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Planning: Identifying options

Started by TonyV, September 02, 2012, 08:17:17 PM

emu265

Quote from: Mister Bison on September 04, 2012, 03:42:57 PM
And a first time we could prevent a game from closing. Think about it: MMOs are one the only kind of game you can't play after it's been closed ! never ever ! well, except community efforts. How worse can it get ? People everywhere complain about languages becoming extinct, what about gameplays and IPs ?

If possible, we should aim at making illegal this kind of closure, an MMO should be preserved instead of closed.

Interesting.

I am not aware of any legal basis for making the closure of an MMO illegal, but hey I'm not in law school quite yet.  However, I'm sure that whatever we are able to accomplish with this effort will set standards.  If we are successful in some way, which I earnestly believe is possible, this sort of thing may stick.  Cities is an incredible exception to the rules in the case of most MMOs, let's do it justice. 

downix

This guy on the forums says he has a Hero Engine subscription. Might want to talk to him.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=4379491&postcount=2202

epawtows

#42
If there is one thing CoH players know how to do, it's figure out alternate names when the one you want is taken. :)

If we can't call a replacement "City of Heroes", then call it "Heroes of the City".  I think we'll all get it.

zybron

I love City of Heroes as much as everyone else here, but there is something very appealing in the thought of a player owned, open source, community MMORPG. Personally, I think Plan Z wouldn't be such a bad thing. And, if it does come to that, I'd be happy to help out. I'm a software developer and though I typically work on business software in my day job that does mean I have plenty of database experience and would be happy to help out in any capacity I can.

SkyStreak

I definitely think that 'playing nice' is our best option, but I think drumming up support from other game communities (particularly those who play NCsoft titles) by going the "Are YOU next!?!" route might not be such a bad idea.

nemerle

Whenever working on the server got me down, I'd fantasize about writing the engine, and client-server communications from scratch, it'd save sooo much time, but then the problem of writing the whole client from scratch always entered the picture :(
Remember that CoX engine has some pretty unique features, and selecting some available game engine would still require a rather large amount of work.

TerryXY, what were you called back then ?

Talionis

Quote from: epawtows on September 04, 2012, 05:02:04 PM
If there is one thing CoH players know how to do, it's figure out alternate names when the one you want is taken. :)

If we can't call a replacement "City of Heroes", then call it "Heroes of the City".  I think we'll all get it.

I too like the name "Heroes of the City"  it has a good ring...

ROBOKiTTY

Quote from: downix on September 04, 2012, 04:09:31 PM
This guy on the forums says he has a Hero Engine subscription. Might want to talk to him.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=4379491&postcount=2202

I'd be wary of proprietary dependencies in a community project. We should strive for all non-trivial dependencies, IMO, to be at the very least source-available, accessible, and without time limits. HeroEngine looks like it comes with a host of proprietary dependencies as well. While it would streamline development and deployment, I'd be careful about making a commitment.

Two things about HeroEngine immediately jump out as dealbreakers to me: 1) developers are locked into HeroScript, which is proprietary. Native code is restricted to DLLs that go through their plugin API. This is essentially the same thing with Unreal Engine and means very non-portable code. 2) Although their server runs on Linux and CentOS, the client and all development tools are for Windows/DirectX (with Linux/Mac and OpenGL support on their roadmap). This would alienate our Mac users.
Have you played with a KiTTY today?

ROBOKiTTY

Quote from: nemerle on September 04, 2012, 05:35:24 PM
Whenever working on the server got me down, I'd fantasize about writing the engine, and client-server communications from scratch, it'd save sooo much time, but then the problem of writing the whole client from scratch always entered the picture :(

I've always thought it was incredible that you stuck with the project for so long. With enough strong developers like you, we should be able to do anything. 8)
Have you played with a KiTTY today?

The White Rager

I noticed the article we got on addictiveinfo had a bit of info I hadn't heard before: it stated that Nexon is a major shareholder of NCSoft and has been putting pressure on them due to their (overall - wasn't our fault) redline quarter. I don't think anyone's suggested that angle yet. Where we the community couldn't succeed, perhaps they would? We might divert some effort towards convincing Nexon that NCSoft is making a really bad move, and it might be in their best interest to dissuade them. 'Hey Nexon, you know NCSoft's bad year? Well they've decided to axe a steadily 10 mill profit game instead of the ones that lost money." Obviously we'd use very different words  ;D, but it might work. They have what to lose from NCSoft screwing up, and the push to make a point NCSoft wont' be able to just ignore.

WanderingAries

Quote from: ROBOKiTTY on September 04, 2012, 05:50:04 PMThis would alienate our Mac users.
Which is something you Definitely don't want to do. If anything, we want to encourage Mac compatibility as more people are starting to surface as Mac Gamers.
Find me on Homecoming:
https://www.homecomingservers.com

TerryXY

Quote from: ROBOKiTTY on September 04, 2012, 05:50:04 PM
I'd be wary of proprietary dependencies in a community project. We should strive for all non-trivial dependencies, IMO, to be at the very least source-available, accessible, and without time limits. HeroEngine looks like it comes with a host of proprietary dependencies as well. While it would streamline development and deployment, I'd be careful about making a commitment.

