Large online mulitplayer games and game engines

[Adder_Noir]

Dear All,

I'm still only on my second book of learning C++ although I've had plenty of programming experience writing snippets for games before. The first book was about 350 pages and introduced to me to everything up to and including OOP and inheritance.

Now I'm reading one targetted at the games industry. I'm not a typical game student, nor am I planning a typical career in the industry. Since playing BattleGround Europe I was amazed at the amount of people such outdated graphics appeal to when the rest of the formula is gotten right. I thought it was only me left in the world who appreciated good gameplay over fancy brass knobs and bells.

I'm an electrician by trade and a budding novelist but in the future I plan to create an online game very similar to BattleGround Europe. I've had plenty of experience in building units, writing config files, making artwork and the like in Operation Flashpoint so I know what's involved on that side of it.

I'm trying to gather information well in advance to give the picture plenty of time to focus and also to give me something to look forward to in the future.

So my questions are:

1)Would it be sensible or even feasible to purchase a pre-existing game engine for the game or would I have to look at building my-own custom made one to suit such a high-performance demanding format where I could sacrifice pretty-ness for code saving leanness?

2)And how expensive would it be to rent or run a server large enough to cope with thousands of players online at the same time?

I would imagine realistically that I would have to make my own engine which is no major problem as I'm already very au fait with maths and physics thanks to my educational background. Also I suspect running a server would be out of the question and I'd have to rent it.

I know it sounds like a very pie-in-the-sky question but this is the very, very beginning and I'm trying to get some research rolling so any insight you chaps could offer would be most appreciated. Thanks

 

[verty]

If you had to write your own engine, I doubt you could release a game in time for it to be current with respect to the standard of games being released. I think one really needs a team with one or two people dedicated to programming the engine and additional people for level design, ai scripting, artwork, etc.

 

[Adder_Noir]

Wow sounds like a big task. The game would not have any levels or ai in it however. It would entirely be multiplayer so once the environment was built that would be the end of that.

Exactly what's involved with engine creation and where could I find out about it? It really does not need to be anywhere near the levels which are considered standard for today. If you look at BGE's engine it's over 6 years old

I know one or two folk who are interested in the idea so I might be able to recruit help later.

 

[jim mcnamara]

ID software has a downloadable version of the doom engine and the quake engine. Quake is pretty big...

Start looking here...
www.id.software.com

MMPORG or MMPOG will get you a lot of information used for google search keys.

 

[verty]

I don't know too much about game engines unfortunately. You could start with a simple game like tetris, just to get the feel, and then look at the source of some game engines.

 

[AlephZero]

This will give you some idea how a fairly small pro games company operates: http://www.eurocom.co.uk/careers/howtogetintothegamesindustry/

 

[Adder_Noir]

Ah thank you gentlemen. This will be a long running thread so I'll be popping back in and out with questions now and then for a long time ahead all being well.

Thanks for the links and the advice so far

**Edit**

I've had a good read through that Eurocom website. I'll be honest I've spent the last 12 years of my life cursing the fact that I went into higher education because I truly believed they were pointless, wasted years.

Now I'm beginning to see just how useful they may in fact end up having been. I'm not in the slightest bit afraid of either the maths or physics involved in the engine aspects, nor am I any stranger to extremely detailed analyses of complicated problems and concepts. It would seem that I do indeed have a huge advantage over many bedroom programmers in this respect and perhaps it's time to stop cursing my parents for cajoling me into doing A-Levels and my engineering degree after all

I'm lucky in the sense that my chosen area of interest would not be anything that had to run on consoles, nor would it be anything that had to graphically compete with modern games. The audience I intend to pitch this to are hardcore realism gamers who really don't mind ordinary graphics the likes of which we saw on games 8 or 9 years ago provided the game is realistic and runs efficiently.

I suppose in that sense I'm fortunate to have such a clearly defined and potentially achievable goal too.

