Lots of questions about Torque

#1 1) you'll get the whole sourcecode to the torque game engine, so you will be able to modify EVERYTHING, its only limited by your abilities and imagination ;-)

But as far as i heared, its not that easy to get a good MMO with 1000+ players... but its possible, and many people are working on it, maybe some day we will get a nice starter kit or something like that.

2) yes, thats no problem

3) yes, that can be easily done with a resource

4) sure

5) dunno exactly, try to search for it, has been asked alot ;)

6) i'm not sure, but i don't think that the network traffik is encrypted in a kryptographic way, but as i said, you've got the code :)

I hope I could help a little

#2 Thanks you help me a lot ( just have to convince the team, I've make my choice it would be Torque^-^).

#3 Check out Minions of Mirth for a great example of what EXCELLENT talent can accomplish (programming and artwise).

You get the complete source code, so a gifted programmer can work wonders.

1) There is no hard limit on the number of players. The 128 "limit" is based on bandwidth and latency testing for consistent gameplay for a fast-action shooter. There are resources for adding a database backend. Your network metrics will be your main concern once it is up and running.

2) Yes. For an example of a master server, look at the GPL'd TNL source code.

3) There is a hit-zone resource.

4) As such, you can add buildings as long as you trigger a scene relight for DIF objects. If you use DTS models, then you should be good to go.

5) The max throughput is largely dependent on the video card specifications. You can test it by loading hundreds upon hundreds of objects, animate them, and seeing when your frame-rate drops. You can do this in the demo. Instead of a single Kork, add a couple of hundred.

6) Look at TNL for packet encryption.

#4 Ganeel,

By no means wiould I ever detract from Torque as it is simply an awesome, professional grade engine, but for a "true" MMORPG, I'd think twice before commiting to it considering the caveats mentioned in your first post.

There are resources available here at GG that can walk you through setting up Torque to work like an MMO engine, but there are some other consideration you may find limiting.

For one, noone that I know of has found a way, short of theoretically throwing a mountain of processing power and bandwidth at the issue, to support "1000's" of simultaneous players/ connections.

None of this is to say that it couldn't be done with torque, but you need to be aware that this would be a major undertaking - not just for the herculean amount of development required to produce content, but modding the engine to suit your needs as well.

To that end, I would suggest you take a look at the Kaneva game engine.

I personally have absolutely NO experience with it, but it is designed with MMO's in mind and was built for exactly that purpose from the start.

On the other hand, if your development team is highly knoweldgeabe in C++, networking and such, then Torque offers excellent graphics/ rendering capabilites, SOURCE CODE, and much more liberal licensing schema than just about any other engine I've ever come across.

~ Just food for thought.

#5 Kaneva is ok, I definitly don't like all the royalties though. I mean for starters you give them 50% of your profit, then you have to pay 200 dollars a month, or 2 dollars per player, whichever is more money.

So, lets say you have 500 people playing your game. Lets say you charge 10 bucks a month. So your gross would be 5000 dollars.

Now, kaneva takes half the money, so you have $2500. And since we have 500 people we do 500 x 2 = 1000. So 2500 - 1000 = 1500.

So now you have $1500 to pay your team for making updates to keep people interested in your MMoG. And you might have some additional things to pay for after that, like web hosting, equpitment, software, etc.

So in the end you might be making somewhere around 200-300 dollars profit a month.


Now for Torque you pay 100(TGE) + 35(ShowTool - A must for modelers) + 150(TSE - Needed for MMORPG's - See Atlas) + 50(RTS - I've heard a lot of the stuff on it helps with MMORPG's) = $335

So $5000 - $335 = $4665

And then you are going to need to get yourself a good server, buying a computer and using it as a server would be the best bet, so lets say it costs $900.

$4665 - $900 = $3765

Then you need $70 per month for a cable connection.

$3765 - $70 = $3695

And so now we need to pay our team and for other expenses. And so you are making somewhere around $2400 to $2500 for the first month.

And so then every month after that (since you dont have to buy the engine every month) you would be making around $3600 per month.

Of course some of these values might change depending on the size of your team, how much you pay your team, how many people play your game, how much you charge people to play your game. And later you might buy some more servers.

