Plan for Iain Craig

With a lot of people asking about MMORPG creation, I thought I'd share the route I'm taking, as a dev with a lot of C++ and the sum total of only one finished game (and that was a GID). I'm using Torque to develop an MORPG - note the single M. I thought I'd see what I can do in the way of a smaller, more intimate multiplayer RPG.

I've been working through Dreamer's Advanced MMORPG tutorial, which is very worthwhile if you're willing to fill in the blanks and don't just want copy and paste code. It's basically taught me TorqueScript too, which is handy; it's hard to learn anything in a vacuum but if you're working towards a goal there's a reason to keep going.

2km x 2km world size? Not a problem. That's four square miles! I'm going to have a central town, and a few satellite villages. If in the future I really want more space, a portal-based zoning system that punts the player onto a server running on a different port may well be worth looking at and would require a minimum of engine changes.

Besides, with creative design a "massive" world may only be presented to the player as a limited area. Consider a city on a shard of land that has been ripped from it's home world and now drifts through space, seemingly always in the calm at the centre of a raging storm. Anyone trying to leave the city disappears into the storm, and is not heard from again.

Perhaps the entire storm phases in and out of existance in different worlds, and anything trapped in it gets sucked to the centre, where the city awaits, in the eye of the storm. One week, a helicopter crash-lands on the edge of the city; next week, a bewildered troll is found wandering down the main street trying to find her cave, having just stepped out for a wash in the rain.

What kind of society would form from a group of interdimensional misfits with no way of leaving the city? Although there are a lot of interesting tangents to follow in that design my point was just that although the actual play area is small, that small area interfaces with a massive world. There's no hard and fast rule that says you have to let them GO there!

128 players max? No worries. Upwards of 100 players + NPCs in your immediate vicinity, plus a strongly-suggested external world, will not feel small. I'm not out for profit on this one anyway, it's a learning experience and a chance to experiment with different RPG concepts. A lower number of players may allow me to evolve a richer, more character based experience.

Lack of art assets? The terrain builder goes a long way. And those cottages, docks and towers from the SDK look a hell of a lot better as to-be-going-on graphics than most programmer art.

If you really, really want to do an MMORPG, why not start by building a small, defined area of your world and the code to support it? You'd probably have a lot more luck finding funding/team members when you can show potential investors what you have and explain that your problem is scaling it with your available resources.