[xtremetom]

I am currently trying to build the biggest iso community on the net......we have the programmers, we have the concept artists we need iso and pixel artists

our team currently consists of:
2 professional back-end programmers
2 professional graphic designers
numerous art students
1 professional web designer

we are working to create a massive online community based in mediaevil times, so lots of castles dragons, kinghts, orcs goblins, trolls....well basically think lord of the rings........in the community people will be able to decided on what creature they would like to start as, and of course they can alter and change the characters head shape, eyes, clothes.....all the usual....as people play in the community they can better their characters skills in magic, fighting, commerce, black magic, battle tactics and many many more ......... their aim.......to be cometo king of the land..............so who ever id the current king watch out cos everyone wants to kill you.................players can do this either becoming the ultimate warrior and recruit other players to join forces to over run the kings castle and ran sack his treasury...................or people can create a huge business empire: owning blacksmiths, bakeries, butchers, farms and numerous others, in an attend to become to richest player, and be able to buy the king out, or simple just hire a huge army to destroy him......................as players get better and better and their money in the game increases they will be able to upgrade their homes and shops and buy bigger and better tools so they can produce more and make more money.

does this sound like something you would be interested in helping with?
if so either drop a post or email me at xtremetom@hotmail.com

our current business play is to produce a working prototype in about 3-5 months which we can then take to major corporations for possible investment. Everything is set to go, we just need iso/pixel artists

cheers tom

if you need more info please contact me.......the whole project will be goin commericial the second we build a prototype

[Hajo]

Sometimes I think there are too many MMORPG projects started.

Why don't the developers unite?

There are so many projects and all are struggling for more manpower and suffer from little progress.

[Bjorn]

I agree with Hajo, when everybody is starting basically from scratch on his own MMORPG, the free MMORPGs will be many and crappy.

I think for example many of your plans will be able to take shape in cooperation with the MMORPG project I'm participating in, The Mana World. The only real difference would probably be different world content and isometric graphics, which would mean a huge amount of code could be shared.

Hmm but alas, you plan to make a "community project" but still "go commercial". I think these two don't match very well, if not conflict with eachother. Hmm at least it rules out working together with TMW, which is complete free and open source software...

[Hajo]

At some point a MMORPG needs infrastructure (server, network) which must be paid.

How do non-commercial community projects like TMW solve that problem?

[Adam]

By never getting that far.
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https://numbatlogic.com

[Hajo]

Probably you are right in 90% of the cases. I still hope some projects get somewhere, and finally at least MUDs exist, are often open source and somewhat popular.

In "free" but closed projects I saw two solutions: donations (it seems to work, surprisingly) and pay-for extra content (which seems to work, too).

In open source projects only donations seem to be an option?

Bjorn, how do you (the TMW team) pay the rent for the server?

[biggerUniverse]

I use my paycheck for stuff like that. "eat, or pay hosting... hmm..."
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We are on the outer reaches of someone else's universe.

[Hajo]

:)

Actually I have no idea what kind of server a MMORPG needs, but I assume I couldn't host one on my own PC, so need to rent a bigger server with fatter pipes somewhere?

In my mind this sounds like several hundred euros per month, a sum that I surely don't want to pay just so that other people can play the game for free?

[Bjorn]

There are lot's of things we do not need to pay for, because we're hosted at SourceForge. This is one example where free software simply has an advantage over a closed project.

About server / network infrastructure. All of us are already paying for our internet connections, and our plan is simple to make use of this fact and build a server that when necessary can function in a distributed fashion, and serve for example only a few of the maps in the game. The players would have to reconnect (transparently) to a different server when going through some map boundaries.

A sidenote to this, at the moment we have somebody voluntarily host our server on a 100 Mbit connection, so while we can prepare for the situation where we use several 1 Mbit connections, server hosting already doesn't look like an issue.

In addition to this we're looking at how to handle a potentially large amount of players downloading an update. The obvious answer here is probably bittorrent. We can integrate libtorrent into the client and several people could volunteer to seed any updates the clients would need to download. WoW is apparently already using bittorrent for their updates.

In my opinion all of these are not really a problem. The real problem is the amount of time that goes into development, and building up a solid team that stays motivated to achieve their goal. This is where Adam's "by never getting that far" remark comes from.

[Hajo]

Maybe you missed my message when I announced that H-World is going open source (GPL)?

http://forums.rpgdx.net/viewtopic.php?t=1293

I'm not sure why you point me at the benefits of sourceforge, since H-World is registered there:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/h-world/

The statistics are a bit bugged. Also the CVS. All code and images are in the CVS already, yet it says "0 commits". Well.

You're lucky to have a server for free. I'm not sure if every project is so lucky?

And I know the problems with motivation. Actually H-World seems to be one of the 90% that never get anywhere. I declared it stopped in the official forum:

http://www.simugraph.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=11&t_id=38

Overall I think you're just lucky with your hosting? I mean I see no chance to get a free server anywhere, regardless if my project is open source or not.

[Verious]

Most well designed MMORPG games do not use very much bandwidth per player, they tend to be designed for less than realtime gameplay. In other words, they are not built the same way as a FPS, which uses a considerable amount of bandwidth for twich based action.

This is due in part to the design of the game itself and in part to the need to scale the game to hundreds or thousands of simultaneous players.

For example: Turbine's Asheron's Call actually uses turn-based combat (granted, it is very well hidden). This greatly reduces the total network traffic and reduces the advantage players with better connections tend to otherwise have.

I think a well designed, well architected, finished (or at least highly playable) game would probably not have too much trouble finding a home on a low cost or free server.

The trick is to have the game client check a website for the IP address to connect to; therefore, if the server has to be moved it is completely transparent to the end user. This technique tends to work better than using a dedicated domain or subdomain name, because DNS takes time to propogate.

[Bjorn]