check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MMORPGs
says that there are 2mil dofus players, just shy of guildwars at 3mil, and there are 7mil runescape players, just shy of wow at 8. (then there's 2nd life, never heard of it). if dofus and runescape are included in the list of topdogs, beating out DAOC, EQ2, Lineage2, and the like, that's saying something for browser-based games. dofus is "ok" as far as 2d goes, and runescape is just plain shite. They have nothing on guildwars and wow. So unless there's something i'm missing, it's all browser / play-anywhere concept.
Now between dofus and runescape, i don't know if it's because runescape came first or happenstance, but runescape is substantially more popular. I was thinking about scrapping together a flash game with scrape-by graphics and having a forum for my players where i'd ask whether they'd prefer a cleaned-up and upgraded version of the current quick-and-easy 2d, or a full shift to powerful 3d at the expense of webstart, downloads, and assets. I'll keep my players informed on development status, and this could be something of that journal we were talking about.
Quote:You're gonna need a lot of experience if you use flash. I switched from C++ to AS3 a few weeks ago for a change and started programming an mmo framework in it. Without the very efficient spatial partitioning system I use then flash wouldn't be able to handle the large maps I give to it. I can't tell if you have a lot of programming experience from your posts because it's no simple task.
i'm glad you brought that up, i was going to ask about space partitioning. i made a mini java mmo and could do quadtree bsp to cutout the uneeded portions of the map. can flash do that? at quick glance, i'm under the impression it can't since dofus uses hundreds of static-screen mini-maps instead of a chase-camera global map.
Quote:Another reason to use java. In my experience you want the server and the client to use the same language and java is good for that. At the moment I've just been programming the engine and keeping it soft coded and ready for the networking. Put it this way I'm using VB.NET for the server due to the easy GUI and I had to write a full wrapper class so that flash and my server could communicate perfectly. Not to mention I have to basically reprogram a lot of code in VB so the simulations will both be in sync with one another. A real pain!
right on queue, again! my roomate and i were discussing j2ee-to-java ease over connecting flash to another server-side language. how hard was it to program the wrapper class? I was thinking of using .net myself