On 4/13/2018 at 8:24 PM, darynflannery said:
MMO = 1 million or over players. That makes sense.
MO = typical multiplayer online.
I guess the question is "how massive, is massive?" One persons massive might be 1,000 players, while another 1,000,000 to anothers 10,000,000. But I do wonder where that common understanding is, about the number thresh-hold of what in fact designates 'massive'. I think I have also heard 1mil, being that standard mark also. Hm.
Although, here is what confuses me. On STEAM; there are a few *indi* mmo's/ mo's. Smaller worlds, less players; yet Steam defines these games as "MMO" or "MMORPG" next to the 'sort and genre' of said games. They don't define them as MO. And I would say these described games are around a capacity of 10,000 players subscribed, and only maybe 500 players on at any one given moment of the day. So, pretty light on the server(s) yes.
In my mind, I have always thought MO to be within the scope of 2-80 players in a world (or battle arena) at one time. And more than that.... I get confused. Is say 100+ players in a world at one time still an MO? Or more so an MMO? Maybe we should have a new definition and call it APMO for "'A Plenty' multi-player online" (laughs). I half joke of course. But something like that, while be is lesser than 'massive'.
For now, I remain confused for terminology; but by new default, I might swing to using MO for indi-level mmo's.
The term was created to refer to games where the infrastructure required a massive transformation.
The term has become seriously abused by people who don't know any better. If you ever hear of a small project being called an "MMO", it is like seeing a crop duster and calling it a fighter jet, or a two story building and calling it a skyscraper.
Online games can trivially handle ten or twenty players. The first good one came up in 1978 (just called MUD for Multi-User Dungeon). Variation after variation of network games grew up after that. Games up through the mid 1990s were limited by network capacity. Playing by modem made things difficult, but the engineering was amazing. Games like the original Warcraft or Command and Conquer pushed the hardware of its days, especially when you consider it was designed for less than 300 bytes per second. That is about one megabyte per hour. Many games these days push more data than every minute.
Games grew and network capacity grew. Games servers could handle hundreds of concurrent players. Many games grew to support thousands of concurrent players. But there is a limit to what the servers can handle.
At some point, varying by game but generally in the 1000-5000 concurrent player range, there is a cap for what can be done. It is extremely difficult and costly to cross that limit. Instead of being something that can be easily handled with a few computers, it is something requiring an enormous amount of infrastructure. It is no longer just a collection of servers, it becomes a globally distributed grid of complex network architecture requiring an army of IT folk and millions of dollars to maintain.
That threshold is when you get the extra M. Crossing that boundary is expensive and is among humanity's modern marvels. It is the first time in human history so many people have simultaneously collaborated in a single entertainment world, and very few companies have pulled it off. A million bucks won't keep the lights on around the globe for a single week.
On 4/13/2018 at 8:24 PM, darynflannery said:
And about Unity. Alright I might go with the free tutorials, rather the cost courses offered. I will try out the free for a while, and see how I like them. I think I would like Unity to be the first Engine that I familiarize myself with, only because it seems developer "user friendly"; especially for fresher/greener programmers like myself.
Unity and Unreal are both free. Try them out, see what you like and what you dislike.
On 4/13/2018 at 8:24 PM, darynflannery said:
I have heard that Unity limits the creative aspects of what game designers would 'like' to do. And that is what they find most annoying. Even though the engine itself is pretty handy in other ways, to shorten work and cut some decent corners.
Every game engine puts limits out there. Working with a race car engine puts limits on what you can do, like not working on a motorcycle or not working on an airplane. If you want to build a motorcycle start with a motorcycle engine. If you want to build an airplane start with an airplane engine. There are designers who want a motorcycle with the power of a race car that can pop out wings and fly like an airplane, and they feel limited that engineers can't build it.
As far as the code goes, software is software and you can do anything that you can make the computer do. I've worked on Unity projects that are abysmal, they look like someone's college freshman project. I've also worked on Unity projects that were beautiful masterpieces, the developers were constantly revisiting the code to keep everything in great shape. The same about Unreal, projects that smelled of open sewage, and projects that could have been displayed in a museum. You can't blame the engine.
Engines will shorten the work you must do because someone else has done much of it. But you still need to use all those libraries, and that is still work that you must do. Can you make all the parts of a modern game by yourself? Can you code up all the basic math, the linear algebra and quaternions, statistics, the discrete math, and all the rest by yourself? Can you personally implement networking systems, NAT punchthrough, UPnP, or maintainconnectivity meshes? Can you personally handle the math of physics systems, continuous collision detection and collision response, and arbitrarily shaped meshes? Fluid and cloth dynamics? Can you personally implement rendering systems, with multiple layers of shaders, with articulated mesh processing, dynamic level of detail processing, with lighting and shadowing, or even for dealing with the fact that eyes don't have a linear response? Can you personally implement audio systems, with algorithms for mixing and computing positional audio, for blending audio levels, for ensuring that audio mixes correctly and dealing with the way audio also doesn't have a linear response? Can you handle all the various types of input your game needs, keyboard and mouse and gamepads and joysticks or whatever other HID is plugged in?
Even if you are using the engines, do you know how to put those parts together? If someone gave you a suitable math library could you implement all the math processing needed by the game? If someone gave you a suitable physics library could you simulate objects moving in a realistic manner? If someone gave you a suitable animation library could you process the motion of the models? If someone gave you a suitable networking library could you get all the communications established between arbitrary computers? Having the engine alone does not grant the knowledge of how to use them effectively.
Game engines have a large body of existing functionality, but if you are going to make a game you still need to work with all the systems and put them together. It is an enormous body of work that few humans understand. Most games are written by teams of programmers, and artists, and animators, and audio engineers, and effects engineers, and tools folk, and many other people whose work comes together in the end. Each person has a general idea of what the others do, but they are a specialist in their tiny subdomain of the project.
I hope that encourages you to learn more, to do more, and to join in with the teams who do great things. But I also hope it dissuades you from the irrational; you won't be making the epic MMO by yourself any more than an unprepared beginning hiker could scale Everest. But given years of practice and dedication, you can be part of a team that makes the epic MMO, or work to join the crowd of experienced mountain climbers that work together to scale the summit.
As a beginner, using a game engine can help you climb the hills. It is a tool that can help you climb mountains that would otherwise overwhelm you. If you invest the time and effort you should be able to craft games, and you as an individual or small team will still be well within their capacity.
