Ono, not another Indie MMO!

The horror!

Yes, I'm an indie game developer teamed up with some extremely talented people writing an MMO game using TGE 1.5 + Faust Logic's AFX + Dream Game's MMO Kit.

Of course, if you read these blogs then you probably already know that... now for some new stuff.

I'd like to send out thanks to Dream Games for hosting their 90 day MMO Game contest, plus a huge shoutout to the rest of my team for helping us win first place! This was never officially announced here on GG and I want to make sure these guys get some kudos for their huge effort. It was a lot of hard work but it really paid off well.

This started out as a fun little "I told ya so" project when Dream Game's announced their 90 day MMO Game Contest. I was (and still am) a little fed up with the negativity coming from a few noisy people in this community, so part of this was just a way to prove these people wrong.

Too many times I hear people making claims about how a 3d game simply can't be published by a newbie indie and an MMO project is doomed to fail, even if you're an experienced indie.

Why would you discourage someone from making an MMO compared to any other game type?

Listen up, Nay Sayers... I'm here to make you eat your shorts, err, I mean words. :D

Here are some quotes that you'll hear from a few people that you should simply ignore. Some names have been withheld to prevent the lynching. The quotes are not verbatim, but the general meaning of the statements remain the same. If you want the exact wording then I can post the chat logs if you want. :D These statements were made 4 months ago when I first started this project and they were repeated again in the last 24 hours. Sick of it, I tell ya.

"It takes at least x million dollars to produce an MMO." - Nay Sayer

I'm not saying you can make an MMO game with a low budget... If you're stretching your wallet just to purchase TGE then you probably aren't going to make a successful MMO game until you find some way to fund it. You should consider publishing your game as a single player RPG/FPS/RTS game first, then use that money to help you publish your MMO.

Our budget started out being only $1000, and we blew through that fairly quickly. If you count everything we've purchased from Garage Games, plus additional art assets and contractors, to date we've spent nearly $10k.

Over the next 12 months we expect to spend another $10k - $15k for contractors, artwork and tools to help finish our game, plus an additional $25k for an advertising / media blitz plus an upgrade for our server cluster to handle the first (hopeful) onslaught of new players. Part of this money will also go towards a limited special boxed edition publication to send out to magazines and other places in hopes of getting cheap publicity with game reviews, etc. (If you know someone that might be able to get us some free publicity and you can hook us up, we'll send you a boxed edition too, if you want).

So, the final budget should be $50k - $100k including unexpected incidentals. Although this isn't something the typical indie developer could cough up, this is well below the "x million dollars" as quoted by Mr. Nay Sayer.

It actually can be done more cheaply if you're willing to go about it more slowly.... it's just a matter of persistence, hard work and keeping your customers happy.

"Out of the thousands of indies making an MMO, only one has been completed." - Nay Sayer 2

First, not exactly true that only one has been completed... only one with TGE has been finished and another is pretty close, but there have been several MMO's and MUD's created by indies... some even using open source freely available software.

Out of the tens of thousands of indies making games, very few have made it to the finish line, and even fewer have turned enough of a profit to quit their day job... but that doesn't mean that it can't be done, nor does it mean that everyone is giving up. In fact, since a few people have made it to the finish line is inspiration enough for me.

"Torque isn't the right engine for an MMO." - Nay Sayer 3

I've reviewed tons of game engines over the past ten years, and within the past 30 days I've re-reviewed several that were specific to making MMO games and none of them have the power and flexibility of Torque. Couple that with Dream Game's starter kit and you've got absolutely the best platform you could expect for under $250k! (And even if I had $250k cash to spend right now, I'd think loooong and hard before considering something else.)

It's true that the stock engine is an FPS engine and ShapeBase / Player / AIPlayer need major work to make them lighter on the networking side. Torque also doesn't have a database layer, the middleware is basically non-existent, the chat system is fairly network intensive and many of the subsystems aren't scalable... but hey, that's out of the box. You do get the source code and more documentation than you could read even if you spent 100 hours a week for the next year reading. Trust me, I know... I've over the past 6 years I've reviewed 100% of the source code, read nearly all of TDN, looked at most of the resources and read a lot of the forums and it's been a larger time sync than any MMO game I've ever played.... and that's from a player with a level 50 Empath/Rad/Energy hero on CoH :P

Any game engine is going to have its drawbacks, TGE included. It's just a matter of your coding skills and how much time, effort and money you can put into it.

With TGE, what you get is impressive networking, well written code, beautiful graphics, a flexible tool chain and the immediate "now" factor... well, by now I mean just a few months.

Our game, Fractured Universe, is playable today after four months of development!

Don't get me wrong... it's not by any means feature-complete, but we have spells, skills, levels, inventory, database, AI, special effects, cross-zone chatting, three zones, tons of weapons and special items, and a whole lot more.

"Where there's a will, there's a way." - common saying

If you really want to make an MMO Game, go for it. You can do it!

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Ok, so on to the technical stuff.

