MMORPG Contest - Week 6

Yay, nearly halfway through this... remind me never to commit to something like this without having my head examined first, though. Although it's been a ton of fun and I'm learning a lot of things, it's a tad bit on the stressful side of things.

Team Building
I'm actually a little *less* than halfway done with everything. I had expected to get a little bit more help from the other 8 people that joined the team during the first few days, but no biggie. I've got some plans on how to speed things up in the near future.

As it stands, the musician / sound guy is pulling through, and three people are actively working on the game design, but without any of those three being coders, I'm sure I'm coming across as a jerk when I tone down the designs to something that can be done in 90 days.

To play catchup, I did a bit of recruiting this past week. I've added a new concept artist and a new modeler to the team and I've all but kicked 4 - 5 other people off the team due to their not participating. If I end up kicking the others off then that'll make a total of 6 - 7 people (half of which are designers... too many in my opinion, but hindsight is 20/20).

One of the new guys is modeling and scripting interactive props.

You'll be seeing some screenshots (or a movie or two?) of his stuff next week (hopefully), and in addition to that, when he finishes the items he's expecting to release them as a content pack. Should be pretty sweet because they all include scripts to make them interactive, such as a torch that lights as you approach, etc... more details next week.

Help Wanted

Once the coding is done and the artwork is well on the way to being done and the first world is finished then I can speed things up with a little help from a few other people.

When it gets to that point I'll post this in a few more places, but what I'd like is one person that's fairly good at level building. All of the artwork will be finished and all that would be required would be for someone to take the artwork and create a zone or two.... or as many zones as can be created in a month. I'll be creating the training zone and two other zones, but I'd like some help making more. For the contest I only need two zones, but to make the game more complete I'd like a few more.

The other thing I need is story tellers... the main back story is mostly just an idea, but no real story exists. I'll need a primary story teller to create a few pages for the main back-story, and one or more GM/DM type people to help in the creation of quests.

If you're interested in either of these positions, e-mail me. We'll discuss details...

Coding

Over the past few weeks, although I'd purchased the MMO Kit, I'd mostly just ignored it. I knew some of the things Dreamer and his crew had done that I didn't want in my game, or wanted it implemented differently, so I tackled those issues first.

The database access, for instance, I didn't want running in the main thread and I wanted to use MySQL for the server side and not ODBC (for speed reasons). Also, I didn't want the Zone servers to double as authentication servers nor chat servers, so I wrote those as separate servers using a separate TCP/IP connection. My implementation of both of these servers actually run inside TGE and I added some startup command-line parameters to indicate if the server should start.

My command line is something like this:




This will start up a game server running the primary instance of zone 0 (the training zone), start up the loginServer listening on port 5241, and also start the chatServer running on port 5421.

The zone server gets information about zone 0 instance 0 from the database. I'm using a text-based log file for the chat server. I'm thinking that the training zone will be under utilized, so it's not a big deal if it also doubles as the chat server and login server.

The zone manager is responsible for starting and stopping the zone servers. When a zone server is over-populated, the zone manager will do a zone split, creating two instances of the same zone. The zone manager will also handle load balancing between instanced zones as well as spawning off new instanced zones for instanced missions / quests.

The chat server is finished now too... I didn't get the chance to put all of the features in it that I'd have liked, but it supports global chatting, zone chatting, player to player, and team channels. For now the players cannot create their own channels, but I plan to add that in after the contest if I don't get a chance to do it sooner.

This past week I pretty much finished everything that I knew wasn't in the MMO Kit, so I started browsing the MMO Kit source and pulling stuff over to my version and integrating it. I figured I'd have a lot of editing to do to integrate it into my game.

One of the things I needed to do was to create the client side of the login GUI. As I figured, it took a decent amount of coding, since my login method was completely different from the MMO Kit, but Dreamer's crew did a great job of laying everything out... it took me just a few minutes to hook everything up.

I have to say, I'm actually very impressed with a lot of the stuff I'm seeing in the kit... things like standard Ok, Ok/Cancel, and Yes/No message boxes, the impressive GUI textures, and the overall quality of the scripting and C++ coding. Even if you're not making an MMO, this kit makes a great resource. It'd be nice if some of these features would make it into TGE.

Cool GUI stuff:




I can't take credit for these GUI's... they're all part of the MMO Kit.... very nice, eh?

Artwork

Originally I had anticipated only doing coding this week, but I hate not showing at least a few screenshots, so I also did a little bit of modeling today just for that purpose. :P

I've been working on a process of taking a MakeHuman model, exporting to .OBJ, then use some scripts to help me reduce the poly-count, attach some pre-made bones, import some motion capture data, then export to Torque.

That's all pretty easy and with a little bit more experimenting I'll be able to get it down to about an hour per model, plus another hour or so per piece of clothing. I'm trying to keep all of the proportions mostly the same so I can re-use all of the clothing for most of the models.

The biggest unknown up until today was clothing, so I started working with methods for quickly creating some clothes.

Here's my quick little work in progress... this was created from scratch in just a couple of hours. I wrote down the process so redoing it I'd estimate will take about an hour.





That's only 2800 triangles, plus another 800 reserved for clothing and as much as another 300 for weapons at the highest detail level.

The skin is still a little off... I'm still experimenting with the SSS script in Blender. I create the vertex colors using SSS, then bake it into a texture. Once I figure out the correct colors, it'll only takes 10 minutes to generate the skin.

It'll take a few more minutes to clean it up because of the seams not lining up perfectly, but that's easy enough.



And just to prove that things are going faster, I whipped this one up (including the ugly texture) in about 20 minutes.






Future Stuff

Next week I hope to have some more artwork from the new guy in addition to some actual in-game screenshots. I'll be purchasing the Arcane-FX and hopefully have some of that integrated as well.

Back to the grind... thanks for reading.