Hopeful dreamers looking for directions thats us

Hacking will be the least of your problems. Shouldn't you be more worried about how to implement your game ideas in any of the engines available? A working game that has everything you want is more important than a piece of software that can't be hacked (which is probably impossible anyway). An morpg is sooo much work. Good luck.

 

I think the word "sooo" should be many, many times longer.

ShadowMax76, I think you'll need to be looking at a number of programs, but the fact you're not sure which one to use is a bit of a red flag. I'd scale back your ideas, think a lot smaller and tackle that task, first.

 

I'm afraid that's a typical failure beginners tend to make. You picked one of the most difficult and complex type of game. Chances of getting frustrated because you picked a too difficult task to begin with are high.

If you want to do it anyway, I suggest to begin with the un-sexiest part: multiplayer feature. Think of a simplest game possible (e.g. "number-guessing") and make it multiplayer. Go from there.

Here's a beginners guide: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/building-mmorpg/

 

You could always go for a long-tail approach. Start with a massively multiplayer online dungeon (a few rooms only). Once that's completely stable and fully playable expand it into a massively multiplayer online castle (multi-level). Then expand to village, territory, country, etc. But start with the smallest possible implementation of your idea - one room - and make it completely stable and even fun to play. Then grow out from there.

I agree with baegsi's sentiment - focus on coding the multiplayer part with just placeholder artwork. Let your friends draw all they want but nothing gets inserted until the code is complete.

I would guess that a web-based implementation would probably be the way to go - something in-browser. There are enough examples of this on-line that you can draw from.

 

-----> http://www.gamedev.net

 

http://sol.planet-d.net/mmorpg.html

Not trying to put you off, but a morpg is a _huge_ project for a small team. If you're still going ahead, take note of what baegsi said - I'd agree with him on all points.

 

These guys are being polite, but the truth is we get a post like this fairly regularly and it's always from someone with no experience trying to make the hardest sort of game straight away.

I hate to say it, but the best advice I can give here is to forget about this for now. Pick the simplest thing you can think of and try to make that instead. Get some experience. Don't expect too much help from your friends - chances are they will drop out as soon as they figure out that pretending to make games is fun but actually making games is really hard work. I'm sure just about everyone here has had a similar experience working with friends in the past.

 

Something else to consider: even if (through some miracle not fully elaborated here) you do succeed in creating the software and art assets associated with your game idea, what will you do with them?

MMORPGs are not like standalone singleplayer or multiplayer games. They are only massively multiplayer if there are A) servers available 24x7 with fat pipes to support the network traffic and B) lots of actual annoying, juvenile, whiny players. In order to support item B) your game will need C) a customer service organization to deal with all of their annoying, juvenile, whiny problems and D) a billing system that can take their money each month and possibly give it back occasionally if they are annoying and whiny enough.

So before you even begin thinking about how to develop the game, you should be thinking about how to support it. Will you publish it yourselves? If so, do you have the expertise and can you afford the costs of supporting it until it becomes cash-flow positive? If you are going to rely on outside publishing and support, you should start thinking about who you would like to partner with, and what kinds of games they want to market.

Realistically, you should think more about trying to get hired at a game company in your area that has the general capability and desire to develop MMORPGs.

Good luck.

--milo
http://www.starshatter.com

 

This is a troll. Nobody can be that stupid.

 

You obviously haven't been on the Flipcode forums recently.

 

I think this it the typical "Miracle happens here" project.

1. Assemble small team of un-skilled newbies
2. Begin work on MMORPG
3. Miracle happens here
..
.... Edited for Redundance does it really add value to list all 65 identical steps individually? -Dan MacDonald
..
65. Miracle happens here
66. Repeat steps 3 through 66 until hell freezes over...
67. Profit!

 

This kind of thread shouldn't even exist on these forums. I left it as an experiment to see just how much crap it would produce. Thanks to all the people who made a legitimate attempt to set the guy straight. This entire topic is really beneficial to no one beyond the original poster perhaps. I would like to see a LOT less of these kinds of discussions as they really are of no value to our target audience.