MMO hardware

#1 Want to make a MMORPG? Here's the computer for you!

#2 Thats exactly why I asked this question, how is an indie supposed to develop a MMO if they have to come up with that kind of money up front.

#3 Why don't you ask the Tale in the Desert guys? I don't know how they did it but they did.

#4 I miss that computer....

BTW, it was capable of half a teraflop, until not too long ago that would have put it fairly high on the supercomps list. But you don't absolutely need that much computer for an MMO, DAoC runs on about 6-8 dual 3GHz Xeon rackmounts (not sure exactly how many these days), when EQ first launched it was running on shelves full of 400 MHz desktops, 13 to a shard (they've upgraded to comps similar to Camelot's, but they run a lot more zones now).

How much computer you need for an MMO depends on a lot of things. But it's not computer cost that is really the issue, it's the hundreds of manyears of content and programming. Even the quarter-million Mutable dropped on that monster was *nothing* compared to our payroll.

--Dave

#5 Dave: Any chance of a post-mortem, at least from the time you left? Would be an outstanding contribution for the community if you wrote up a .plan (or couple of 'em!) going over lessons learned about how things went.

#6 Ufortunately, my time at MR ended a year before the project did, so I have only hearsay to go by for the end of things. And my separation agreement contained some pretty stiff non-disparagement clauses, it would be pretty difficult to tell the truth about what happened without triggering them.

To sum it up in safely neutral language, it's never good to be in a situation where you are constantly having to tell the person who signs your checks things he doesn't want to hear. Truth is an inadequate defense under those circumstances.

--Dave

#7 Understood! Even positive/neutral observations or things you learned would be interesting, but I certainly see your position.

#8 Well, I'll say this: I don't care what Sun and the zealots say, Java is not ready for heavy lifting under any but the most ideal circumstances. Even a monstrous amount of hardware can be brought to its knees, if your entire system is built in Java. For light-duty cross-platform "thin clients", or scripting extensions to compiled logic, it can work fine, for any kind of heavy number crunching or deeply recursive logic, forget it.

--Dave

#9 If you're serious about pushing a product 100,000 dollars is not that much money. My friend opened up a retail store and put almost 500K down. If you don't have the cash or aren't willing to spend it then you obviously aren't serious. MMORPGS are serious ventures.

Why make an MMORPG anyway? I have a hinting suspision most MMORPG developers want to make the game for themselves rather than make a game that will actually be profitable. MMORPGs are a waste in my opinion, sensible people do not have the time to spend endless hours in a virtual world.

#10 Because an MMO brings with it a reliable revenue stream. EQ *still* makes more than $40M a year, 6 years after it launched, and is the highest grossing PC game ever (The Sims actually isn't even all that close). WoW is probably going to bring Blizzard $200M/year, in 2 it will make more money for Blizzard than all the other games they have ever made (and if they can hold their customer base, it will pass EQ in 3).

Even at the bottom end, A Tale In The Desert and M59 are somewhere close to $half a million a year in revenue. That's not Set For Life money, but it's a hell of a lot better than living milestone to milestone.

--Dave

#11 Dave: I popped you a PM on our other mutual forum--you didn't post a public email, so I didn't have any other way to get ahold of you.

#12 "But it's not computer cost that is really the issue, it's the hundreds of manyears of content and programming"

On one hand I agree with this comment, but the first part is completely wrong.
Most recent games, like COH, WoW, EQ2, required millions of dollars in hardware at ship time.

Shards still costs anywhere from 150k to 250k in hardware, not including the global hardware (like loginservers, billing, customer support, etc).
Thats per shard for that first figure. Easily gets into the millions very quickly depending on the size of your player base you expect to get at launch.

Games as big as WoW would probably set you back 20 to 30 million in hardware at launch.

So id say hardware cost is an issue, its part of the reason a big MMO DOES cost millions to build and launch.

#13 Wow runs on 1ghz amd's with 256 mb ram try playing the game then come back here ;)

#14 One thing I wish to work on in the future is integrating the clients into the main server architecture to accomidate for indie MMOG development. What's everyone else's take on this? I believe, with the TGE Netcode, this could be accomplished with some great results!

Yes, I know this could require some heavy work.

- Ronixus

#15 Chris, are you referring to something similar to the bit-torrent concept? Rather then a client server interface, have more of a peer-peer with a smaller server to get it started? Interesting concept, and correct me if im completly wrong :)

#16 You mean like Guildwars?

#17 @ Greg - Exactly it!

#18 @ Chris

I see, well, we all know the pros of this kind of model, the best one being near limitless bandwidth for the game, as long as the user are there to support it, which brings us to the cons. The game would be severly crippled with a low user base, as there would not be enough peers to support it. Security also comes into play, as if my computer is hosting some of the data (lets say a single zone in the game) whats stopping me from modifying that code? Encryption is the natural choice. All in all, definatly something worth looking into, as it would take ALOT of the burden of finding servers, bandwidth, etc, and might actually allow an indie to play with the big boys.

#19

Quote:
Security also comes into play, as if my computer is hosting some of the data (lets say a single zone in the game) whats stopping me from modifying that code? Encryption is the natural choice.

Which is why I've developed my RonzCode! It's a sweet little encryption/re-encryption/de-encryption code I've been working on and so far it's completely, 100% unhackable! The reason why is it quad-randomizes the encryption and both the code and the key are encrypted into it, not to mention it can be re-randomized completely at any time. I could replace entire sections of code, substitue values, or create locked files with it. The best part about it is it can be shrunk down to a single line of code (level 3 RonzCode)!

The only thing I need for it now is to develop the program which can use the code in an actual outside program. I have the specifications all done!

- Ronixus

#20 "Wow runs on 1ghz amd's with 256 mb ram try playing the game then come back here ;)"

if thats the case then how come WoW only handles about 2500 people per shard? which is well below the
average for other MMO? Many other MMO's support as high as 5k per shard with only slightly
higher hardware.

plus not all of wow runs on those machines, ever look at there underpowered DB boxes?
hey what about the queues to get into the shard? maybe the actually needed more and better
hardware and tried to do it cheap.(but they didnt read on)

in additional, so they run on 1ghz (which im not sure thats actually correct) how many do they need for a shard?
from my sources, there shard costs were about the same as everyone else even though they were running
on cheaper machines (they needed more of them).

so much for that theory. there first chunk of shards when then first launch costs then in excess of 40million.
and they have more then doubled the number of shards since then.