Morrowind like MMO?

#1 I wonder what kind of a nav mesh middleware piece you will license and integrate to cover a world like this?

#2 As of right now, my main and only concern is finding an Engine that can handle the massive terrain that i want/need for my game. I would highly prefer that i could make the terrain into a globe and have an entire planet to fiddle around with, but as i understand it, there is no fully functional engine that can do that.

#3 @Fizbin: Why is it not an option to zone your game? 90% of the MMOs out there zone, and those that don't actually do, but do seamless server hand-offs to make it look like they don't.

There's a problem that you run into with any of these engines which is floating point precision. That is, after you've traveled a certain distance from (0,0,0), your camera will shake and your player model will twitch, because the accuracy of its floating point coordinates will be inadequate. And that will occur well before you reach the edge of your continent.

#4 let's see if i can put this clearly, in my game lets say u have 2 points that are as far apart as oh say New York and California, in my game if the player so choose's they should be able to walk, run, hop in a vehicle and drive or fly to get from point a to point b. i am also going to need all this wide open space for mining, and for a person who will specialize in mining in my game, it will become annoying to have to load into a new zone everytime they want to mine somewhere else, they should be able to just get out and go.

if that wasnt clear enough, ill give u an example of a game that is currently very similar to what i want for my game. Project Entropia, now called Entropia Universe is the game that i am trying to base my game off of, except without the whole RCE deal.

I must admit im no expert at video game creation, i just have an idea, and want to make it happen! Most of the work on my game will be done by those that i hire, so im probly not exactly the best person to say it cant be any other way, if i can have the huge massive lands, without loading when going from one terrain tile to the next, or have the loading done in the background(i guess this is the right way to say it) as u approach the line for the tile/server.

maybe a better way of putting it is, i want to have a land mass a few thousand miles across, and as u travel it, u will never see a loading screen. maybe that says it better than all that is above

#5

Quote: i want to have a land mass a few thousand miles across, and as u travel it, u will never see a loading screen. maybe that says it better than all that is above

You want a seamless loading scheme, or else you'll have almost insurmountable problems. Also, how much money do you have budgeted, to be creating and populating a landmass a few thousand miles across?

#6 No, it is not going to be able to do what you want...unless you have the skill to drastically re-write the source to make it do so.

#7 Well my budget as of this moment is nill, however i will be starting a LongWall operator job before to long, a month or so, jobs starts at 100k a year or so(more for me because of school :) ) so money isnt gonna be that hard to come by. Basically what i plan on doing is outlining and raising the land mass over the water so i have my continents, then taking small sections at a time and redo them to make them look better and more natural, while leaving all that flat terrain open for mining, until i get around to doing it myself, and ill probably start with the small continent(and by small i mean approx. 100 sq miles) i have already detailed on paper then when i get done with details on that(hopefully the game can make some money by this time) ill start the bigger land masses with paid help.

I know cryengine 2 can handle what i want, but according to there website, i have to already have the game made on another engine and running before i can even think about sending in the application for them to review and think about letting me use it.

#8 T3D wont be able to handle a huge world in 1 zone.

Why this approach, when every other mmo out there have shunned that way of doing it, due to many reasons.

I have been in contact with myself, Harald Seeley told me they dont sell to 'unsure' studios and indies anything but CryEngine1 which is appropriate for 1-3 million dollar projects.

PS I have been working on a mmorpg for about 5 years with this engine. Its currently at hold, while we do another game. It was frozen due to us realizing that a mmo (which are to have somewhat quality) arent for < a handfull to make.

Anyways, good luck with your voyage :P

#9 Although, everyone here is correct, if you have all this "projected capital" in your future, there is no reason not to adapt your idea to the constraints of the engine(i.e. multiple zones). Only your preference of a single zone is your only hold up. We had to adapt many of our ideas to the engine, but this opened up greater possibility we never imagined.

Creating an MMO is defiantly a huge project. I read many people's post about their 5+ year projects, and there doubts of whether they will actually ever finish. In addition to the game design, programming, visual and sound effect, and other technical parts, there's at least a novel to be written too. I believe at current Torque's only has one running MMO, and Two others that almost ready or on/off beta testing(Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong guys).

But don't let this discourage you, the Torque Engine can be easily modified to anything you want. I've seen every type of game, and control system working with it and well. The engine also very forgiving of small issues(like missing animation, textures, sounds) that many engine will simple not operate with.

I'm sure many people have been slowed in their progress by the engines constant updates to new greater levels. We ended up making our game more like a plug-in, similar to UAISK, to deal with this. The last update to B2 took us 48hrs to do the rebuild from base. This in itself is an incredible feature of this engine. Also, the community for the Torque is unmatched anywhere. Without everyone, we would not be anywhere near as far along as we are. We began our MMO project (NightLife), last October. Although we missed our first deadline for public alpha testing in august (we found huge issues with the skills/movement system over the network), we are on track to hit our beginning testing in mid October, now. Now admittedly we licensed almost 100% of our art, and without Faust Logic and AFX, and UAISK, and many other add-ons(we licensed nearly everything, but now are only using the 2 mentioned by name in our project), none of this would have been possible, but these are just more great reasons to choose Torque.