Live data from Hacker News

The One Man MMO Project

onemanmmo.com

31–40 of 119 posts

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#31

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.

Mudlet and a number of other maintained clients now support TLS!

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#32
post #2

How do MMOs maintain and update state for tens of thousands of players and then push those updates from the server back to clients efficiently?

Sharding, and many other finer (game and architectural) design and implementation details. Few MMOs actually have millions of simultaneous players in the same instance of the world or boss or raid at the same time.

The MMO-lite I worked on was made to be as horizontally scalable as possible, and had extreme incentives built into the gameplay to push players towards actions and areas of the game universe that would more fully leverage benefits of the scaling trade-offs we made.

Being able to segment and slice the outbound data from your clusters (and/or what the client requests) - that is, the data and game state equivalent of occlusion culling - goes a long way.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#33
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In memory. MMO servers store all world state in memory, and each server has a capacity usually in the 10,000 player range. You'd be impressed how fast computers actually are -- 10,000 objects isn't actually that many. Since the server knows where all clients know, the server knows what the client can see, and the server only has to update the client with relevant information, like the 100 closest players to it.

> 10,000 objects isn't actually that many Yeah but these 10k objects are containing themselves many more objects (item inventory, proximity mobs etc).

Not just that, but you have to do physics and other calculations on each object and even between objects many times per second. So if your server handles 20 ticks per second, you only have a budget of 50ms per tick. Even on a beefy, many-core server, that's a lot to do in not a lot of time, and you can't afford to have any inconsistencies with performance (like GC stalling for several ticks).

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#34
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mbedtls is a bit annoying at first but the windows build process is less painful than openssl. ```powershell New-Item "temp" -ItemType "directory" -Force $client = New-Object System.Net.WebClient $client.DownloadFile(" https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/archive/mbedtls-master.zi... , "temp\C:\temp\mbedtls-master.zip") Expand-Archive -Path C:\temp\mbedtls-master.zip -DestinationPath C:\temp\; Move-Item C:\temp\mbedtls…

lets try that again https://git.thejoyo.com/JoYo/snippets/src/branch/master/mbed...

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#35
post #26

Wow, looks like he's been at it for a decade. I'm curious how much game development technology has changed over this time and if it outpaces development.

Probably some Unity3D starter pack and something like Improbable will get you there in few evenings.

You vastly underestimate the amount of work it takes to build a game, even with all the excellent tooling out there.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#36

I remember ages ago it was common to see the advice "don't try to create your own MMO" as they were one of the most complex game dev projects you could do. Are MMOs any easier to make now given the libraries and cloud services that exist today?

As you suggest, there's much more legwork already done on both the technical and design fronts that people can leverage.

But there's a wide difference between making a proof of concept and making something that scales+people want to play.

The former is much more tractable these days, and the latter - ignoring the difficulty of competition - is a bit easier but still a hard problem. Content is somewhat easier to create, but still hard to scale (and quality demands are higher to match the improved general capabilities and expectations).

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#37
post #24

Looks awesome! I actually created a MMO prototype before, just by myself. A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy. I used Babylon.js for the 3D game/controls, and I imported free 3D assets from various asset stores for the content. The backend was a simple socket server written in Node.js with socket.io connected to the web frontend via JS using the standard WebSockets API.…

content is almost always the bottleneck in any form of gamedev

Well until you hire an army, then it's quality, and tooling to manage content, then it's back to creative direction as the blocker.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#38

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…

Awesome...I also spent years playing/coding/admining MUDs, though the one I was writing never got very large.

The mechanics you mentioned are interesting; what kind of MUD was it? I got hooked on DIKU MUDs in 1990 or so, and still play https://mume.org:4143/ from time to time.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#39
post #24

Looks awesome! I actually created a MMO prototype before, just by myself. A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy. I used Babylon.js for the 3D game/controls, and I imported free 3D assets from various asset stores for the content. The backend was a simple socket server written in Node.js with socket.io connected to the web frontend via JS using the standard WebSockets API.…

> 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.

Re: The One Man MMO Project

#40

I remember ages ago it was common to see the advice "don't try to create your own MMO" as they were one of the most complex game dev projects you could do. Are MMOs any easier to make now given the libraries and cloud services that exist today?

It's easier to make a 2010-era MMO today than it was today. The problem is that "MMO" today now means a 2019-era MMO. Player expectations rise in sync with technology advances, faster even. So if you're targeting a AAA, tech-heavy genre like an MMO, it never gets easier.
Post reply on HN