Greetings to everyone. I am new to Unity3d but very eager to learn and have been reading everything I can get my hands on. One question that I have not been able to answer simply is … What would most consider the best terrain size for a small MMO?
Now I am unsure if small is the appropriate word here, but I would like to create a piece of land that is about a third to half the size of the U.S. and was thinking that the terrain size should be around 20000 by 20000. The height map that I created is 2000 by 2000.
Is this overkill or should I consider making it larger? To my untrained eye, it seems as if I can move the camera across the terrain pretty fast. Opinions?
Google says the US is: 3.79 million square miles.
Google says one third of that is : ~1.263 million square miles.
Google says the square root of 1.263 million is: ~1124 miles
Google says the average walking speed of a human is: ~3 miles per hour.
Google then says: 1124 miles / 3 miles per hour = ~15.6 days
Does it take over 15 days to walk across your terrain? I doubt it. Have you ever played an MMO where it takes 15 days to walk from one side to the other? I doubt it. Have you ever played an MMO where it took you even a fraction of 15 days to walk across the map? I doubt it.
World of Warcraft, which surely is an MMO you’re going to take a lot of inspiration from, has a rather small, but hand crafted, game world which, acording to internet sources, is about 80 square miles, converted into real life measurements. Compared the 1.263 million you’re aiming for that’s pretty small is it not?
Your game world would be over 84 times bigger than the biggest game world ever created. You’ll have your hands full creating that even with a random terrain generator, not to mention trying to manage or add gameplay to even a fraction of it.
The point I’m trying to make is that you should set yourself a realistic goal before starting something as complex as a MMO.
And don’t bother worrying about minor things like how big your game world should be. You can alter that later. See if you’re even able to populate a small square of terrain with interesting features and gameplay possibilites before moving up in scale.
And to get a sense of how much work something like that takes just look at the 3+ months botumys has spent working on that project.
botumys’ world could easily be turned into an interesting MMO. And by starting with a richly, detailed, tiny by MMO standards, world you can offer a small number of players a great experience from the getgo and expand on that when more players hear about your game. This is undoubtably much smarter than trying to compete with World of Warcraft straight away and instead end in a complete failure like i.e Age of Conan.
It depends on the scale, if you’re a tiny little regular-sized person, or a mountain-sized giant.
Everquest is roughly 350 square miles, which is just smaller than Seattle (~140) + Chicago. (~230)
World of Warcraft (Just the continents of Kalimdor and Eastern kingdom) is 106 square miles, which is about just bigger than one and a half Washington DCs (70 mi sq).
A game which is 1/3 to 1/2 of the United States ( 3.7 million sq miles ), would be far too large.
EDIT: Someone already beat me to the geographic comparisons, poo).
Thanks to the both of you. So one square in Unity is equal to a square mile, or how does that work? I am quite certain that my questions are very novice, and if so please bear with me.
I also would like to be open here and let everyone know that I am a visual learner, so while I have been reading any articles I can find on Unity, I learn better by examples. I am a proficient PHP programmer, but this is completely new territory for me.
In case any are interested, here are two free maps of a continent that is from a series of books …
I paid a graphics artist to merge them, and then convert them in to a black and white image that I can use as a height map in Photoshop (since I suck at PS). And here is what she came up with …
Which I then imported in to Unity3d at 20000 by 20000. Other than playing with one of the islands I haven’t done much as I am only a few weeks in to learning.
there is no relation between 3d units in unity / 3d engines and realworld units.
how large it will look / feel depends on your camera setup, model sizes and world scale
normally you define an object (like a standing humanoid) and give it a “real world size” and then use that as measurement for everything else, so kind of how you do it in the “real world” too, as SI units (the physical units to measure things) are just relatives to some defined “default base amount”
I’ve only been using Unity for a couple of weeks and my learning projects are nowhere near as large in scope as a full-blown MMO world, in fact, quite the opposite.
But I did read somewhere, probably here, or maybe even the docs, that the default size of the Unity cube primitive is supposed to represent 1 meter per side and that another one stacked on top should give you roughly the size of a human.
The point was to use it as a base to figure out what size to import your models at and scale from there. The reason given was that that was the optimum scale at which the physics engine works. As I understood it, going fantastically larger or microscopically smaller could give you problems and odd behavior with the physics engine in the future regarding collisions and what not.
thats true but not exactly due to the physics engine, more due to the nature of float precision.
if you remain within -+ 30’000 values and don’t have steps smaller than 0.01 you are normally “out of trouble” out of my experience though with a corresponding scale an area of 60k units can mean hours to run through
Well that’s good to know, it sounds like there’s a lot of leeway in model size then.