Two things about HeroEngine immediately jump out as dealbreakers to me: 1) developers are locked into HeroScript, which is proprietary. Native code is restricted to DLLs that go through their plugin API. This is essentially the same thing with Unreal Engine and means very non-portable code. 2) Although their server runs on Linux and CentOS, the client and all development tools are for Windows/DirectX (with Linux/Mac and OpenGL support on their roadmap). This would alienate our Mac users.

I agree, i wouldnt choose such an engine. They may offer alot of nice to have tools, but most of them we dont even need. Im pretty sure the 100$ per year license has some downsides. There are free engines like jmonkey engine, written in java(and for those who think java is horrible/slow, thats bullshit and old information.)  which provides all the tools we need. Im pretty sure there are alot of old java experts within the CoH community that would love to contribute.
@nemerle cant remember my name, must be something like 2face or terry. its quite a bit ago, i remember and a guy called fork. I did some packet sniffing and stuff. couldnt help much back then, since im more into .net and java.

Paula

Quote from: WanderingAries on September 04, 2012, 06:07:42 PM
Which is something you Definitely don't want to do. If anything, we want to encourage Mac compatibility as more people are starting to surface as Mac Gamers.

Just to chime in, if we find ourselves with a player-driven programming situation, if we could have "official" compatibility with Mac & Linux, we'd be in a Gaming Tier of Awesomeness shared by precious, precious few games out there...

(My best friend games on a Mac, and I dual-boot Ubuntu/Win7)

ROBOKiTTY

Quote from: TerryXY on September 04, 2012, 06:26:25 PM
I agree, i wouldnt choose such an engine. They may offer alot of nice to have tools, but most of them we dont even need. Im pretty sure the 100$ per year license has some downsides. There are free engines like jmonkey engine, written in java(and for those who think java is horrible/slow, thats bullshit and old information.)  which provides all the tools we need. Im pretty sure there are alot of old java experts within the CoH community that would love to contribute.
@nemerle cant remember my name, must be something like 2face or terry. its quite a bit ago, i remember and a guy called fork. I did some packet sniffing and stuff. couldnt help much back then, since im more into .net and java.

Well, I didn't expect to hear about jMonkeyEngine here. I've been working with jMonkey for a year and had just submitted my first patch to it days before the news about CoX came out... But yeah, the performance is quite decent, and the rendering is delegated to C code anyhow. The Java front-end just provides a safer abstraction, like scripting in any other game engine. In CoX terms, it's one way of reducing the likelihood of minor logic changes introducing new system-melting crash bugs.

Besides, given the spaghetti hackery that is CoX, I've seen more performant/robust 3d MMO clients in Flash.
Have you played with a KiTTY today?

Codewalker

Quote from: ROBOKiTTY on September 04, 2012, 07:06:16 PM
Besides, given the spaghetti hackery that is CoX, I've seen more performant/robust 3d MMO clients in Flash.

On the bright side, spaghetti code with lots of global variables, if() trees, and gotos is a lot easier to follow in a machine code debugger than object-oriented code with 20 layers of abstraction. :)

Golden Girl

Any engine decision would have to be based on the simple question of "war walls, yes or no?".
"Heroes and Villains" website - http://www.heroes-and-villains.com
"Heroes and Villains" on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/HeroesAndVillainsMMORPG
"Heroes and Villains" on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Plan_Z_Studios
"Heroes and Villains" teaser trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnjKqNPfFv8
Artwork - http://goldengirlcoh.deviantart.com

TerryXY

Quote from: Golden Girl on September 04, 2012, 07:31:11 PM
Any engine decision would have to be based on the simple question of "war walls, yes or no?".

Well this is more a design decision, not an engine issue. With proper coding you can have a open world just like WoW. You can easily have hundred-thousands of objects in "one world" without "zoning",... just need to let the player know what is "interesting" for him and what not. Because player A is not interested what player B is doing 200 miles away.
You can also have like a map server for every zone. Lots of possibilities here. And yeah i brought jMonkey up because im using it since like 7-8 months now, and got stuck with it because its just amazing. It is definiatly capable handling such a project.

Mister Bison

Basically it's just a back-end way of fractionning the world piece by piece and passing the player from zones to zones, but the thing still looks like the assets just take so much space in memory you have to load them separately on the client.
Yeeessss....

Bjork

One of the things Champions Online did right was to have One World and then create different instances when one filled up. This in my opinion would allow a much more cohesive world, I hope it is something that is given some consideration.

Golden Girl

Quote from: Bjork on September 04, 2012, 07:59:32 PM
One of the things Champions Online did right was to have One World and then create different instances when one filled up. This in my opinion would allow a much more cohesive world, I hope it is something that is given some consideration.

That kind of "serverless environment" is totally what we should be looking at if we're forced to try and set up our own superhero game.
"Heroes and Villains" website - http://www.heroes-and-villains.com
"Heroes and Villains" on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/HeroesAndVillainsMMORPG
"Heroes and Villains" on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Plan_Z_Studios
"Heroes and Villains" teaser trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnjKqNPfFv8
Artwork - http://goldengirlcoh.deviantart.com