We’ve been working hard on our Action based MMO (previously posted here ))
We’ve made a lot of progress and are now would like to get some feedback, so if you’re interested we would love to hear what you think.
As its a MMO the server has to be online to play. We’re currently running short intermittent tests and will keep this post updated to let you know the current server status.
Rough expected test times (GMT)
Saturday 16th Aug 14:00 GMT → Sunday 17th Aug 10:00 GMT
You can find a builds here;
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Please don’t be shy about feedback, everything is valid. We would also love to know how far you managed to get and any suggestions to make it more enjoyable.
Hi, a bit later than planned but got together another build that should be up right now!
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I think it starts in low quality by default so hit Q to up the quality, when you can see player shadows it’s at max.
We managed to significantly reduce the download size, added a tutorial and got closer to finalising the character combat. The Warrior has updated combos and the Gunner has an ammo system, mines and interchangeable weapon slots.
Again, we’re really interested to hear you think so please don’t be shy.
It looks very intresting but the links take too long to load and most of them gave an error at the end and one of them just a black screen after the unity logo. Is there somewhere to just download it and run it?
Awesome, so with the minimap (im working on one for my game, ive set it up well, but eh…) how did you make it so that the layout was well… like a layout… did you use render texture?
And also, what are you using to store player data? a database, or is it stored in playerprefs?
Hey Nasoukikos it would be really handy if you could tell us the error. The Second link is really slow but should stay up, the first is pretty fast but would get throttled if we get a lot of downloads. Anway here is a standalone build for you!
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but be careful as there’s no quit button so if you go fullscreen you will have to use alt-f4 to close
ThorneKey, passing the question over to Peter who has done all the code for this project (I can only do the art!)
The Minimap is just rendered to a separate camera which draws on top of the game with clear depth only (it needs to clear depth due to a quirk of our specific map implementation). No render textures or anything like that
The game runs entirely online on a server and no player character data is stored (even seen directly by) the client (unity). So the flow goes something like
Client:Login → Server:LoadCharacter → MySQL Database Server: Get Account Character
The actual client credentials (username / password) are transformed into a cryptographically strong identifier pair by a web api and those identifiers are stored in PlayerPrefs to allow you to log back in automatically (We’ll make this optional in the future) but that’s the only thing in there I think
We run all our servers on AWS, Currently we host our MySQL database on a custom EC2 instance although I expect we’ll move to RDS for release to reduce the maintenance overheads associated with it. I’ve not tried any other services for running it i’m afraid so my experience is a bit limited here; running it inside AWS has the advantage that internal data transfers are free.
Just playtested it there, it seems really polished graphically. The combat at least as the gunner felt relatively slow and could possibly be refined to feel smoother. There were a few features that could use work such as the character creator being incredibly basic, a zoom feature to look at individual aspects you are changing would be really good as an example.
Generally I’m pretty impressed though, I hope you have lots of luck with the Kickstarter campaign as I would love to see this progress. I’d also be curious into hearing more about your EC2 instance, how many threads it could potentially handle and such.
Edit: Just saw your Kickstarter was unsuccessful, quite hard to find which information is up to date on the website and post. Sorry to hear about that.
Thanks for the feedback Chambers, did a quick update on the webpage.
Glad you liked it overall! Would you mind expanding on the slowness of the gun guy combat? At the moment the weapons he has are overpowered and the monster layout is a bit sparse and easy so perhaps that would make the gameplay more frantic? Hopefully we will get it in for the next update!
Got Pete to answer the EC2 question for me; “I’m not sure quite what you mean about the EC2 instance; the game is targeted at EC2 high compute medium instances which have 2 cores. The server is primarily designed as a single threaded application with some network dispatch offloaded to the second core. We support up to 256 players per server although we have some potential to raise this to 512 in future if we feel it would be beneficial to do so (Due to bandwidth vs cpu cost scaling 256 is around the sweet spot for running the game). Does that answer your question?”
What would be nice is some slight camera zoom. Not too much though, just enough to see our character a bit more.
Also, not being rude, im tryna be “‘critically thinking’-ish?” but would a 512 server be necessary ? do you think youd have 512 players on at any given time? Maybe wait and pull in some stats first :))
But as i said earlier its a great project, i like the feel it has
I tried again both with the standalone and the web links, I couldn’t reproduce the error though (i think it was something about a networking error). But with both standalone and the web after Authenticating Stored Account(? i think) it just shows a black screen, but if I press enter I can write in the chat, but can’t hit enter again to “sent”.
Edit: I also disabled firewall/antivirus and tried it