As to scale or size of the world, if I were to embark on the decade long task of building an RPG by myself, I would still keep it relatively small.
An example I can think of is Gothic 2: Night of the Raven. Although the world wasn’t that large compared to some games, every area was lovingly hand-crafted and detailed with a lot of thought behind it.
I’d much rather go through a small game that has been well though-out and richly detailed than a large, generic, copy-pasta, boring hiking simulator.
The technology won’t be your enemy, but if you run a game on that scale, even if it is a fairly successful indy MMO, it will have a few 10,000 subscribers, with a fraction of that online at any given time.
Now do the math, and you’ll see that means most of your players will rarely if ever encounter someone else. So what, exactly, is the purpose of making it a multiplayer game?
If the black text on your map mark towns your in for a hell of a time.
Personally, if I were to start making a fantasy MMO today I would start by creating a world roughly the same size as 2-3 zones in WoW because I think that could easily offer gameplay for a couple of months up to a year of solid play if developed properly.
People may not admit it, but what keeps them interested in a MMO is not a huge world with hundreds of towns and thousands of dungeons, but the sense of constant progress. If you can give them that even in a tiny world they will play and enjoy your game.
My map would probably only fit, at most, a thousand people at the same time, but I’m starting a small MMO and that’s plenty in the beginning. I would make the game so that I could add instances and new zones on a regular basis. WoW’s way of separating the zones would probably work well here as I could just tile on my zones as I make them.
To keep players interested I could show them a huge world map, I’ve planned from the beginning, right away, sort of like the map you’re showing here in this thread, but limit players to my created zones with physical barriers and in game lore. Then whenever I add a new zone I can have an in game event in a cheesy way like: “The wall keeping the demons of the east at bay has been breeched. Every capable hand in the land is summoned to fight these beasts back to the abyss”.
I would also do everything I could to distance myself from WoW because there’s no way I can compete with Blizzard and try to steal its players so instead I would have to cater to those looking for something different.
There are countless huge MMO projects that have failed in recent years because they tried to compete with World of Warcraft right away. My tip is to start small and build from there. Mount Blade (Error - TaleWorlds Entertainment), I don’t think is a MMO, but they started out tiny, with barely a tech demo, but has constantly improved from there.
Here’s a graph I remember having seen before, but had some trouble finding now:
Look at the 2 MMO’s on that list that tried to directly compete with World of Warcaft; Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. They spiked and the failed massively. They both had huge budgets, but apparently no one telling them that their business plan was destined to fail.
I have no idea what Dofus is, but the game I would look at on that list is Eve Online. Eve has been steadily increasing in players ever sinse it launched. That’s more or less the only way you, or a huge studio, can approach a MMO today, start out small and try to grow. The only way you could directly compete with WoW was if you had a franchise more known than Warcraft and managed to hype it the way WoW was hyped and I don’t know what that would be. When Star Wars, Warhammer and Lord of The Rings couldn’t do it I don’t see what can. WoW is also so well established that the players you try to steal from it expects the same amount of content in your game. This is impossible to match unless you and a thousand of your friends spent the last 10 years before launch creating content for your game. Thus those people will just go back to WoW again after having tried your game.
All are fantastic suggestions and I most sincerely appreciate everyone’s replies. Very enlightening. A couple of comments and questions if I may please …
TwiiK … Sadly all of that black text does indeed signify towns. But I cannot seem to wrap my mind around the idea of adding new instances/zones. I LOVE your idea of showing the big map, but only allowing access to what zones have been done. Could you elaborate on this a little? If I were to GUESS, I would think that what you were saying was to create like a 1000 by 1000 area of the big map, and then after I had that section done add another one right next to it like adding the next piece of a puzzle. Is that a good way of looking at it?
Happily, I have no desire to compete with WoW. :o
.Tom. … This is excellent food for thought. I do not estimate more than a couple thousand players. I was initially worried about my ability to scale some of the cities to an appropriate size based upon their descriptions from the book series. A few of them are pretty large.
dreamora and Killjoy … Thank you two as well.
As a side note. Is anyone offering actual classes on Unity? Are there any here in the Silicon Valley area? Is anyone on these forums in the local vicinity and willing to offer some training? I’m willing to pay for that persons time.
