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

[Adam Martin]

On 01/03/07, Amanda Walker <amanda at alfar.com> wrote:
> 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

Those have been around for years - I'd suggest going to gamedev.net
forums and have a browse, see what the latest and greatest is. And to
find out quite how many people there are who are more than capable of
writing rich powerful 3d engines in their spare time :). There's a
huge community of soon-to-be indie developers there, a rich mixture of
extremely keen and creative highschoolers trying to write games from
scratch, highly skilled non-games industry people (programmers,
artists, etc) writing games for fun, and mainstream games devs who
just like to do some game dev work as a hobby without the stresses of
commercial dev.

> > that will put World of Warcraft to shame.

I'd like to know what a thing that put WoW to shame would look like in
a conceptual sense: what would it have to do for you to count it a
success?

> 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.

...and there's much much better stuff out there for very low cost if
you're going to go commercial, or have a promising project and can get
the interest of the big commercial engine licensors.

> 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,

Nah, b/w is ever cheaper and computing power now for servers is
shockingly cheap - prices I was quoted last year for quad-core servers
with more RAM than any of our dev machines are lower than I was
expecting for single-core 1Gb machines. I have friends who've
kickstarted stuff on what a few years ago would have been considered
major "big iron", funded by nothing more than their own spare cash
(normal people on average programmer salaries).

For instance, have a look at people like OGSI.

> 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

Indeed, it's not the *only* way to do it, but it's almost universally
the most appropriate balance of risk, cost, difficulty, performance,
security, and maintenance. In general, there's really very little
reason to bother with anything non client/server these days.

> 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.

Personally, I'm betting that will happen but disappear because the
amount of revenue being pumped into client/server systems vastly
eclipses what goes into the p2p stuff, and yet the p2p stuff has only
marginal benefits. This will remain the case until/unless the
last-mile home broadband b/w goes up by several orders of magnitude
whilst the cost of server b/w and silicon only drops by a small
factor.

/me ducks and runs for cover

Adam