Hi, I am developing an MMO that will be like a mix of league of legends and diablo.
I'm struggling hard in the graphics department. With some decent graphics this may be a decent game. I am only using ms3d files for terrain and animated meshes (current repo needs updated). I need someone to help me get a good graphics pipeline going with some decent output. Terrain, monsters, humans, different races, little objects for scenery, etc. I need a topdown design of an MMO world artists can work on and I can use in game at the same time to test dynamic loading of chunks, etc. Once we achieve that we're golden.
For now there is no gameplay, there is just login and security things going on. Creating accounts and creating characters, encryption and decryption, establishing of keys, etc.
A programmer who knows how to implement path-finding could be a huge help. Graphics programmers too. I've got most of it on lock though. My hand is hurting right now from coding so much, that's why I'm on here peddling interest in my game, I gotta take a break for a while and let my hand regain feeling lol.
https://github.com/JacobStewart64/GoldenAgeGame
Golden Age MMO
It's interesting hearing from other crazy people (like myself :D) trying to do MMOs. It sounds like I'm approaching it from a different angle than you are, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.
I'm actually working on an MMO engine, for doing full sized worlds as in an actual planet orbiting a sun and with a moon or two. My working title is Zemli Drakona (meaning Lands of the Dragon) . My target world size is 2000 km in diameter, and it's done with run time procedural generation so it should take minimal disk space. I'll store things like houses and tree models on disk, but all the terrain will be generated by simplex noise based functions, driving a my voxel engine. I've got many thousands of lines of C++ code already which I'm debugging. I hope to have some minimal demo in a month or two. So far I just have a ball on the screen 
However I do have code that lets me do orbits and planet rotations so I can have a real day night cycle. You can put the camera anywhere in the astral hierarchy and it will traverse the tree both up and down and render, and it automatically does the LOD on terrain, based on from the camera location. For physics it builds a separate highly localized version of the world using the same functions as the display model that refines and un-refines as you move around.
hard drive space is cheap... holding all that stuff in memory or even swap, not so much. some of it might be worth pre-compiling.
Oops, got confused about what was first post. replied to wrong one.
3 hours ago, SkyPenguin said:hard drive space is cheap... holding all that stuff in memory or even swap, not so much. some of it might be worth pre-compiling.
Errr ..... Just how cheap is the disk space to hold 12,000,0000 sq km of terrain? Also with this type of procedural generation you only have in memory roughly what you can see, so it's really no worse than any other game.
sliding scale it? Got to be some way to half and half it. "Pure" solutions are rarely the best. I made one game where to save on processing power I pre-computed a table of 200 random values and looped through them rather than computing true random values thousands of times. Cost a teensy bit more hard drive and memory space but cut processing significantly.
Also, to belatedly respond to the original thread: it sounds like you're missing a lot. Before searching for an artist I'd just grab some cheap/free art assets and toss them in game as placeholders until you replace them with something better.
2nd point: heavy authentication/key codes is not the best thing to start with, just adds overhead as you tinker with the game. I generally wait until I finish a prototype before messing with security.
