may have heard that some time after AC was shut down, an AC server build somehow leaked and the community has now got a basically true/pure emulated server setup now. I can now go back to my first MMO safely whenever :)

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#99

Post by jhj »

vehementi wrote: post #98
jhj wrote: post #97

MMOs are happily two orders of magnitude easier to write today. Before game engines you can license or get for free really existed, it was just you, the compiler, and a text editor, which rapidly turned into many people, the compiler, your editors, and pain. I worked at Turbine off and on from 2001-2012, and was the MMO game engine tech lead in the time period up to when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragon…

Thanks for this. You may have heard that some time after AC was shut down, an AC server build somehow leaked and the community has now got a basically true/pure emulated server setup now. I can now go back to my first MMO safely whenever :)

The AC1/2 code was a pile of poo to be honest, but it still managed to do many things light-years ahead of other piles of game code poo at the time. Great concepts, but questionable execution (many people, many of whom were brilliant but this was really their first software job of any sort, came and left over the 90s, leaving their code behind. The AC1 software-only (i.e., pre-DirectX/OpenGL/GPUs) renderer and physics code were in large part incomprehensible, but they worked.)
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