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Name:	Gary Ingram
Date Posted:	Feb 23, 2006
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Ah good. Downloaded the source of TGE (first imoprtant step) now the fun begins............

Silly long term goal:
Remember Jumpgate anyone? (www.jossh.com). Plan is to recreate parts of this. Why? AIFAIK Jumpgate had the best flight physics of any game I've ever sen (and I played it for over 3 years)

It made space combat realistic and fun! Its major downfalls were:
1. Small universe
2. Poor economics
3. Bad graphics

If I can get the basics of the game recreated I could work on the rest.

Major problem is the Torque network engine, which is not really suited from a MMPOG. I dont really believe that. With a bit of work it could handle far more than was expected of it. Has to be easier than writing a network layer from scratch!

A lot of work then, and never enough time. :-( But hey, its a start!

Gary

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J. Erick Christgau (Feb 23, 2006 at 00:29 GMT)

Jumpgate was kinda fun, for a while. I also really liked Terminus which, like Torque, ran on PC/Mac/Linux and matches Torques network and "zone" type structure quite well.

Have fun!

Edit: also see Terminus Point as they are keeping the game alive, kinda.
Edited on Feb 23, 2006 00:31 GMT

Matt Huston (Feb 23, 2006 at 00:54 GMT)

Would be cool, I semi remember Jumpgate. I really like space sims but unfortunately they aren't that great right now. There is the X-universe, X1-X3, all improving but even in the 3rd game it's a pretty dry universe.

Mike Kuklinski (Feb 23, 2006 at 01:24 GMT)

Terminus WAS a fun game -- I loved knocking out those damned Terran fighters in multiplayer -- was unfair since those guys got their ships free, we were working on donations simply to fight them. Our 'War for Independence', so to speak -- we had the best ships in the solar system :)

An idea I had for a Kuiper "mmo" version was to use persistant worlds like in neverwinter nights or Terminus, but store all character info on a master server, so it was always persistant and could run on regular servers.
Edited on Feb 23, 2006 01:25 GMT

David \"Fulcrum\" Wyand (Feb 23, 2006 at 04:33 GMT)

Greetings!

I never understood why people always state that Torque networking is not good enough for producing something like a MMO. At the base level it's just a transport layer that provides some nifty throttle controls. On top of that is your game where you have to decide what should be sent between computers and how often -- which is very game specific.

I've always looked at it from the other direction. Such as: "Wow, Torque networking can handle real-time FPS traffic without the congestion we see in many commercial games? It should be no problem then to adapt it to the typical persistent world environment where the per-player bandwidth requirements are much, much less".

:o)

- LightWave Dave

Stephen Zepp (Feb 23, 2006 at 04:35 GMT)

[soapbox]
I really don't understand why (mostly IMO people speaking about TNL/Torque networking without really understanding it), but Torque Networking has a very bad, and undeserved, rep for not being applicable for MMO's.

Torque Networking is probably the most appropriate networking model for MMO's that is available to developers publically. There is a AAA/top 5 world wide publisher MMO in beta right now that uses TNL, and it increased their network performance and decreased their total bandwidth throughput by several orders of magnitude.

I agree absolutely without a doubt that starter.fps is not tweaked for MMO-style performance, neither gameplay (networking every projectile in a high projectile based concept) nor Net:: preferences, but Torque in and of itself can be tweaked simply by setting a few prefs and (possibly) changing just a few #define params to work exceptionally well as an MMO.

If anything, the way Torque processes objects (all objects, every 32 milliseconds, with no priority or multi-timeslice update capability) is a limiting factor in using Torque as an MMO...but the networking is absolutely not the limiting factor!
[/soapbox]

Sorry to slam your first .plan by appearing negative, wasn't the intention! I just want to point out that the networking is the least of your worries here for an MMO-style game with Torque.

PS: Hehe..great minds think alike..Dave just got to it ahead of me!
Edited on Feb 23, 2006 04:35 GMT

Allyn "Mr_Bloodworth" Mcelrath (Feb 23, 2006 at 14:12 GMT)

Did you guys notice that he said : "Major problem is the Torque network engine, which is not really suited from a MMPOG. I dont really believe that. With a bit of work it could handle far more than was expected of it. Has to be easier than writing a network layer from scratch!"

lol..

David \"Fulcrum\" Wyand (Feb 23, 2006 at 16:57 GMT)

Greetings!

Allyn:
Sure did. And it doesn't take away from any of Gary's other discourse in that paragraph, nor Stephen's comments and mine.

Think of this as a discussion for the community as a whole that Gary happened to stumble into. :o)

- LightWave Dave

Tim Muenstermann (Feb 24, 2006 at 00:10 GMT)

Welcome Gary!

-Tim

Gary Ingram (Feb 25, 2006 at 13:15 GMT)

Thanks for the comments guys.

Having looked into the network code I'm more and more impressed with it. TBH my comments were mainly as a result of comments by GarageGames themselves, possibly why it has this reputation.

Still wading though code and tutorials, my god there is a lot here!

Still, loving it so far.....

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