Come work with me!!
by Phil Carlisle · 08/27/2007 (7:00 pm) · 21 comments
Ok, its a blatant ad to get us started off. Sorry, should go in the help wanted place, but frankly thats a bit too noisy and I want to find someone :)
http://data.bolton.ac.uk/personnel/hr/personnelmatters/r&s/vacancies/cca037ac-Aug07-Advertisement.htm
Ok, to get past the corporate speak, come work with me on some fun stuff! You'll do some lecturing, but the main bulk of your work will be playing with us lunatics (ok, not true, but not THAT far off).
We're after someone who's a real vet, fancies a change from the usual game dev ratrace but still loves doing thier job.
Anyway.. Now that I've got the obligatories out of the way. I wanted to post about something else.
MMO's. Why do people constantly go over the same turf? I mean, go to www.mmorpg.com and look at the sheer number of MMO's coming out that follow almost exactly the same template? Then think of the number of fun indie games you could produce with that amount of funding!
It just kind of irks me that essentially people can seemingly throw money away at businesses that clearly have no clue of how to differentiate themselves.
Anyway, now that I've got that little rant of my chest. Right now I'm doing some research into how possible it would be to build an MMO architecture on an indie budget. I came across the amazon EC2 stuff a few weeks back and it got me seriously thinking. EC2 for the uninitiated is an amazon "service" which allows you to run linux based servers on thier hardware backend. Basically it virtualizes the whole process, so you can literally install and run servers on the fly via thier webservice API. This isnt really the key to it though (running a server isnt rocket science), what is innovative, is that you pay for CPU hour. You also pay very little. If you combine these things together (easy server launch API, quick server setup and launch) you should be able to see that an on-the-fly scalable server cluster could be built pretty easily. Not only that, but it would only cost you for the servers you NEED. No server sitting there running with nobody on!
So this COULD be used for a truly indie budget server cluster (on a par with the larger MMO's of this world). The only downside is that right now you cant specify a few things you'd need to really build a proper cluster, mainly in terms of the location and distance between servers switch-backbone wise. If they get that sorted, which I believe they intend to, then a cluster scale MMO on an indie budget is very possible. Hell, if the MMOkit would build on linux you could literally build a scale-out cluster using it!
So, thats an option for the future. I'll be keeping an eye out for the new API coming and might even experiment some.
http://data.bolton.ac.uk/personnel/hr/personnelmatters/r&s/vacancies/cca037ac-Aug07-Advertisement.htm
Ok, to get past the corporate speak, come work with me on some fun stuff! You'll do some lecturing, but the main bulk of your work will be playing with us lunatics (ok, not true, but not THAT far off).
We're after someone who's a real vet, fancies a change from the usual game dev ratrace but still loves doing thier job.
Anyway.. Now that I've got the obligatories out of the way. I wanted to post about something else.
MMO's. Why do people constantly go over the same turf? I mean, go to www.mmorpg.com and look at the sheer number of MMO's coming out that follow almost exactly the same template? Then think of the number of fun indie games you could produce with that amount of funding!
It just kind of irks me that essentially people can seemingly throw money away at businesses that clearly have no clue of how to differentiate themselves.
Anyway, now that I've got that little rant of my chest. Right now I'm doing some research into how possible it would be to build an MMO architecture on an indie budget. I came across the amazon EC2 stuff a few weeks back and it got me seriously thinking. EC2 for the uninitiated is an amazon "service" which allows you to run linux based servers on thier hardware backend. Basically it virtualizes the whole process, so you can literally install and run servers on the fly via thier webservice API. This isnt really the key to it though (running a server isnt rocket science), what is innovative, is that you pay for CPU hour. You also pay very little. If you combine these things together (easy server launch API, quick server setup and launch) you should be able to see that an on-the-fly scalable server cluster could be built pretty easily. Not only that, but it would only cost you for the servers you NEED. No server sitting there running with nobody on!
So this COULD be used for a truly indie budget server cluster (on a par with the larger MMO's of this world). The only downside is that right now you cant specify a few things you'd need to really build a proper cluster, mainly in terms of the location and distance between servers switch-backbone wise. If they get that sorted, which I believe they intend to, then a cluster scale MMO on an indie budget is very possible. Hell, if the MMOkit would build on linux you could literally build a scale-out cluster using it!
So, thats an option for the future. I'll be keeping an eye out for the new API coming and might even experiment some.
About the author
Torque Owner Ted Southard
Honestly there's a lot of people that show up on the boards here and elsewhere that really don't know that. And not just about MMO's, but about game development in general, thinking that it's about the same level of difficulty as playing the game to make one. Of course, they weed themselves out, but before they do (it can take a few months) they usually post wild and mildly amusing posts about "teh b3st game everer!!!!11!!1one".