How do I diagram ping between servers on the Net?

Networking & Multiplayer
#41

That’s very helpful in letting us know what you’re trying to do, thanks.

The first thing I’d suggest is that you look at Neverwinter Nights, which seems to be almost identical except for the fact that it has fancy graphics instead of primitives, and that the transfer from server to server is less integrated.

In terms of a game, I cannot stress how much better off you would be actually inventing a single game rather than trying to create CubeWorld as a world/toolkit. Your observations about strikenet were good - it’s a very bad idea to try and “just make a world where people can do anything” (it tends to be incredibly boring, and you’ll never finish the project - this has happened to very many people already!). But then, instead of taking the wisdom from that, you seem to be about to make some of the same mistakes again?

Or, to put it another way, you are not trying to write a game - CubeWorld is a toolkit, not a game. There is no “fun” and there is nothing to do. This is fine - so long as you don’t delude yourself into thinking that you are writing a game when you are not. I would suggest you consider making an MMOG with some fun gameplay first…

#42

CubeWorld is similar to Second Life in that Second Life allows avatars to move around a seamless landmass, create items, use a scripting language to bring their creations to life, and cordon off plots of land to create buildings. Second Life blurs the line between games and toolkits, but Second Life is a MMOG.

#43

[quote]CubeWorld is similar to Second Life in that Second Life allows avatars to move around a seamless landmass, create items, use a scripting language to bring their creations to life, and cordon off plots of land to create buildings. Second Life blurs the line between games and toolkits, but Second Life is a MMOG.
[/quote]
There.com had $57 million funding and still a lot of people find it “too boring” to play.

Really, these “games” are just chatrooms with extra features. They may look very pretty, but they don’t have that special something that defines a game - fun.

One criticism of designs such as yours for Cubeworld is that it is hard to distinguish them from:

[] we give people computers
[] and a programming language
[] and a programming manual
[] and expect them to be grateful

This is all, of course, just personal opinion. I think you might want to attach slightly more importance to it than that because I’ve been in the industry for 6 years now in one form or another, and because I’ve seen countless people propose your “game” over and over again and none of them have ever got around to actually making anything that was fun. Shrug; maybe you will be different, or maybe you don’t mind that you’re not making a game…but I can assure you that what you’re proposing is a lot harder than making a game, once you factor in the difficulty of getting people to “play” it.

#44

JC-
I’m missing the part of your project description that addresses the ‘G’ part of MMOG (that would be, the actual Game). When thinking about the game, what are the rules? What are the goals? What are the obsticles? What are the rewards? What are the penalties? Most importantly (since it’s MM), how can these goals be accomplished, obsticles overcome, through use of teamwork? etc.

I believe thinking in terms of single player is a good start to determine what you want to ‘do’ within the game space, but eventually you need to add the mutli-player dimension to the mix and see how it comes together. The project you describe has interesting technical aspects to it, but from a game perspective, it’s a little hollow.

-Chris

#45

Some comments… FWIW:

(1) NWN has great client and map building technology. Its server system sucks, is incredibly naive, and can handle up to about 16 players before totally fallign over if yo uare very lucky and on a very fast machine.

(2) There are indeed distributed solutions to some of these problems. They are not easy or obvious and JUST throwing the problem across more computers and saying “now its DESTRIBUTED so its fault tolerant and scalable” doesn’t work.

“Clever coding” alone won’t get you to the right answers. There are entire text books on destributed simulation. If you are serious about this area then I’d suggest you start there. If you are going to be coming to GDC then stop by the Sun booth and I can show you some other interesting things.