[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Amanda Walker]

On Feb 28, 2007, at 5:23 PM, John Buehler wrote:
> To break out of this pattern, it's going to take things like  
> inexpensive
> graphics engines that will let every Tom, Dick and Harry Developer  
> take a
> shot at the graphical genre the same way that printf permitted the  
> parents
> of those developers to take a shot at the textual genre.  That's  
> when the
> zealots for depth will be able to step up to the plate and build  
> something
> that will put World of Warcraft to shame.

The graphics engines aren't the problem, I don't think   Torque has  
been out for years, for example, and even has a 3rd party "MMO Kit".   
Irrlicht and CrystalSpace are free, etc.

The problem I see for doing an indie MMO is infrastructure.  It takes  
a lot of bandwidth and computing power to support very many users,  
and current game engines are biased towards very centralized server  
implementations (which then biases the hardware investement towards  
"big iron" servers racked up in expensive data centers).

This is not the only way to do it--the US Army, for example, does a  
lot of distributed simulation to support test & training: real time  
tactical simulation among hundreds or thousands of nodes with no  
central server at all.  Participants bring their own CPU power.

The main barrier to doing this for a consumer game is the "untrusted  
client" problem.  Once there's a distributed MMO engine that is  
robust in the face of hacked clients, life could get very interesting  
very fast.


Amanda Walker