Give the game a real chance - Buy a decent engine

[NativityInBlack]

Given the success of the kickstarter please get a decent engine.

Several multi-million dollars games are in trouble because they picked the wrong engine and it's way too late to go back now.

Warhammer Online - used Gamebryo, it was laggy, unresponsive and could not handle a lot of players at once.

Star Wars the Old Republic - uses the Hero Engine, ugly, dated graphics. Elder scrolls online is already doomed by that engine and it's not even on beta yet.

I remember rumors that Ultima Online 2, the last attempt on a sandboy MMO, had their engine melt when they had too many players at once. EverQuest 2 was really traumatic as well, I remember buying a top line PC and it still played awfully.

Please go play TERA online just to try out a modern combat, I believe it's powered by EPIC and while it can't hold an horde on screen it's fluid and fun. Part of the WoW success it's on the fluidity of the animations and combat-response time.

Even if you decide to build it in-house, please get some external consultants and real-deal dev modules.

A decent engine is the most important part of any game project, to have a real shot you guys -must- test how many simultaneous players the system can hold at once - and interact and the combat response time (DX11 support would be nice, if possible).

Godspeed,

The kickstarter of the technology demo is here if anyone haven't helped yet:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-technology -demo

[Blaeringr]

They have already picked an engine. They haven't officially announced which one yet, but they certainly do seem to have one picked out. So despite making good points, your points may be a bit late.

[Ryan Dancey]

Remember that the "engine" doesn't dictate graphic aesthetics. That's a function of developer choices to trade off speed for detail and art choices for "look".

MMO middleware is so much more than client-side graphics. What you see on the screen is 5% of the middleware.

[AvenaOats]

Fulgor wrote:

Given the success of the kickstarter please get a decent engine.

Several multi-million dollars games are in trouble because they picked the wrong engine and it's way too late to go back now.

Warhammer Online - used Gamebryo, it was laggy, unresponsive and could not handle a lot of players at once.

Star Wars the Old Republic - uses the Hero Engine, ugly, dated graphics. Elder scrolls online is already doomed by that engine and it's not even on beta yet.

I remember rumors that Ultima Online 2, the last attempt on a sandboy MMO, had their engine melt when they had too many players at once. EverQuest 2 was really traumatic as well, I remember buying a top line PC and it still played awfully.

Please go play TERA online just to try out a modern combat, I believe it's powered by EPIC and while it can't hold an horde on screen it's fluid and fun. Part of the WoW success it's on the fluidity of the animations and combat-response time.

Even if you decide to build it in-house, please get some external consultants and real-deal dev modules.

A decent engine is the most important part of any game project, to have a real shot you guys -must- test how many simultaneous players the system can hold at once - and interact and the combat response time (DX11 support would be nice, if possible).

Godspeed,

The kickstarter of the technology demo is here if anyone haven't helped yet:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-technology -demo

Agree with most of this. Have not played TERA but I don't like the visuals and even the combat (perhaps it looks a lot better in pvp?) + camera is always really "jerky" when I see examples of combat on youtube. I also think that actiony combat is mostly ruled out already, is a guess? As said, it's true with most of above in terms of the effect the engines had on their respective mmorpgs, animations and how it affects combat and numbers of players on screen.

I really like what I've seen of Diablo: It's combat, animations and it looks simple, fun and possibly transferable to something here?

[Ryan Dancey]

@AvenaOats - Zero percent chance we'd use Blizzard technology in anything. They don't license. Also, Diablo is designed to run without much client to server communication; all those monsters you see on your screen are not being kept in synch with a server-side "authentic" version of reality.

[Andius]

Plus the Diablo engine rubber-bands TERRIBLY. "Oh you moved out of the way of that giant fire-ball?! TOO BAD! You are right back where you were standing a second before!" I don't know why they bothered to put a hardcore mode in that game with their crappy lag issues that their server has and rubber-banding issues. I can't imagine getting past level 40 without being killed by something entirely out of your control. And I know it's serverside because every time you ask "Is anyone else having lag problems?" The whole party goes "Yes."

