Need to make a MMORPG in 6 months?

Gotcha!! I figured that would get your attention!

Ok first I have no grand illusions of making the next WOW or Ultima Online. I understand what it takes to make a MMORPG and know how harsh and hard it can be.

But Myself and one other friend want to start very small. Perhaps the size of the island you get on the Demo of unity.

What I want to know is there any 3rd party apps that I can buy for unity to add classes, spells, stats such as strenth, mana, willpower ect... Just the core to a calss system a mmo would have.

I have looked around and see RTS kits, Racing Kits but nothing like this.

 

I dunno about anything outside of Unity. I think you will have to create all that yourselves, within Unity. It shouldn't bee to difficult, but it's not going to be a walk in the park, either. More like a hike up Mt. Tamalpias. It can be done, fairly easily, but it's no jog to the mailbox, either.


A small MMO is a good start, I think. I'm working on a networked FPS, about the size of the Unity Island Demo (smaller, actually). Nothing excessively complex I have to worry about.

 

Honestly, the things you mentioned are going to be be both the easiest to create and the most specific to your game.

One of the hardest parts of an online game is the persistent networking of the game world. Personally, I would start there and get your small island up and running on a server with players allowed to create their characters and interact with the world.

This will include things like chat channels, local area channels, message efficiency and the all fun database back-end which supplies the persistence part.

Once you have that then start, one thing at a time, adding details (like health, then abilities that damage and heal, then stats that affect those abilities, etc).

From what I've seen many projects work on the single-player side first then add in networking and it makes for some ugly networking (see: 90% of professional products!).

Anyway, just some food for thought!

 

Don't underestimate the work on the client end.
The whole interface and handling of data, optimization and rendering etc is no trivial task.

If you work for 6 months fulltime on it, you might have a chance.

Doing it on a base of a handfull of hours per week will not work out in 6 months, not even for a single zone.

MMOs take years due to more than just the visual content.
Its not like the programming is done in months and then just done. Already a scalable server and network architecture takes a small professional engineering team months to design, implement, benchmark and refine and even then you can be assured that the first large scale test will bring them back into design stage to overcome the issues that caused the server to die


What you thought potentially can achieve is a small persistent multiplayer online game. thats realistic if you have some background with server building and especially unity.

 

Read this:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-powerup1/

And this:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/13269

And then take a look at this:
http://trac2.assembla.com/swgemu/browser/core3/trunk/MMOCoreORB/src

Good luck!

 

You know, unless you've set the 6month timeline as part of a business plan, I think the best way to go about it would be to make a single-player prototype. You can even build it around a proxy-server kind of thing, so while it's not an MMO, you've got that architecture in mind. So make the prototype, stand back and look at it, and then see if you want to take it further.

 

I don't know if this would work with Unity or not but it might be worth looking into some of the free, open source MMO server emulators out there. I'm sure they could be adapted to whatever your game might be unless there's some complete technical showstopper on the Unity end.

One that I have looked at before is called MangOS. It's a WoW server clone and it works pretty good.

Anyway, there's a number of others out there also. Naturally, they would require some programming to be fitted to Unity and whatever your game is.

 

Yeah it's always a great idea to look at what's out there - not necessarily to use, but to get an idea of what it involves and how the data is handled.