[MUD-Dev] [NEWS] Warhammer Online Cancelled -- Why?

[ceo]

Jim Purbrick wrote:

> FWIW this is no longer a problem.

:) I was sure you got that solved long ago

> I'm not convinced. One lesson that I've learned from this is that
> while there are difficult and interesting technical issues to
> solve developing MMOs, the biggest problems are
> managerial. Dealing with the vast amounts of content that are
> produced and need to be produced dwarf any tricky technical
> problem that need to be

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "managerial"? My initial
reading was to assume "personnel management", closely followed by
"project management", neither of which I think are what you meant.

FYI, our take on this has long been that the biggest problems are
maintenance and ongoing-dev. Hence encouraging developers not to
write in OOP, nor in imperative scripting languages, but in inferred
languages (since these are far far easier to update old code with
unplanned-for game-features and exceptions to rules etc).

Is this kind of thing (maintenance, ongoing-dev) stuff that you
encompass in your phrase "managerial"? If you think of that word in
less of a "manager-as-person"-centric way then I could see how you
would.

> solved. It's something that Raph was telling me at Siggraph a
> couple of years ago when I was trying to sell him middleware and
> he didn't want to hear about anything other than better ways to
> create and manage content. A lot of the middleware solutions are
> very nice technical solutions, but they still leave you with all
> the content management problems to solve. Even if you bring
> someone in half way through the project to build the server tech
> from scratch they'll be done before you've solved the content
> creation problems.

I guess that partially depends on where you place the boundaries
when ring-fencing "server tech". I tend to include all development
and maintenance code+tools+processes as part of the "server tech",
since with an MMOG they are (IMHO) intimately intertwined.

  e.g. whether or not your server process allows runtime reloading
  of code mandates how those other processes can/will work.

Adam M
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