I think Unity is great for developing MMORPG such as World of Warcraft. I must be missing something obvious, though, since I always thought that a massively multiplayer online games need a server.
How does Unity help in this regard?
Is the assumption that some sort of a lobby server is available to link up Unity clients, that it’s compatible with the Unity networking protocol but not written using Unity?
Is the assumption that users will be writing servers using Unity? Wouldn’t a server require a graphics card then?
Unless you have the money for a server farm and a full time IT staff, I would avoid thinking about MMORPGs. They just aren’t realistic projects for small teams.
You can have the server run headlessly…maybe. The lack of some sort of “dedicated server” mode, I suspect, will probably be rectified in a future version. If nothing else, you can get rid of all the cameras and let the thing run in software mode. Graphics card isn’t much of a detriment if you’re not rendering anything.
The ability to run on Linux, though, is certainly more important than ever…come on UT
Unity 2 does have a master server. This at the moment is hosted by Unity Technologies. This master server allows you to start a server and have others that have the same game to find you and join you. Otherwise you would need to supply an IP address to all the clients you want to join your server.
But to create an WOW type of game you would probably run your own headless server app… all of this is completely possible in Unity 2. However as mentioned before DO NOT underestimated the support staff and technology in hosting a WOW type of game. Blizzard went from 300+ staff to 2000+ staff… those extra 1700+ were support staff for WOW!
I thought I remembered that a Master Server can be customized yourself and is a separate entity and can run in Linux. Read it right in the Networking docs. (this is not the game PLAYING server however.)
Too tired to look it up again.
Oh yeah. MMORPG. Don’t. Unless you truly are ready with a business plan, a game design doc, a large team of experienced game creators, and a huge amount of investment money. If that’s the case, then I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Not that I’d want to trivialize the effort, but I think that’s overstating it a little. Look at Prairie Games and their Minions of Mirth; a small staff and not much of a budget. Granted MoM doesn’t have anything like WoW’s user base by some orders of magnitude, but not everyone is shooting for 9 million players.
MoM (one of my all time favorites) is written on Torque 1.4.
In reality, Torque Game Engine with Torque Networking Engine was designed for FPS max 64 player limit. Its NOT an MMO engine. Now they have made improvements for 1.5, so I don’t know the max player base, but I seriously doubt anyone writing games in Torque GE expects it to be an MMO. Maybe TSE but thats a different story, its still zone based.
I wrote a plugin using TGE and changed the networking to Rakknet, which supports clustering and up to 32768 players. Mind you, you will never see over 2000 players on any MMO server since anything above that is packet hell.
In the end, it boils down to what you can make and how you can make it.
Scale is the important factor here.
Take off the first ‘M’ (Massively) and it’s a good target for a small team that has produced a few games. There’s plenty of clever ways to reduce server load and the field is far from completely explored.
Bringing up WOW is what has gotten people to say “NO WAY NO HOW.” Again, unless you and your team are pretty experienced and well funded you can’t take on WOW head to head and expect to compete.
That’s okay, though. I have no idea what experience level you are at, but it seems like you are still getting started. If that’s the case, I’d make an offline mini RPG first. Control one character and fight a few slimes and one big boss orc or something. Working out battle mechanics and controls and all that is a huge undertaking and it will all be useful experience as you progress towards bigger goals.
If you are really just starting, just play around and start real simple. It’s still a ton of fun.
I think you could do an MMO but you need to think laterally and build something more like Guild Wars (where you only really interact with small numbers of other players in instances), or the incredibly boring space trader MMO whose name escapes me (but which could in principle be a great game), or Kingdom of Loathing (web-based MMO where players don’t directly interact).
