I really like the idea of being able to create a 3D MMO that anyone can simply go to a website and begin playing. I think of it like Old School Runescape back in the day. I had interest in programming my own game and have been looking at game engines. I am striving to have tens of thousands of players one day in a big RPG using babylon.js. I know I can use Unity, however I feel very adamant on having a non app based game, running straight through the browser. Unity web exporter has seemed to have problems. I am not looking to make a game with expensive graphics, something along the lines of WoW, maybe a little better would be fine. Assuming I cut up the world to selectively load and manage entities responsibly, is using WebGL/WebSockets/Babylon.js plausible to create something at the level of complexity like WoW/Runescape?

Short answer - it depends...

So - to understand why, you need to understand how multiplayer (or even MMO works). For client side you most likely can use them (assuming your client will run in browser), pretty much every laptop with integrated gpu will be able to run graphics about as complex as in WoW. The harder part will be server side (handling 10 000 concurrent users isn't as easy as one thinks).

On 6/12/2019 at 5:27 PM, Abstractly said:

I am not looking to make a game with expensive graphics, something along the lines of WoW, maybe a little better would be fine.

World of Warcraft had an initial cost of around $200M.  Are you sure that is a game you want to compare it against?

Other people like to compare their "simple graphics" games to Minecraft, which had about five work-years invested in it before he started accepting money as Cave Game. When you think of the lone wolf developer version you have to look at the 2009 version of the game, not the 2019 version of the game.  Even by 2011 the game had grown to a large team with a massive budget. The game most people game to know and love was not a solo developer, but instead had the polish of many million dollars invested, and thousands of work years.  

As a matter of practicality, when you are talking about MMO the actual libraries you use are inconsequential.  If you are investing in the servers around the globe to keep a massive number of players online, that cost will dwarf the cost of any single networking library, or even switching network libraries.

And if you really were talking about a regular traditional online game, the actual networking library you choose also makes relatively little difference. Different libraries provide slightly different feature sets, so look over the feature sets you care about and pick any library that fits your needs.  Look for what is easiest to use so you don't need to spend weeks configuring complex distributed transaction systems or similar, you can jump in to directly communicating between the systems.

5 hours ago, frob said:

World of Warcraft had an initial cost of around $200M.  Are you sure that is a game you want to compare it against?

Other people like to compare their "simple graphics" games to Minecraft, which had about five work-years invested in it before he started accepting money as Cave Game. When you think of the lone wolf developer version you have to look at the 2009 version of the game, not the 2019 version of the game.  Even by 2011 the game had grown to a large team with a massive budget. The game most people game to know and love was not a solo developer, but instead had the polish of many million dollars invested, and thousands of work years.  

 

As a matter of practicality, when you are talking about MMO the actual libraries you use are inconsequential.  If you are investing in the servers around the globe to keep a massive number of players online, that cost will dwarf the cost of any single networking library, or even switching network libraries.

And if you really were talking about a regular traditional online game, the actual networking library you choose also makes relatively little difference. Different libraries provide slightly different feature sets, so look over the feature sets you care about and pick any library that fits your needs.  Look for what is easiest to use so you don't need to spend weeks configuring complex distributed transaction systems or similar, you can jump in to directly communicating between the systems.

If you just look at initial cost structure and then make a conclusion without evaluating the many many other variables that determined that initial cost, then sure "ya got me" but it feels like a big oversight.

• World of Warcraft were one of the first to market ( MMO ), which are always the ones that pay the biggest price.
• I would be okay with the 2009 version of WoW.
• Many technologies and libraries are put out now that would otherwise would have to be paid and built for back in those days.
• My game won't be focused on having tons of highly detailed content for many different (classes * races).
• No custom game engine, rendering is already available, lots of plug and play.
• I can purchase bulks of same design models / textures on unity game store for a few hundred which would of costed hundreds of thousands back in the day

I like your comment on the WebSockets and assuming its speed is negligible to UDP, that sounds great.