Game Development Community

Importing an MMO from another product

by Flybynight Studios · in General Discussion · 05/29/2004 (3:55 pm) · 3 replies

Our project has grown beyond the capacity of our original development engine and we are trying to eval other products. Several of the devs have had some interaciton with Torque and so far it looks very impressive. Things that are a big plus are the source and the built in network code.

Our backend DBs are all mySQL (currently we are using our own C++ DLL interface which it sounds like we could drop into the source with minor mods), an IRC based chat plguin (again C++ that we *should* be able to drop into the source) and literally thousands of lines of custom scripting.

The scripting we can deal with. What I was wondering about is what sort of logistical problems we are going to potentially encounter with the engine in an MMO envrion?

Some targets we are striving for:
-Zone based world - not seamless.
-200-400 AI NPCs (MoBs) per zone.
-100 player entities per "zone"
-Extensive item and inventory DB and extensive player advancement, combat skill and craft skill engines.
-Dynamic respawn engines.
-Dynamic loot tables.
-100% persistance of the zones

Any feedback the community can offer me on this would be greatly accepted. We have a significant investment both financially and indev man hours in our current product but programming around and patching the inherant flaws in the Conitec 3DGS engine is getting to be extremely counter productive. We've got an active dev team of 10 persons with another 10+ people who are less active but assist with some application program and database development. This will be a very serious decision we have to make and I'd like to hear about the pitfalls before we are into this for another several thousand dollars. =)

Thanks in advance folks. I can be reached for IM chat if you have some feedback for me at slyxsith at hotmail dot com. Or email at markm at aakrana dot com.

Cheers,
Mark

Aakrana: The Forgotten Lands
http://www.aakrana.com
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Torque 3D Owner Gareth Davies
#1
05/30/2004 (8:22 am)
It's nice to know there's at least some realism in your timescales / figures. I personally think torque would be good for you. Obviously having the source is a huge advantage, and if you've come this way on another engine without it you'll be laughing. Torque however is not small at all, so it may take some time to pickup.

There's actually a good amount of conversation on this topic, it may take some time to find the meat from the flames though.

Here's my attempt at some bullet answers:

- mySQL intergration should be fine (there's already some resources that do this). Same with IRC (infact Lore uses it extensively)

- Zones are good ;) Seamless is far more difficult than it's worth. Torque's scale is fairly large so you'll probably be ok. It's not so good for extensive cities because of the culling. However i'd expect some resources / content packs to turn up and solve this.

- The default AI is fairly heavy. You can probably reduce this to be much less.

- 100 Players isn't really an issue for torque, but in it's default config they'll require a really serious server. Remember torque's 'default' is a real time system, not a low bandwidth 'tick' system used in most MMO's.

The rest is really your domain, since it's all >very< game specific. But since you have the source it's not an issue!

Good luck.

Torque Owner Stefan Lundmark
#2
05/30/2004 (8:28 am)
I think this would work.
We extended Torque to fit our needs for our own MMORPG with almost the same requirements as you, so it's doable.

Torque Owner Flybynight Studios
#3
05/30/2004 (9:26 am)
Thanks for the candid answers guys. Much appreciated. We're going to be taking a real close look at this next weeks so here's hoping.

Thanks for your time.

Mark