next »

[mewse]

Congratulations, you're the new owner of ShadiSoft Software, the latest software development house to have gone bust when their exciting new MMORPG failed to catch the public's attention!  With a full staff of programmers, designers and artists to obey your every whim, it's your job to reverse the company's fortunes and become the most popular MMORPG on the block.

In the game, you have the power to zone the world into level ranges, to set up and adjust the powers of the available player and monster classes, to place and move towns, respawn points, and initial starting areas, to place major quests, to hire and fire employees, to set the game's subscription cost...  and a few other bits and pieces.

In terms of procedurally generated content, the game generates content based upon the name the player gives to the MMORPG.  This includes:

• MMORPG world geometry (oceans, continents, the names of regions, etc)
• The initial MMORPG setup which you inherit (and can then adjust)
• All simulated players and their preferred activities in an MMORPG.
• The available player and monster classes and stats.
• The rival MMORPGs, and their players.
• Various incidental background graphics

Download from:

• http://www.mmorpg-tycoon.com/

I'm planning to continue development on this game even after the competition is over;  there's just too much stuff that I wanted to do that I didn't have time to do.  I'd like to procedurally generate newspaper headlines and the subject lines of forum posts as the game goes on, to give the player more power over class and monster types, and I'd especially love to make monsters visible directly on the map.  But that simply didn't get finished in time for this competition's deadline.

The little house icons represent towns, and the square in the green territory is a new player starting area.  You can zoom in and out at this screen;  if you zoom in close enough, you can see the players moving around and completing their quests, gaining levels, and use the "Inspect" tool to check out their vital stats (name, health, level, happiness, etc).



EDIT:  Removed broken direct download links.  Downloads are now available via the MMORPG Tycoon homepage.

[increpare]

excellent idea!  :D

 

[Inane]

I want this more than your sister.

[Melly]

I want this more than your sister.

How hot is that sister?

[moi]

This project looks totally overambitious but I am wishing you good luck

[Akhel]

This looks fantastic. Even if you don't manage to finish it in time for the compo, please keep working on it.

[William Broom]

This looks awesome. Will we be able to choose our business models? i.e. ad-driven, monthly payments, or ZT Online-style microtransactions? Can we lay down the banhammer on unruly players like they did in Puzzle Pirates?
Can't wait

[mewse]

This project looks totally overambitious but I am wishing you good luck

Probably true..  but I like aiming high.  If I don't get all the way there before the deadline, there'll certainly be a demo or something.  And I'll keep plugging away at this until it's done, even if I miss the deadline. 

Will we be able to choose our business models? i.e. ad-driven, monthly payments, or ZT Online-style microtransactions? Can we lay down the banhammer on unruly players like they did in Puzzle Pirates?
Can't wait

Right now I was planning on letting the player set a price for the initial purchase, and then a monthly fee, either of which could be set to zero.  I'd need to think a lot about ad-driven or microtransaction business models;  figure out how all that would fit in with all the other factors in the simulation.  But I probably won't include those two unless I somehow manage to finish early and want to start adding more stuff.

I hadn't really thought about the banhammer yet;  The simulation does allow players to grief other players, but I haven't yet decided how the player would go about minimising it (I mean, apart from the obvious stuff, like re-zoning so that your high-level zones aren't right next to your newbie starting areas, and things like that).  Nerfing was an easy thing to let the player do, because one click will apply to everyone.. but picking out an individual for banning when you've got up to 10,000 simulated people connected at once..  it sounds like a little more micromanagement than I really wanted.  On the other hand, it could be a lot of fun to go on a spree of random bannings, and then watch the forum buzz.   :D

Maybe the player can hire GMs in addition to programmers/designers/artists, and those GMs can automatically use the banhammer, or something.  Probably needs more thought.  And is probably beyond the scope of this competition entry.  But we'll see how I go.

[Inane]

That post didn't answer the pivotal question of: Is your sister hot?

Anyway, you should be able to get volunteer GMs, who abuse power and piss people off. :D

[alphasmart]

This looks utterly fantastic!  I do sense there may be some drama from a certain someone if he discovers it though...

Seriously though this looks great, and probably something I'd pay for if you complete it (ironically, I'd never ever pay for a MMO, particularly on subscription)

[cyber95]

This looks utterly fantastic!  I do sense there may be some drama from a certain someone if he discovers it though...

I like Squidi, but he overreacts wayyyyyy-hay-hay-hayyyy too much.

[mewse]

So I didn't have much time to code today;  only about an hour in total.  I fixed up a couple low level bugs (including in my random number generation code.  Ick.)

But I did implement one big new feature;  during the world setup phase, the game now seeds the world with water, effectively turning the play area into a single big continent/island.