Torque and CPU usage

Of all of the performance / scalability considerations of stock TGE 1.5, this was my first concern. A single dedicated server running on a very nice Linux box (Dual CPU / Dual Core 64 bit AMD Opteron with 2gb RAM) consumed over 50% of the CPU... and that was an empty server!

The problem is that although on the surface the engine appears event driven, it's actually polling the event queue instead of waiting on the event queue and it has a sleep() that essentially makes it poll once per tick (1/32 of a second). The problem is the stock sleep implementation turned into a sleep(0), which essentially did nothing except give up the current time slice and made the game engine run in a fairly tight loop.... this is ok if you're running a single zone server per CPU, but if you're wanting to run 10 zones on a dual CPU box then... well... it's not going to happen.

The quick fix is to re-implement sleep() so that it sleeps for the appropriate amount of time. An empty server takes negligible CPU, and a decently loaded server only takes about 5% of the CPU... awesome!

Long-term fix is to eliminate the polling and make everything event driven, although at the moment it doesn't appear that this solution is required. You'll end up running out of memory before you run out of CPU cycles (10 zones on a single box pretty much chews up all 2gb of RAM).

Networking

With a stock TGE 1.5 engine, you quickly get into problems once you get over 100 players. Honestly, it gets laggy even if you have 64 players and a lot of stuff going on.

Several solutions... first, get rid of all the extra stuff in ShapeBase / Player classes... there's a ton of extra network activity that's unnecessary. If you're not using something, comment it out (or remove it altogether if you're confident enough).

Still, that's not enough. If you want to be able to get more than 100 - 150 players in a single zone, you have a few more minor tasks ahead of you.

There are several options:

Enhance the zone system so the outdoor area isn't considered a single zone.

Fine-tune the scoping so that most objects are based on the environment's visible limit, but make the players and other dynamic objects have a closer scope. I've found that a limit of 200 meters is great, and on the client side you can fade the player objects out over the course of 20 meters so objects don't pop in and out of visibility. For our game, NPC's that aren't moving have a larger range (400 meters).

Limit the scoping so only a limited number of players (and their side-effects such as projectiles / AFX effects) are scoped to every player... this is a little more difficult, but it'll make huge battles renderable and not take up too much bandwidth. My current default is 32 players, so any single player cannot see more than 32 other players (including AI players). I've not finished implementing this but so far it's has proven to be fairly easy to implement. Eventually I'll be forced to finish the code because it's the only way I'll be able to get a significant number of players in a single zone.

With these enhancements, your TGE MMO game zone should be able to handle over 1000 simultaneous players and only transmit about 10kbps per player. Yes yes, I know... 10kbps * 1000 is 10 mbps! Luckily my current server can handle this, but you end up paying through the nose for this kind of bandwidth.... yet another reason that although MMO's don't cost millions to start up, they do cost tens of thousands.

Database

If you're using a database, no matter which one you're using (and please, don't use ODBC!), check out my event-driven database resource. Eventually you're going to need to put your database access in a seperate thread, otherwise you're going to experience significant lag every time you have queries that take longer than a couple of milliseconds.

Game development status

Ok, enough ranting about TGE... well, maybe a few more sentences: If you're interested in making a 3d game or an MMO and someone tries to discourage you, ignore them. Either they're jealous of your newbish / youthful energy or they have an ulterior motive. There are a few people affiliated with game development companies that don't want the lay-person indie developer making games... it makes 'em look bad. Why would you hire a company to make a game for you when you can make it yourself at a fraction of the cost, have it made your way and earn the lion's share of the profits? That's why we're indies!

Game development status (honestly, no rant this time)

The last patch we published included several new quests, new monster types, some upgraded AI, enhanced inventory and a few other great features.

The next patch should include a completely revamped GUI (still being designed by the incredible Mr. Bloodworth, otherwise I'd post screenshots).

The new patch should also include a brand new third generation quest editing system that includes the in-game quest editor GUI upgrades. This is a result of our iterative implementation process... The first generation worked, but was rather clunky. Second generation was awesome, but although it was flexible it turned out to be too cumbersome. This third generation is still as flexible as 2nd gen, but is so much easier to use that normal quests can be entered in two or three minutes, yet still retain the flexibility to have scripted backends for unlimited quest capabilities.

We still have more monsters to include, and a ton of new NPC's thanks to FrogGame's new character pack.

The "tab to select next mob" is finished and solves the only problem I had with game mechanics... picking a monster as a target in the heat of a battle was annoyingly difficult. With the new keystroke targeting system it's a breeze to use and doesn't get in the way of having fun.

The 3d chat system (including chat callouts like you'd expect to see in a good MMO) is finished, so that should make it in the next patch as well.

New spells! 10 new spells / skills for our first two character classes should also be finished.

This puts us on target for having two hours of gameplay and most of the game mechanics finished by mid April, just in time to show it off at IMGDC. Hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading my blog... and Keep On Torquing!