Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people" • Hacker News Board

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#31

Post by pmjordan » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 4:53 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #29

pmjordan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-pas…

"As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-passionate about making games." That's funny. The CS program at my school is filled with people who want to work in the game industry because they love games. I have the same reaction as you--just because playing games is fun doesn't imply making games is fun…

My point exactly. The majority of them are probably learning to program purely as a means to an end. They don't really care about the tech, they just know that if you're smart enough to be a good-enough programmer, it's the easiest way into the industry. (there is often a certain mystique associated with breaking into the game industry. As a decent C or C++ programmer it's really not very hard at all)

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#32

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 5:13 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #21

anigbrowl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other). Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp ga…

Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't l…

Well the non-sharded aspect takes 3 forms:

- totally dynamic load balancing on the servers - cross-game chat at all times - cross-game market (well, there are multiple regional markets but distance is part of the game mechanic).

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#33

Post by ricree » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 5:42 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #8

ricree wrote: post #4

"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet" That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine. Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that ther…

Oh, there are a few such companies. Can't think of the names right now, but I did some research into this over the winter. A big problem is that the asset creation is very expensive, and balancing the economic factors is much easier said than done. If you are interested in this, Richard Bartle, inventor of MUD, is the leading thinker in the field. The best technical system that I know of is the stackless python one d…

I can imagine that asset creation might easily be as large an expense as building the technology.

However, one of the big killers of MMOs is problems with the launch. With some of these large high profile failures, they've already gone through this and worked out at least some of the bugs, so one would assume that this would make them more attractive to buyers.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#34

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Jun 04, 2009, 6:29 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #21

anigbrowl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other). Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp ga…

Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't l…

One thing has been bugging me about Eve lately: why are the "shards" tied to physical locations of all the same granularity?

If you made the unit of player interaction a "shard" this would yield inherent dynamic load balancing.

How about a space game that doesn't have any fixed locations of importance? Have space be huge, mostly desolate, scattered with raw resources. Everything is in terms of "motherships" warping between star systems, occasionally stopping at a system to gather resources. Players would berth their smaller ships aboard the motherships or at stations in the systems. However, everything of importance (resource spawns and quest sites) would only be reachable by hitching a ride aboard a mothership.

Most player ships would only be capable of warps spanning in-system distances. Really wealthy players would be able to buy their own "motherships." Motherships would be invulnerable to attack while in-system, due to the use of the drive fields in a defensive configuration. However, while in-transit between star systems, motherships are subject to "warp-intercept," which is the formation of a warp-bubble or "pocket universe" around the two ships when they get too close to each other in warp-space.

Motherships cannot be destroyed, but they can be captured. To capture a mothership, one needs to mount an attack with player ships and destroy enough of the mothership's defensive fields and guns to allow boarding. Boarding switches the game to an FPS mode, with the object of securing one of the ship's "command centers."

Some NPC motherships will be capturable. However, maintaining control of one of those will require a 24/7 presence. At the point that no players occupy the command center, a NPC mothership will revert to NPC control.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#35

Post by osi » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 1:27 AM UTC

thalur wrote: post #17

ricree wrote: post #4

"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet" That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine. Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that ther…

Could a viable company be created with the goal of producing and selling an MMO engine, rather than an actual MMO? You would be removing the expense and risk of creating the gameplay side of things (models, textures, quests etc), and could focus on getting the engine right. There would probably be some issues in selling the engine though: there would be a certain chicken-and-egg factor in selling an unproven engine t…

they exist. i work for one. the engine was built as we developed worlds on contracts for clients. once we got it to a certain point, we started licensing it out.

we term it a platform, as its something to build with an upon. all of the projects we've seen require extension and addition to the basic model we've defined to customize it for the project at hand. but we've baked in things that make doing so trivially easy.

http://www.electrotank.com/corporate.electro

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#36

Post by blasdel » Fri, Jun 05, 2009, 1:32 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #29

pmjordan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-pas…

"As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-passionate about making games." That's funny. The CS program at my school is filled with people who want to work in the game industry because they love games. I have the same reaction as you--just because playing games is fun doesn't imply making games is fun…

In school I started calling that CS student demographic "gamer scum", and the term gained some currency among my friends and coworkers/faculty -- students were allowed to work on games for their projects, but they were cajoled and were not expected to succeed.

I do admit to developing a fighting game once as a project, but it was with physical robots!