Terrazona and Butterfly.net

#1 There's been a thread about this before. Basically nobody can get a decent price out of either and the sample app's (if they exist) aren't particulary good. I'm not sure either product (no matter how good) will be of any use to the average small developer.

A better bet for an indie would be to try out the Quazal stuff since theres now a trial / non-commercial version. Or better yet use something like twisted and not have to pay anything :)

#2 I did a keyword search in the forums on both terrazona and butterfly.net, but neither showed up. Does anyone have a link to that thread?

Thanks,
W.

#3 Here is one link regarding MMOG engines.

#4 I'm sure they are both pretty nice.... but I would imagine they are in the same price league as a new Ferrari.

Openskies has a license that supports 10,000 players that costs $20,000. That cost would be manageable by and indie team who have good day jobs and really want to make an MMOG.

Quazal is really the best bet for indies who want a publisher for a MMOG. Develop your game with the free non-commercial version, pitch it to publishers... and hope you find a publisher willing to cover the cost of the full version.

#5 This is my opinion.

If you license one of these, it is for the server hardware facilities and not for the server side software. It is so that they will host your game, and not because you want what their libraries are provided.

Think about a basic petition system, and what it takes to implement:
/petition (message) -- Petition.Submit(Message)
/petitionstatus -- Petition.GetStatus()
/petitiondelete (ID) -- Petition.Delete(ID)
--- GM Side ---
/petitiongetnext -- Petition.GetNext
/petitioncomplete -- Petition.Complete(ID)

To manage this you need a simple SQL table. It's trivial to implement the table, and in turn, it is trivial to implement these functions. If an average petition takes 5 minutes or 6 minutes to complete, probably reasonable, and if you have 4-5 staff members at a time online, querying the database for these commands isn't going to be a performance hit. If you need multiple queues and escalation levels, that is not difficult to implement, either.

Twisted is an OK framework for implementing some of this; I am seeing some significant security holes in Twisted, and some flaws with the way it is set up. The security in twisted is only skin-deep, a better security framework is required than what they are providing. I am currently determining if it is worthwhile to continue to use twisted, or if it would be better to code something from scratch that works the way it needs to in order to prevent security problems.

#6 Dave, you wrote:
> Twisted is an OK framework for implementing some of this; I am seeing some significant
> security holes in Twisted, and some flaws with the way it is set up.

Could you expand a litlle more on 'significant security holes in Twisted' ? I have never seen you neither on the twisted irc channel, nor on the mailing list. There may be security holes in Twisted, but I don't know any, so maybe you could share your knowledge with others?

Thanks,
Luc

#7 I'm a little curoious about this as well... Using customized identitites and authorizors and then giving the client a restricted perspective based on their access level is pretty damn secure. Perhaps you were referrring to the default security setup?

#8 Zona does not do hosting, although they have partners that do. They only provide the MMOG sdk which includes the client libraries and the server plugin libraries.

#9 I live right next to a bunch of the guys that developed twisted, I'd love to hear about the "security flaws" that you have found in there product.

As far as I have seen its very solid, reliable, extensible and secure.

Could you fill us in? thanks.