My general plan is to create a MMO 3d fantasy war game. That will be displayed in the third person for close combat. and first person for ranged combat. Combat will be done in real time ( no point and click here) Players should be able to see hundreds of each other at the same time ( highly optimistic) The world will be massive and to allow the player to create houses. Houses and terrain can be destroyed. I also want the world to be full 360 (the air, water and land are fighting zones) It seems that dark fall is a game similar to my idea. Any more details wanted please ask. I intend to be the designer, the skills I have are I have people management and leadership skills My finance and business skills are pretty good and my law skills aren’t to shabby. I write mean story . I know am a programming noob but I hope to rectify that in the year b4 development starts. The problems I foresee are Length of time to create. I plan on using pre-made engines to offset this. How to allow so many players to interact at once without lag. So far I am thinking UDP And I might have to lower graphic quality a little. Bandwidth cost I would imagine bandwidth cost will be high. So I want to ask you what engine do you guys suggest. How big of a permanent team ( artist, programmers what not) and what skills should they know. So far I was thinking maybe three artist and four programmers. Programmers must know C Artist I am hoping for experience with 3d modeling applications maya or blender maybe. I plan on hiring these people. Anything else you guys feel the need to comment on or criticize go ahead I’m all ears for something constructive hell you don’t even have to be nice in your criticism so pessimists welcome. This is a question for the mods can I use just the general plan and the single question in detail and repost it on the more specific section or would you count that as spamming.

Nothing really new.... you just described Shadowbane although you added keyboard movement instead of point and click.

Yes but i am still not sure what how to put in a mystic heroes like battle system
Or around how many people I would need.

Theme wise I want it to be fantasy sort of like what would happen if middle earth had WWII.
and I dont intend for players to be able to build there own city more like parts of a city.
Havent done shadowbane in awhile so i will recheck that.
Last time it was disorganized nd had no non pvp enviroments I want to have some places a player can rest just not many.

and i didnt really think the theme important since i was mostly looking for technical.

[Edited by - 3toedgecko on April 5, 2007 5:52:28 AM]

Sorry about that part I meant to say “ I write a mean story”

I don’t intend to learn how to program an mmo in a year I intend to learn enough programming to manage and evaluate programmers in a year.

I didn’t think the story was important to post not that the story wasn’t there.

Yes I do have friends that know some of the skills, but they will be on a different continent than the one I will be developing on, plus I really couldn’t afford even though half of my male friends might come just for bargirls and beaches (not to work in an office building though).
That why I was planning on hiring people instead of using them after all programmers are pretty cheap.

Making my own engine will complicate things I don’t think I have the knowledge to find someone who can do that. I would hope to have enough by the end of the year though.

Middle earth going WWII was mostly to give an idea of the scale.
The world i intend would best be described as a mix of
The seventh tower series by Garth Nix
Everworld by K.A. Applegate
and Avatar the last airbender

To get technical, I'd wager your idea is basically impossible. The following things all take up a lot of bandwidth:

Quote:
Players should be able to see hundreds of each other at the same time ( highly optimistic)
The world will be massive and to allow the player to create houses.
Houses and terrain can be destroyed.
I also want the world to be full 360 (the air, water and land are fighting zones)

And with that much latency, you will not be able to have real-time FPS style combat. There's a reason that most FPS's top out at 20-40 people on a server, and most MMO's have slow combat. In a normal MMO, you need every action to be able to handle a second or two of lag. The only way to ensure you aren't going to have lag is to drastically limit the number of players allowed in each zone and limit the amount of other info that needs to be sent from the server. For example, WoW doesn't even let you drop items onto the ground, in an effort to avoid needing to send all the clients the positions of all the crap people have dropped. If you were allowing people to blast buildings into little pieces and have those pieces strewn all over, that is a ton of info that needs to be sent.

Online games will always have to reach a balance between speed of action, number of players, and depth of available actions. The reason there isn't yet a lightning fast Tekken/Doom with a million people playing at once is not because no one has thought of the idea, but because the current state of network technology makes it impossible, or at least hugely expensive.