MMORPG Contest - Week 4

Wow, it's hard to believe that this contest is nearly 1/3 of the way over. Time flies when you're having fun I guess :P

Since this is a major milestone, let me recap the progress so far...

Week 1

Initial game design was started, but the most important part was the team creation.

Unlike most teams, our team started completely from scratch. Out of the 9 team members, only two of us knew each other before the beginning of the competition. It all started with this post.

We spent the first week mostly setting up, getting to know each other, etc...

Website - Wiki, Subversion, and a phpBB was installed and configured.

Logo rough draft was created.

A bit of the design was started, which was important in getting the initial wiki pages setup.

Week 2

Major work on art pipeline was done, which is a fancy way of saying that we decided the tool chains we'll be using for character, building and texture creation.

Initial database design was started, along with the creation of a web-based PHP application to allow designers to collaborate on the game design. At this point an important decision was made to use significantly more of a data-driven approach and less scripting. We also decided to shy away from the MMO Kit database design and lean more towards a design of our own.

More game design was done.

Week 3

Significant progress was made on creating the first building.... not just the building creation itself, but deciding atmosphere look and feel.

Four music tracks were created / adjusted for game play.

Character modeling pipeline is making progress, but still incomplete.

AI / NPC coding and database design continued, including A* path finding (complete, but AI movement requires a "radar" to be added for avoiding non-static objects), NPC dialogs an quest giving.

Week 4

This week was mostly implementing the building tool chain. 4 new buildings were created, including a stable, another house / tavern, a Warrior's Guild and a Magician's Guild. All of them have mostly complete interiors with staircases, but lacking details. Some of the details will be created with common props, and some touch-up is required on the textures, but they're good enough for now. At this point we cannot spend too much time perfecting one thing without progressing in other areas and if we have time then we can go back and put some finishing touches on them.

More research on seamless zones using Intel's Cluster OpenMP compiler. The idea is to make mini-zones for a single TGE map to allow better load distribution. Clients will be simultaneously connected to the current zone that they're in, plus up to 8 other surrounding zones. Move updates will go to the current zone, but the player will receive updates from all 9 zones.

We could also use an update manager to reduce network traffic by limiting the number of characters, NPC's, monsters, etc that are in-scope. This gets tricky at zone boundaries and requires synchronization of up to four servers using a shared-memory area, but by handing this synchronization to separate threads then it can be handled gracefully without slowing down the main threads.

I'm not anticipating that this will be finished before the end of the competition.... with only about 60 days left, we have way too many other fish to fry. For the contest we only need to support 100 players, so an optimized camera and player (RTSUnit-like) is all that's required for that, so I only spent a few hours playing around with it... it was more "leisure" time on my part.

Scripting and other coding has also been started, but it's still building up steam.

Encrypted Containers - Finished of a variant of encrypted zip containers that prevents off-the-shelf zip crackers from breaking the encryption even with brute force. Although this might make a good resource, I'm not releasing the code for now for obvious reasons.

Main.cs removal - modified the code to eliminate the need for main.cs.

Script reduction - Since this is not a toolkit nor a MOD-able game, there's actually little need for scripting. Although we're not completely eliminating all scripts, we'll definitely have fewer scripts than the typical Torque game. In fact, as a starter, we completely removed all scripts, then started putting some back in place as required.... at this point we have fewer than 10 script files, and when it's all said and done we'll probably have less than two or three dozen small scripts (not including GUI files).

Other C++ coding - WoW style movement, advanced camera, MySQL integration and a few changes to pull scripted things into C++.

And,that's about it for this week.... Over the next three weeks we hope to make significant progress on C++ coding, GUI / HUD and scripting, plus get most of the NPC dialogs, quests, items, spells and combat into the game. Week 8 hopefully we'll see the first few characters with animations get into the game, so by the end of 60 days we will have a playable, albeit unfinished game. That'll leave us with 30 days of play-testing, world creation, storytelling / quests, and the creation of a few more character, NPC and monsters models.

And now for some screenshots....