Imagine my surprise when the PG algorithms immediately generated an initial MMORPG setup in which the new user starting point was placed on a little island off the main coast, and the first town was on the mainland, which effectively meant that whenever a new player connects for the first time, he goes looking for a "home", starts walking toward that first town, and falls straight into the sea and drowns.

D'oh!  Maybe I need boats or something. 

Screenshot

This looks utterly fantastic!  I do sense there may be some drama from a certain someone if he discovers it though...

That's really cool!  At a casual glance, his gameplay design seems to be focusing in on the little details of MMO creation that I'm abstracting away, like precise monster and quest placements, etc.  I really love his pixel art mockups.  Wish I had those sorts of art skills. 

[Melly]

This looks utterly fantastic!  I do sense there may be some drama from a certain someone if he discovers it though...

That's really cool!  At a casual glance, his gameplay design seems to be focusing in on the little details of MMO creation that I'm abstracting away, like precise monster and quest placements, etc.  I really love his pixel art mockups.  Wish I had those sorts of art skills. 

Meh, if the guy's gonna go pissy over this as well especially when Mewse didn't even know about his stuff then just let him spew fire immaturely.

I think it's an awesome concept. Please finish.

[PaulMorel]

Wow.  Again, this sounds super-ambitious, but if you can finish it, I will play it.

Technical Question: What language/environment are you using?  I'm using java for my game, and I haven't been able to implement a fast version of that glow/blur effect that you are using.  Any tips or links for how you are doing that?

[Sar]

I haven't been able to implement a fast version of that glow/blur effect that you are using.  Any tips or links for how you are doing that?

I've no idea how mewse is doing this specifically, but one not-totally-uncommon approach is to render all the parts you want glowing to a texture which is much lower resolution than the screen at the same time as rendering to the screen, then lastly render the 'glow' texture over the top of them all stretched to the same size and with lowered alpha. Maybe with an additive blending mode.

[mewse]

Technical Question: What language/environment are you using?  I'm using java for my game, and I haven't been able to implement a fast version of that glow/blur effect that you are using.  Any tips or links for how you are doing that?

I'm using C++, with my setup and rendering code going through SDL and OpenGL.

The glow effect I'm using is really just a slightly modified bloom, as described in Philip Rideout's OpenGL Bloom Tutorial;  it's done entirely on the video card, using fragment shaders. 

Basically, I render everthing to an offscreen FBO, then copy a darkened version of that offscreen image into four progressively smaller FBOs.  Then I blur each of those small FBOs, and finally, I add all five FBOs together again to make the final image.

I don't know if I'd call it "fast", but the effect is nice, and the rest of the graphics aren't exactly straining the video card's capabilities, so why not?    :D

[dustin]

for java if your using lwjgl then you should be able to do a very similar thing as it's still openGL.  Also, since the openGL routines are C++ it would be just as fast anyway...

[PaulMorel]

Thanks for the info on that effect.  I may try implement something basic using the low resolution method that you guys mentioned.

for java if your using lwjgl then you should be able to do a very similar thing as it's still openGL

lwjgl?  Probably a good idea, unfortunately this is the first time I've heard of it.

Sorry to hijack the thread.  I can't wait to see how this turns out, and the one screenshot looks terrific.

[mewse]

Update:

Haven't had much development time the past few days.  Maybe an hour per day, tops.  But I've still gotten some stuff done.

 - Simulated players (I really need a better name for them!) now have "homes".  Whenever they visit a town, they may choose to set it as their new home.  After completing any quest, players now return to their home town to heal and pick up a new quest.  The game now generates random fetch quests and hunt quests for the simulated players to complete.

 - Respawn points are now functional.  When a player is killed for any reason, he's respawned at the nearest working respawn point.  If there is no nearest respawn point (due to one not being placed, or due to the relevant server being offline), then the player is logged off, and cannot log in again until a respawn point is available.  Needless to say, this doesn't make the player very happy, and will eventually drive down your forum buzz. 

 - Players can now swim through water, but take damage as they do so.  Currently, a player will drown after approximately ten seconds of swimming.

 - Added a hint of detail to the map view, when zoomed really close in.  Screenshot below is of a new MMORPG about twenty seconds after it goes live, zoomed in close enough that you can only see two regions, plus the first ten or so new users making the journey from the starting area to the first town (although we're still zoomed out far enough that individual players are showing up as rather indistinct white blobs).

Screenshot


I'm thinking about putting together a limited-interaction tech demo sometime soon, to check how well this will actually run for everyone, and to check what sort of frame rate the game holds when it's simulating a heavily loaded MMORPG.  I still haven't let a single MMORPG run long enough to get more than about 100 players logged in simultaneously, and I'm hoping to support up to about 10,000 at once, in the final version.  So I suppose that I'm going to have to cheat, for testing. 

[Baltirow]

- Simulated players (I really need a better name for them!)

You could just call them Users (Simulated users), since they are supposedly your clients in this sim-game.