Best Plugins for MMO

News & General Discussion
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Hello! I am fairly new to Unity3D, but I have made some smaller games before, but now I actually want to create a full finished game. My goal is to make an MMO and there are tons of plugins for Unity and I’m wondering what are the best plugins for an MMO? I want this to be an indie game and I am pretty much good with everything except for coding. Now, it’s not like I haven’t coded before, I have done several things in JavaScript, but not much in C#. I was hoping some of you guys in the community could help me put a list together of the best plugins to help me accomplish my game. Here are the basics of my game…

  1. Character creation. It is more of an animated game so the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth will be 2D textures (I don’t know if that affects anything with character customization).

  2. Like every MMO, I want it to have an inventory, chat system, action bar, health and armor bar, an energy bar (how much energy you have for building things), vendors, enemies, and NPCs

  3. Quest system

  4. Factions. There will be 4 different factions and depending on which one you choose after completing a quest for each faction, you can only buy the armor that chosen faction provides (not including pieces of armor that enemies can drop or buy from other vendors – except the other faction vendors).

  5. I want certain pieces of armor, weapons, and other equipable items / consumables to have different rarity.

  6. I want there to be properties where you can build pretty much whatever you want from various bricks.

  7. I am planning on there being multiple worlds, so I want there to be spaceship travel. So, for example, you would go to a launch pad to a dedicated world and when you press the button to use your spaceship it shows you taking off, then it would go to the loading screen, then show you landing at the new world.

  8. Speaking of spaceships, I would like it to where you could create your own spaceship and cars. I want this to be a game where you can build lots of stuff.

  9. I definitely need animation, but I don’t know if I really need a plugin for that, but if there are some good plugins or programs to where it might auto rig my character and I pose it for animations that might be good.

Sorry for the long post, this is my first post and I really want my game idea to get completed. Thanks!

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I’m gonna warn you, there is going to be people who are probably typing responses at the same time as me, that will crush your dream. An MMO is a massive undertaking. The huge triple A teams who make MMO’s, for them they are incredibly difficult to complete - for those huge skilled teams.

So yeah, prepare yourself for imminent dream crushing.

I’ll edit in some more useful info in a second, haha.

Edit: ok so, if your bound and determined your going to make an MMO, the first and most important thing to consider is scope. If you really need all those features, they need to be really basic, because it’ll take years, if not decades, to complete all that.

Then you need a team. You need programmers, artists, sound guys, music guys, networking guys, and eventually marketing guys. Your gonna need funding. You can theoretically do all this alone - but it ain’t gonna be done till your seventy.

Another option is go really low-fi, and by that I mean like solid colored everything, low tech sounds, low tech models, and doing that will buy you lots of time to code - and your gonna need plenty time.

As for plugins that will get you off to a headstart, I’m not too familiar with any, but the are MMO kits avaliable, which have some basic networking code, and other features that might save you time, but you still need to learn the guts of those to kind of bend them to do your bidding.

I hope I’m not being a dream crusher myself, haha, but the reality is that an MMO is daunting, difficult work. Think of it like this: blizzard spends something like ten years minimum on each MMO they make. Blizzard is a huge giant among game companies. They have severe amounts of talent, but getting a quality MMO just takes time and very much effort.

Good luck out there!

Edit 2: ok so also, to put some wind in your sails, it’s been done before, a single person creating an MMO, but I’ve got no doubt it was hard. Now have a look at all the networking solutions to start with. Ideally the fastest, most performance designed ones will be best. To name a couple popular ones (not necessarily the fastest) there is “photon”, which has free offerings, and one I found a while back on the forums that sent straight binary data across rpc’s, but the best thing would be custom built, likely using sockets, specifically for your purposes. And for characters, and character customization, I recommend UMA (unity multipurpose avatar) which is free, and well supported (lots of people use it and can answer questions). And for what you were saying about “blocks to customize…” - let me just say there exist no plugin that’s gonna do that for you - but there are voxel examples and assets that might give you a push in the right direction - but I strongly recommend you do not do that. And for space travel… well remember what I said about scope - scope means “how much stuff” is your game going to contain/be capable of. If you plan on making an MMO with both ground travel and space travel - it is pushing the difficulty of development up way higher. Stick to ground mechanics and if things take off, consider that later.

I’d love to come back to the forums one day in some time and find a work in progress thread with your game looking awesome like your idea, and have all those features and more, but keep things realistically achievable! If you haven’t developed like twenty games already, and have some serious funds to pay a big team to help you bring it to life, it’s never gonna happen. Focus on prototyping a very extremely basic version of an MMO. Make it possible to connect two clients on a server, who can walk around together. Once that’s working, take baby steps closer to your end goal. Don’t let all this scare you off! If you think you have the passion and dedication to spend countless sleepless nights coding, modelling, texturing, animating and everything else - you could do it. But time and effort by the boatload will be required.

