Discussion Choosing a networking solution for an MMO.

I'm saying if you attempted to make a MMO for academic purposes in a programming course, and handed in a game with 4 users, I'd shoot you.

Anything less that 100 means you fundamentally misunderstood the task - dealing with lots of players in a single 'play area'.

What your uni would do I have no idea. But it just seems to me what you think you are building, and what you're saying you're building are two entirely different things - and that simply by correct naming you'd save yourself a ton of time and hassle.

For a start, if you only want 4 players there's about half a dozen networking solutions I can recommend off the top of my head. And I'd even save you the many page rant on what is and is not a MMO.

 

I had a meeting with my teachers and they said I can present a prototype that doesn't deal with interest management, i.e. all players receive all update data from everyother player. The real product of my project is the report and that's where I have to make a detailed solution presentation of how to make the game deal with the possible inscrease in CCUs.
So in practice my game has to acomodate a handfull of users able to interact and able to acess the items they buy on the store (it is a "Free to Play" business model solution), preferably using the architecture I posted earlier. I haven't had much time appart from reading a lot on interest management and world space partitioning. This saturday (maybe tomorrow evening) I'll give the options presented in this thread a try and see which one best fits my project.

You may not believe but I have learned a lot in this thread alone. It has pointed me in a lot of interesting directions for research and that is how you end up learning anything

 

That's Good

 

You say it's free to use during development but it seems that it's only free for 30 days. Then it's 550/title Was really excited with it reading their brochures.

 

1) Unity park suite is free for dev.

2) They are not-for-profit and will talk to you

3) Given your subject, I considering going with something simpler where you have more direct control at the lower levels.

 

Considering the scope I would actually go with Unity Networking as it will work everywhere without hazzle and if you need interest management you always have SetScope

 

Originally Posted by tigeba
I will leave you with a little puzzle. Why do WoW and SWTOR limit the number of players you can "friend"? Seems pretty arbitrary, right?

I guess my smiley didn't quite translate properly. I wasn't implying it was arbitrary at all. My point was that this kind of seemingly benign feature has a rather large impact on various parts of your game design. Especially when you are attempting to scale that design to handle many concurrent users spread across many server instances.

 

Just to chip in, I started learning programming around Christmas 2008 to start making an mmo. I can't say I've been working on it full time, but I've delved into things I never thought I would - world creation systems alone took up a year, before moving on to physics solutions, data storage and server stuff, etc. you have to learn (and more importantly, understand) a great deal of things before you even have a game running. I had a demo up around mid 2009 but realized there was a yawning chasm between a prototype with 5% functionality, and something with the wear withal to stand up to production, let alone release. It's 2012, I've written and rewritten modules over and over, and I dare say I'll still be going in 2015, but I enjoy the challenge and it's more of an excuse to mess around with all the different technologies and concepts.

Make a plan, use placeholder art and start going at it in bite size chunks. You'll want to enjoy slaps in the face.

 

Hello, @AtomR I also trying to build an MMORPG with my custom networking solution I am currently searching for some friends/team members who want to work together in their free time, this is my discord add me if you are interested.
Discord: .nicka