My Highschool class is making an MMORPG...

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#141

I understand that there have been a FEW people who have shown support, and I really do appreciate them. A few people at JME especially have been extremely helpful. But certain people, and I’ll just use the first post again as an example, just didn’t help at all… When you say “I may be well in over my head but that doesn’t mean I won’t succeed,” it’s TOTALLY different than “You’re in way over your head. Drop the project now.” Do you see the difference? I guarantee you somebody who is starting out will.

I do thank the people who have been supportive, but sometimes the other negative comments drown you out.

As for people who have felt discouraged and are looking for hope, check out jMonkeyEngine. I think you’ll find the community is great and the engine is too. It won’t be a huge crutch, nothing like GameMaker. It’s more of a collection of utilities for doing things that just take up time in your game-making. I think it’s 100% awesome, hopefully some of you here will too.

#142

By the way, you can check out our first YouTube tech demo here. It’s nothing really impressive, just showing the character and stuff. You also get to hear my nerdy voice. Don’t make fun, it was very late and I was pretty tired.

#143

Looking good! Keep it up!

#144

That fog effect is a nice touch. :slight_smile:

#145

Very cool demo.

#146

First off, I want to commend you on the job you are doing. This is an amazing project. As a college senior in computer science this project impresses me very much. I wish I could find motivated individuals such as you to join my programming team for our senior project.

The next thing I would suggest is to toughen up your skin. People are going to say what ever they want, and since they can, they will. You shouldn’t take it personally. If you understand scope and preparation, you have nothing to worry about.

I wish you good luck, and I would like to be in the beta :slight_smile:

~Zatara

#147

Keep an eye on this thread. We’ll probably actually be posting alpha-demos in December to a smaller group (programmers, mostly) to get most of the bugs worked out of the framework, and then we’ll be doing Beta testing (offered to more people) for content to make sure it will be popular! ;D Hopefully the alpha demos can come out in December…

#148

Quick tech question for you Trussell: how hard was the console integration using JME? Is that an integrated feature, or did you “manually” have to build a widget, attach a script interpreter, etc.? I have some colleagues on a project that would love to hear that it’s fairly easy :wink:

Thanks for posting the YouTube demo

#149

Yeah I had to build it manually using an interpreter (basically a bunch of if statements…) that runs if the chat input begins with a period. However, I consider that to be pretty easy anyway ;D

#150

Your YouTube demo looks nice. In 5 years of Java experience I have yet to mess around with 3D fog effects. :stuck_out_tongue:

#151

Yeah, I don’t get it - how come no-one mentioned Love? - http://www.quelsolaar.com/

Eskil is doing something insane, although in a very nice way (since he’s a nice guy).

Although last time I saw it it was still a long way off having any actual “game”.

As are you, by the looks of things. I don’t think that’s bad, or a problem - it seems to me you’re shooting more for making “a multiplayer game-like virtual world”. However you settled on it, the way you’re doing things now (jME client, dont worry too much about the server) looks sensible (I would have recommended not bothering with any game stuff on the server side (be honest, use the simulation and VW stuff instead), but that doesn’t really matter now). I suspect you’re going to get completely screwed when you start to have a non-trivial number of simultaneous cilents, and/or when you start ot have a non-trivial amount of terrain and furniture (that’s when most people’s attempts spectacularly fail) … but if you focus on Getting Things Done then you should be able to make something interesting to interact with without having to waste huge amounts of time on stuff that quikcly beomes clear Isn’t Going To Work.

Anyway, for some more practical advice, I’d re-iterate what I said recently to a bunch of students who were working full time (60+ hours a week for 10 weeks) on making a new game from scratch - http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/05/21/advice-to-students-making-games/

#152

Yeah. We’re definitely focusing on getting things done rather than trying to do everything at once. What you see in that demo is a tech-demo… proof-of-concept in a way, just to show that we’ve been doing research and understand terrain, water, sky, fog, character, animation, input, etc.

I’m currently rebuilding the terrain-engine to be more efficient, then putting in some menus for development and we’ll be turning to focus on networking. We may be using the DarkStar API instead of JGN, but maybe not. It all depends on the research we do over the next few months.

#153

Just launched our website… going under the name Umbra Gaming.

www.umbragaming.com

#154

Oooh, it’s so… “official.”

Ha ha, you say the word like 10 times on your site. ;D

#155

I only see it on the friends page…

#156

Ive been reading this post for some time and its great to see your project progressing. Here is my opinion, im not sure if your planning on making this open to the public like other mmorpgs or just use it as a private game but why not change from the traditional mmorpg game where you have guilds a warrior/mage ect… it seems that all the mmorpgs are the same. boring. Your either the mage, archer, warrior, paladin ect… you kill x numbers for quests and try and get x items for quests. so what im suggesting is instead of doing a traditional mmorpg why not be more creative and invent a new style of mmorpgs. anyway only suggestion, good luck. keep us posted on your progress.

#157

This has been an interesting topic. I am also interested in making somekind of mmorpg (not a very traditional one) but I’ve decided to finish a few other games first for practice. The biggest problem for me will probably be networking so I’m very interested in knowing how you succeed with it.

Btw, here is a funny image about the subject. :slight_smile:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/luontola/files/Making%20a%20MMORPG.jpg

#158

that is a pretty funny comic.

#159

Yeah, I’ve seen that before… didn’t stop me. Was a good laugh, though.

#160