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Look at this one man MMO:

Keep in mind that this guy probably had a background in game dev before taking this on, but yeah he’s really doing it. It’s coming along after years of work!

So if my last post sucks all your motivation away, let this one build you back up.

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There’s a space exploration kit available on the asset store that possibly does what you require, fairly expensive for an asset at above $200. Might be worth you taking a look.

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@MD_Reptile @sicga123_1

I pretty much have all the assets I need. I have pretty much all the 3D models, textures, music, and characters done. I just have to animate the characters and such. Even though creating an MMO might not be easy, I think I will still try just for fun and experience. I know there are several MMO kits but have you had any experience with any of the kits? In the Unity Asset Store I have seen uMMO, Ultimate MMO RPG Kit, and the Atavism Online Creator. Im not sure which is best of the three and all the pros and cons. There is also an early access software on Steam called MyRPG Master and I’m not sure if that as online capabilities (I think it does) and I don’t know how well that one compares to these Unity ones. I would think the ones for Unity are better. Also, let me clear up the rocket ship thing. My idea was not for it to be space travel but just a tradition between worlds. The player wouldn’t control the ship, you would only go to the launch zone that takes you to a dedicated world and, for example, press shift to spawn your ship there and it would be like an in game cutscene (not a video, but the camera and character and ship are doing its thing on its own) showing your ship take off. Then once it takes off, it goes to a loading screen, and once it’s done loading, it would be another cutscene sort of thing showing it arrive at the new world and dropping your character off and wala, you can now play in the new world. Hope that makes sense.

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You may want to consider an engine designed for MMOs. Unity can definitely be used to create an MMO, but the vast majority of what makes an MMO difficult to build will have to be made from scratch. Both BigWorld and HeroEngine have affordable indie licenses.

http://bigworldtech.com
http://www.heroengine.com/

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@Ryiah

What are the benefits of those? The Asset Store has kits for MMOs plus a lot of other plugins to help with other stuff. With those engines you suggested, is it easy to create a character creation and everything expected from an MMO without a ton of coding and extra fees? I would like to do as little coding as possible but I believe the big world tech engine website said they use Python and Ive read that’s the easiest language to learn. If so where is a good place to start learning Python?

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lol

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Don’t use BigWorld Indie. It has been dead since WarGaming acquired them.

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They’re engines specifically designed to handle MMOs. Unity is very much a general purpose game engine without any real specialities. Unity will work perfectly fine for building your client, but you still need to build a server backend.

HeroEngine not only provides the tools necessary to create your client but also the server backend. Additionally they host your game for you. They do take a 30% cut, but the cost of hosting your own servers wouldn’t be too dissimilar.

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Good to know. A quick check indicates development of BigWorld Indie stopped on January. At least it wasn’t the cheaper option.

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What if its a free to play game? How much would it cost?

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You can see the pricing on their sign-up page. Its a yearly fee based on the number of developers (they use the term users).

https://account.heroengine.com/signup/

They handle the hosting and bandwidth usage of your game for the yearly fee and a 30% cut of the revenue. Compare this to the cost of a dedicated server and you’ll see it isn’t bad at all.

http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated

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Re HeroEngine: You have to be cautious though if you are going F2P. I had a conversation on this some time ago with Cooper from HE. Here’s the bottom line of the conversation:

"If you plan to release a game that doesn’t generate revenue, then you would be paying the operational costs, so could release it whenever you’d like. You could expect costs to fall in line with industry standard collocation and hosting costs. "

Not sure if this still holds true. It has been a while since I was talking to Cooper.

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I don’t think that has anything to do with paying HE… You’ll have operational costs for hosting regardless of what engine you use and what model you build your game as (F2P, sub, etc)

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In this case it has to do with HE, since the concept of HE is to provide the so-called “HeroCloud”. HeroCloud is a service that includes the HeroEngine plus hosting plus billing (as soon as your game has been launched). You cannot license HeroEngine itself. You can only license HeroCloud (which then includes the HeroEngine plus hosting plus billing as soon as your game has been released).

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OK, not entirely true. You CAN license HeroEngine alone. But only as “HeroEngine Source”. The basic HeroEngine source code license is $75,000 with a 7% revenue share. I don’t assume that this is the league that we are talking about here (-;

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An asset store MMO kit will never cut it for making your idea of an MMO.

What you should do is read up on network programming and then make the game build on top of a solid solution like uLink, Photon Server or what ever your preference would be. Depending on scope then you could probably even do with with something like Bolt on the asset store.

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Can people stop entertaining this thread.

“I can’t hand code pong without following a tutorial but I want to build an mmo using drag and drop that includes multiple worlds and spaceships”

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At some point I stopped trying to convince people to try easier projects. I feel they’ll discover on their own whether or not that was a good idea. Now I simply try to direct people towards resources that make it easier to develop those projects.

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