Quote:Original post by JJacobo
Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
From what you've written, it sounds terrifingly like you don't have anyone who's highly experienced with building distributed systems
...
So, I have just one piece of advice: go hire some real ****-hot network programmers who really understand this stuff.
Well I do agree with you that IF we're unable to secure more professional network programmers, we WOULD be doomed,
No. Not "professional network programmers" (there's lots of those in the games industry, and many of them are useless for MMO work: they know how to do TCP, UDP, etc. That's circa 3% of what they need to know). Rather, you need specialists in distributed systems - c.f. the recent para by hplus about the questions you need to hire an expert to answer; my own initial list of core questions would be pretty close to that.
Sadly, you're only real option for established consultancies is Themis Group, who are of very variable quality. Again, I cannot exaggerate the importance of having your experts more in-house: at least one game has had Themis advice and ignored too much of it (according to the rumours that reached me) to their peril. It's easy to ignore consultants, it's much harder for your tech lead to ignore himself. So...make sure your tech lead really knows what he's doing here :).
Quote:
One thing we do have are producers who understand business, and the details are partially the team's job to supply to them.
Great on the surface, however in practice it's mostly worthless.
I've done a lot of recruitment in this area for MMO projects and found that the real problem is a lack of supply of suitably qualified people. It doesnt' matter how good your producers are at working out what they need if it's almost impossible to get those kinds of people :(.
So...if you said you have some gorgeous babes/hunks who can charm the back legs off a donkey and persuade some key staff to jump ship from their current projects, THEN I'd say things were looking good. (tongue-in-cheek, but hey - I've seen it work before, and recruit people you'd never have thought would leave their previous job).
Quote:
and are prepared to pay (in dollars as well as hours) what is necessary for professional talent and a sound system.
Here's a figure for you: I was approached recently for a tech-head-of-MMO job. The offered salary was $150k-$200k AAE. Are you willing to spend that much just for one new staff member? You may have to. (for the record, I'm in the middle of something sufficiently more exciting that I wouldn't have taken it - although the salary went a long way towards tempting me :D ).
I'm being a cynical bastard here, but ... I've seen many MMO's start and fail, including a few promising ones that most people never even heard of before funding got withdrawn or the project was cancelled due to the overwhelming difficulties and the lack of certainty that revenues would cover it.
Quote:
Regarding our current team, we have two professionals with extensive experience in "high performance network servers"
Out of interest, what exactly have they done?
Quote:
"Valve, Unreal, etc are all useless for MMO work, and they know it - you *have* to do all the hard MMO-stuff yourself." We agree that the software architecture (especially on the networking side) will need a complete redesign but the engine is far from useless.
Apologies, you misunderstood because I was being too ambiguous: the total effort required to deliver an MMO project is so great that the physics and graphics engine become "small issues": you have bigger things to worry about (there are plenty of graphics/physics engs that can be licensed off-the-shelf with standardized pricing at any point into your project; many of your other issues cannot be solved so easily just with a credit card).
So...those two don't even appear on the risk assessment sheet; hence, an engine that is excellent at them is "useless": it's not buying you anything that you couldn't easily get hold of anyway.
Aside from that, I agree entirely that you can re-use those things, modulo the problems already highlighted by others about e.g. the fact that you cannot possibly run your physics on the client (you have to get cunning and hack into it a bit to make it a slave/ghost of the authoritative server copy). But....where, for instance, are you getting the "distrubuted server-side version" of your phusics engine that is guaranteed to be deterministically compatible with the client-side replay?
(this was one of my big problems 4 years ago: trying to persuade the enigne companies to make fast, efficient, easy to integrate, server-side implementations)
Quote:
If any of you "****-hot network programmers who really understand this stuff" are interested contact me or keep an eye out for classified in several online (Gamasutra included) and industry journals (L.A. circulation). =]
As someone once said, "Show me the money!". I have seen plenty of piss-taking recruitment ads for this kind of skillset, offering e.g. $50k salaries - where outside the games industry the same people would be on $150k base salary. This is not for a head of tech or anything, just for the lead programmer with the right experience and skills - you'll also IMHO need a head of tech of some kind with specialist skills in this area, and they're going to cost even more. Yes, the games industry can pay much lower, but not THAT much lower :).
Bearing in mind also that you will *have* to pay hefty relocation expenses because these people are sufficiently thin on the ground that you are almost certain not to be able to find any in your local area. Unless you can tempt away people from the big local studios...
Anyway, all that is probably pessimistic. With my project manager hat on, I'm only interested in plans and estimates that build-in the ability to cope with the probable risks and the likely bad-luck - otherwise, you die the first time one mildly unlucky thign happens to you :(.
redmilamber
