MMO with B3D

I was thinking in terms of man hours I would have to spend getting it up and running, compared to working on my actual project.

I will concede you're right that an unstable release of BlitzMAX has experimental support for multithreading. I'll take Marks word for it.

I had one. Go figure. But I wasn't talking about what systems home owners have. Still to this day, a large percentage of end users are using single core CPUs.

I think I see where the misunderstanding is. I was never talking about the client. I would argue that which system an end-user is going to eventually play a PC game on is out of the hands of the developers, and needless to say doesn't need to scale as elegantly, or as quickly as the server architecture. So in my world the client machine isn't really part of the equation, since:

1) There really isn't much you can do about it.
2) If the server is thrashing, it doesn't matter what client machine you're running, the game is going to grind to a halt.

Well that certainly depends on what kind of game you're working on. Sure if it's basically IRC with graphics, no problems there, you could get away with what is essentially Meridian 59. If you want something a little fresher, like say the ill-fated Planet Side, Auto Assault or even Tabula Rasa, you're going to have to be processing players every turn, regardless of whether they're idling or not, because the actions of one of the active players could have consequences on their situation, and besides they're part of the physics simulation.

But you'll be wanting a language that encourages that, so you can use in-memory references, rather than having to bog your "servers" down with redundant (and possibly unsynchronized) information and bog your network down with data exchange that might as well occur on the blade servers backpane.

That's just absurd. Well maybe Microsoft Office, but in that case Microsoft Office is way more resource hungry than Office applications need to be.

Hrm. Lets see, that would be about 2000, right? That would be about the time I used to work at an educational institution. At the time we ran 150 thin clients, doing office applications, off a single NT4 terminal services server. Now I don't know which "box" SOE was running EverQuest off, but this wasn't, at the time, even close to cutting edge, and probably downright embarrassing by today's standards. They're still using it last I heard, mainly because they couldn't afford to upgrade it so that it would be usable with Windows 2003, or for that matter, afford the prohibitive cost of the new license. Compare that to your numbers for EverQuest. I maintain that an MMO, providing it's a little more than a glorified 3D chatroom, requires quite a bit more than practically any business application you care to compare it too, for the same amount of consecutive users.

Sure. It was just a prototype, not much work had gotten into optimizing it at that stage, and we figured that with optimized code, and a half decent blade, we could probably get a best case scenario, 400 simultaneous clients going. But maybe the game was more complex than you're assuming?

You seem to have it in your mind, that I seem to have it in my mind that everyone wants to write WoW. I don't know where you got that absurd notion from, since I explicitly said in my very first post in this thread that in my opinion, the main reason someone would want to play an MMO made in BlitzWhatever was Because it's not WOW! Why that would make you assume I was talking about making WoW in Blitz3D I have no idea.

Besides you don't even need to be as big as WoW to need enterprise level hardware. Enterprise comes in many shapes and sizes, from small business to government monolith. It's a matter of scalability more than anything else, and you want to be able to scale real fast if the need arises, and what faster way to scale than throwing in a new blade for some extra processing power?

Well if your business plan relies on anything but the demonstrated bell-curve/S-curve sales curve, you are going to fail. Hard.

Except if those (I'm assuming virtual at that price) servers don't have the capacity for supporting thousands of players. When I'm talking about cost effectiveness, I'm not talking about the cheapest solution on an operational level. I'm talking the cheapest solution on a strategic level, as a function of the number of players over time. Granted for a number of players 'n', a virtual host might be a perfectly acceptable solution, the size of 'n' depending largely on the complexity of your game. But you need to figure out at which value of 'n' your virtual hosting becomes more expensive per player than a proper enterprise solution, and it might not be as large as you think. You can get an entry-level for £4000 and an entry-level SAN for as little as £1000.

In either case, if you want success in the MMO business your MMO has to offer something fresh, you cannot hope to compete with WoW/WAR/AoC. You need to carve out your own niche like Eve Online, Second Life or YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates. Simply making yet another fantasy MMO is not going to get you the market penetration you're going to need to survive.

Neither do I, which is why I think Eve Online is a more useful example:

1) It's an indy game (although originally published by Simon & Schuster).
2) There is only one world. None of those artificial barriers that plague other games.
3) It's not a Tolkienesque medieval fantasy game.
4) Their server architecture puts WoW to shame!
4a) They can handle more than an order of magnitude more simultaneous players.
4b) They can hot-patch their game (server-side, client-side updates still require going off-line).

So if you were to make a successful indie MMO, it'd be a good place to get a few pointers, particularly if you're aiming high.

The MMO didn't exactly fail, as the project never quite took off in the first place. Before throwing that kind of money at a project you need to be fairly convinced you're going to see a return on your investment. We decided that web applications were the safer bet. So far it seems we were right.

You'd be willing to relocate to Denmark? Got a CV? Know Python? How about 40?

Oh I'm allowed to have ideas, I'm just not allowed to capitalize on them. But that contract is out of the picture come January, if not sooner.

Because he doesn't constantly whine and moan about all the other users on the forums? Maybe because he's one of those live-and-let-live people who (contrary to popular belief) don't really get that wound up about what people post on the Internet? Because despite how bad you might this exchange reads he doesn't really have an axe to grind with Banshee. Hell even back when he was almost constantly at odds with Antony, Casey, Jeremy Alessi, RedOktober, Amon and MadJack (apologies to anyone forgotten) he's never questioned the right of anyone else to post on these forums (although maybe their sexuality), and he's never really felt angry at them (for long). Hell even people who publicly endorse anabolic steroid abuse in their signatures (something I find far more offensive than occasionally using one of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television), won't be on the receiving end of a stern mail from Simon if he has anything to say about it (which he doesn't).

I doubt that's objectively true.

You're half right. It's your point of view that I'm arguing from a position that all MMO projects must be big.

This is true to the fact that if your game isn't big, your game is not, by definition a Massively Multiplayer Online Game if it doesn't support thousands of players. It's simply a Multiplayer Online Game.

It's untrue however to the point where you're saying that Big absolutely has to be World Of Warcraft, particularly since I started by mentioning games like "A Tale In The Desert" and "YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates" as examples of what I thought was doable, and specifically excluded "World Of Warcraft".

Anyway, I had lots more to say, but I'm gonna call it a night, as this post is already rediculously long, and it's getting late. I'll catch up with all of you tomorrow.