Your total Profit with Torque = $3600 per month
Your total Profit with Kaneva = $300 per month

So basically you would make 12 times more money with torque than Kaneva.

I just felt like showing you how much money you would be making if you were to try to sell a game made with kaneva. If you feel like learning or making small games that only a few people are going to play, then by all means go ahead and use kaneva. But if you want to make an MMORPG then I wouldn't use kaneva, just because of those royalties. Torque isn't currently setup to easily make MMORPG's, but supposably there is supose to be an MMORPG Kit.

If you don't want to use torque thats fine, Realmcrafter is supose to be ok, and there are several other MMORPG engines.

Anyway, thats just what I have to say.
-Ben Jones

#6

Quote:Kaneva is ok, I definitly don't like all the royalties though. I mean for starters you give them 50% of your profit, then you have to pay 200 dollars a month, or 2 dollars per player, whichever is more money.

So, lets say you have 500 people playing your game. Lets say you charge 10 bucks a month. So your gross would be 5000 dollars.

Now, kaneva takes half the money, so you have $2500. And since we have 500 people we do 500 x 2 = 1000. So 2500 - 1000 = 1500.

So now you have $1500 to pay your team for making updates to keep people interested in your MMoG. And you might have some additional things to pay for after that, like web hosting, equpitment, software, etc.

So in the end you might be making somewhere around 200-300 dollars profit a month.

Ben,

I hear where you're coming from, believe me, but you also have to consider that Kaneva handles all of the hosting, all of the billing, bandwidth, servers, hardware, everything.

Additionally, if you read the license agreement through and through, you'll realize that everything that comes off the top, goes toward paying up your commercial license, so the percentage of profits funneling back to the dev team increases over time.

In the end, for developers who are truly interested in developing a massively multiplayer game, I just don't see a better alternative currently.

Of course, I think Kaneva's business model is doomed to failure, but that's another story. (C;

#7 One more thing... there's no way in h3ll you're going to handle 5000 clients on a single ($900) server no matter what engine you're developing with...

Also, a cable connection? Unless you plan to get really good at managing customer turnover, you'd better think more along the lines of T3.

I think your estimates are severly lowballed.

#8 Thanks for all your answers.

To reply to Kirby, I have tested many other systems before Torque. Some are to expensive for us ( we are only students with no money at all, not professionals), some are free or nearby but all have their default (lacks of documentation, compilation problems, non portable, complexity of code, no editors, partial clients...).

So at last we decided to create our own game engine. I have wrote a documentation for the server-side, but I have realised that I don't know lots of things connected with the communication between client and server mainly how to deal with movments. Plus as we are amateurs for now, some guys of the project who have to implement the client-side have no more time because of their studies.

By using a easy-modable engine as Torque looks like, first Torque already deal with my main problem (deal with moves) and is able to create other parts that I'm not really at-ease with (client connexions...) and second I'll re-use and modify the server-side as I want to fit with my documentation .

The world editor would be created by adding some mods to the Torque editor; and I can let guys with no programming experience desinging the client interface.

It would be an enormous evolution because before we would manage everything from scratch or nearby ( OGRE 3D+Raknet+FMOD+ compilator problems).

#9 Ganeel,

I understand what you're saying, and wouldn't for a moment discourage you from purchasing a Torque licesne, whether you use it for your MMO or not, but being that the SDK for Kaneva is free, you should probably at least evaluate it.

In the end, you and your team will have to decide what tool is best for the job, I'm just trying to point out that a tool exists that already does what you want, and is designed specifically with MMO's in mind. (C;

#10 I've take a look on Kaneva but the problem is the same that for Torque, it's a massively oriented engine but not specifically MMoRPG oiented. so we will make the same type of modification.

#11 Um. do you have very gifted C++ programmers on your team that will be your engine developers. I ask simply because you will need them.

#12 I have ^-^

#13 Oky, good. Because TGE itself has over 500,000 lines of complex C++ code, and with a project such as any MMO game, you will have to have programmers with a huge amount of experience with both large code-bases and network metrics. Not to mention all of the other tweaking you will have to do.