This is actually starting to look quite achievable and if I could make it go the distance it would bring a satisfactory conclusion to an awful lot of things in my life which at first appeared to be wasted endeavours.

I'll be back in touch with some more questions soon. Thanks

 

[dmail]

Game engines are mammoth tasks and usually the downfall of many indie projects, for a new comer into games it is also a daunting task which can be avoided by spending a little money on a good engine such as Torque (http://www.garagegames.com/) which also has networking built in. Using tools like these allows a programmer to concentrate on the game logic, physics ...
Gamedev.net gamasutra.com, and gpwiki.org are valuable resources which provide both articles and help via the forums and community members, Gamedev has many members which are industry professionals.
Check out http://gpwiki.org/index.php/How_do_I_get_Started for a starter guide.

 

[Adder_Noir]

Game engines are mammoth tasks and usually the downfall of many indie projects, for a new comer into games it is also a daunting task which can be avoided by spending a little money on a good engine such as Torque (http://www.garagegames.com/) which also has networking built in. Using tools like these allows a programmer to concentrate on the game logic, physics ...
Gamedev.net gamasutra.com, and gpwiki.org are valuable resources which provide both articles and help via the forums and community members, Gamedev has many members which are industry professionals.
Check out http://gpwiki.org/index.php/How_do_I_get_Started for a starter guide.

That's wonderful advice thank you very much indeed. I intend to heed that warning and pay-out for something like this to save me those kind of problems. Just one thing though could I slightly customize selected parts of it to meet my exact needs if I needed to, or do you have to use it as it is with no changes straight jacket style?

Thanks again

 

[dmail]

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/tge/features/sourceincluded

Full C++ Source Code

You receive the full source code with your license of Torque Game Engine: you are free to modify it as you see fit.
Royalty-Free Technology

Whether you purchase an Indie or Commercial License, you can publish your game anywhere, for any price without any royalties or further commitment to GarageGames aside from displaying the TGE logo upon game start up. There is no better game development deal in the world! Too good to be true? Read the full EULA and be amazed!

 

[Adder_Noir]

You have been extremely helpful and I'm in your debt. I've had a good look at what the engine can do and it looks amazing. I think infact it's far more capable than that which I need. I'll be going with this for sure now.

Thanks again mate

When I get anymore questions I'll post again, although it probably won't be for a while. I need to go and digest a load of stuff.

 

[Jripe]

You might want to check this out.

http://www.ode.org/

It's a free, open source physics engine with a C/C++ API.

 

[neurocomp2003]

There are so many game negines out there.
Some that depend on others.
Unreal, QUake,Halflife
Which have mods that you can create ontop.
Torque...is probably what most go for because its license is like 100$

Then there's the open source stuff like ogre3D,irrlicht, cube.

If your looking to do massive multiFPS you will need to know abit about parallel/network coding. Physics stuff use ODE as mentioned above...Ogre3D is pretty good with graphics.

 

[Adder_Noir]

Lol I can't believe the amount of help people have already offered on this project.

Thanks a lot Jripe I've bookmarked that site. Looks like that might be something I'll come to be relying upon.

Neurocomp that is exactly what I'm looking to do. Where could I learn about such concepts? Ideally I could do with a book which would cover the subject which I can pull apart in my own time.

Thanks again chaps.

 

[Jripe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGRE_3D

I read up on Ogre 3D quite a while ago (a few years) and it was quite active then, and is most likely still quite active now. It is open source, and written in C++ so once again, you might want to also check that out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_engines
A few more options, other then ODE.

 

[Adder_Noir]

Thank you Jripe. Does open source mean the core-code is accessible for all to see?

If that's the case I expect that will teach me alot. Thanks pal.

 

[anthony9559]

I am a big fan of playstation 3 but i can not afford playstation 3 . I have a PC that can Run latest games so i would like to know Can we download ps3 games on pc ? if yes Can we run on it ?
Thank you for your reply
___________________________
used ps3 games
copying ps3 games