I myself have also dealt with threads like this on another forum. I'm not a moderator on any forum (no surprise there), but it's still annoying to have to crush a newcomer's dreams by saying that MMORPG's are impossible to create with a one-man team. Usually, the thread descends into flame bait very quickly and earns a lock.

I think part of the reason that people want to make an MMORPG as their first game is because of the wide appeal they have. Granted I'm not a WOW fan in the least, but I will say that it still is a pretty cool looking game. So if a newcomer managed to pull off making a widely successful MMORPG, they'd become instantly famous, and rich (or so they'd hope). At least, that's what I gather from a few other forums...

Quote:Original post by choffstein

Quote:Original post by ArmisticeML
Usually it is the younger people who want to make Massively multiplayer games. Since, most of the time now, young people grow up enjoying playing with friends and interacting. All people who want to make a MMO game have most likely played one and took inspiration from the fun they experienced with role-playing with their friends.

Although, "massively" is quite unfeasible for an indie company taken they don't have humongous server clusters or experience available to them.

People who want to make their game massively multiplayer are nothing short of dreamers, but who knows, maybe someone will get a big break.

Not necessarily for indie companies anymore. If you can develop your servers to run on images that can be virtualized by Xen, you can use Amazon EC2, and several other grid providers, to host servers. That way you don't have to bother with buying the server clusters, managing physical security, replacing faulty hardware, et cetera. For about $400 a year, you can get a pretty basic server. Considering most boxes are obsolete after a few years anyway, $400 a year is great, because you aren't left with obsolete hardware. Amazon has built in distributed databases and monitoring systems, as well as automatic scaling.

Basically, if you can build a simple server on a Xen instance on a test server, you can send it to the clouds pretty easily. And since you only pay for what you use, you don't have to worry about buying too much or too little hardware.

From everything I've read about developing for cloud computing, requires that you do a bunch of things that just aren't practical for a lot of games.

First thing you need very little interdependence as possible. Even in a MMO's simplest form you're going to have all sorts of interdependence like skills using energy, other skills affecting energy levels, physics pseudo or other wise, status effects that access all those things at the same time. To make everything there "atomic" and as non-interdependent as possible would require an utterly insane amount of skill at IT design. As a matter a fact such a system if finished would literally be able to laugh at every other "truly" massive scale game out there like EvE and to a lesser extent Runescape.

Cloud computing also requires a design where you know anything can fail at any time, and a something that you have no idea how even a simple function is going to run the next time it's used. Adding a lot more IT design overhead.

You also need to design ALL your code so there is no "center". Something most people(and myself) can't do well.

Quote:Original post by Kwizatz

Quote:Original post by mmakrzem
maybe the popularity of WOW has something to do with it too.

No, it has been this way since UO (September 25, 1997).

Quote:Original post by mmakrzem
I like the idea of remaking C64 classics!

Accolade's Mini Putt has been in my mind for a remake for a while.

i'm halfway through a sly spy remake :D

Quote:Original post by Codeka

Quote:Original post by lithos

That's not really how cloud computing works... I'm only personally familiar with the Amazon model, but basically they just give you a virtual Linux (or Windows) installation and it just looks like you're running on a normal computer. The flexibility comes from the fact that you're able to start and stop instances whenever you like, you can bring up more instances as your load increases, and so on.

There's nothing "special" about it, though.

I understand Microsoft's Azure is a little different, but in Azure, you're basically getting a virtual installation of IIS into which you can install your web services, etc. You'll also get a virtual installation of MSMQ that you can use to post messages. But in the end, it's not really all that different for the normal computing model that we're all familiar with.

Ok that's not how amazon cloud computing works, now that I know this I'm looking into it a bit more. there are however few different styles of cloud computing one of which being a semi-public shared machine like I was detailing. I kind of feel into the trap of only looking at new things.