I would prefer something that didn't rubber-band me as much. Of all the client-server communication problems that a game can have (Lag-switching, speed-hacking, etc.) I would go so far to say that rubber-banding in the worst, especially if you have I a good team of GMs willing to deal with the people clearly abusing them. I would be willing to put up with any of the others to avoid it.

This game may not be twitch based but I don't want to be running from a giant monster, or chasing a griefer, or trying to make my opponent lose line of site so I can cast some self heals real quick, and be told that I cannot move forward.

[AvenaOats]

I was jumping on my favorite hobby-horse, more than suggesting the engine itself and referencing Diablo too obliquely, obviously - sorry (!). Just a fan of the distance from the action with smaller avatar allows more tactical combat (possibly) with simpler animations allowing more complex combat also? And wider view of the immediate game world, involving more avatars (positions of)? Not sure, dota games lol eg has some interesting tactical combat? Also reminds me of Baldur's Gate and how atmospheric that looks (at least to me). For sure it's not as stunning visually as some MMOs look, but maybe that's a price worth paying for? As said, I think this is my preference partly as I find FPS view hard-work so prefer higher level perspective of game worlds. Maybe that's distinctly minority preference but if any chosen engine can work with that... at least it's a consideration if only to be quickly disposed of! :)

[Buri]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

@AvenaOats - Zero percent chance we'd use Blizzard technology in anything. They don't license. Also, Diablo is designed to run without much client to server communication; all those monsters you see on your screen are not being kept in synch with a server-side "authentic" version of reality.

Diablo 3 does. Diablo 2 didn't. Other than art assets, the server dictates EVERYTHING your character sees and does. My internet connection has lagged out over this last weekend only to pop back to find myself in the middle of a fight when, before, I was alone. Thankfully, I kept clicking one of my area attack spells "just in case" because I heard horror stories about people desyncing and resyncing to corpses, namely their own, on the Diablo 3 forums. Thankfully, I still had a quarter of my life bubble and was able to get to a health drop. :D

Also, if your latency gets high enough, NOTHING happens. If you click a spell, nothing happens. Enemies freeze yet you can still move. Objects don't get destroyed, etc etc, until your client resyncs with Blizzards servers.

[Sulavan]

a good physcis engine would be a great thing to see

[Brady Blankemeyer]

JediveODE

But myself I prefer the engine used in Galahad and the Holy Grail.

Referencing Diablo 3 makes me think of overhead view like Ultima Online and that's not the style I want.
I like the view from my heroes eyes, not acting like I'm so mad god who makes my character run in and out of the lava till he's near death... cackle from above as he whimpers and pleads with me, but I ignore his cries and make him wait till his hps go up to full on their own, then do the lava dance again! I'm not that kind of person... really.

And who cares about the graphics engine! I make my own; I have a box of Crayola crayons near me, and I color my monitor to make it look pretty. Even though he moves and I have to color it again, takes me 3 days just to leave town. It's all worth it in the end, as I'm on my 13th monitor, mom says I'm almost at my allowance limit for the year.

[NativityInBlack]

It's really rare to be able to give feedback so early on a project, so thanks for stopping by Ryan. :)

If possible please look for an engine/middleware that will allow YOU to eventually let us:

1-Jump
2-Climb (rogue-like adventures)
3-Swim (underwater exploration/dungeons)
4-Fly (endgame-spells-mounts)

To mimic a little of the freedom we have on a PnP session we will need the right tools, beside the Goliath no one else has really given us all the dimensions and even there it's very limited.

To be blunt, the world is ready for a Minecraft MMO, and for that we will need:

#1 in-game building/crafting tools
#2 perma-spawning enemies banging on the stuff we build
#3 dynamic dungeons
#4 deep character progression

- will win the day -

Godspeed,

[Jamie Charlan]

Hopefully they've gotten their hands on MT framework 2.0

Contrary to many MMOs, flying should be a possibility at its normal "you get it now" levels for pathfinder. Exploration should be absolutely paramount; something that's missing from MMOs these days is the ability to just go "today I'm headed that way". Let flying, climbing, digging and all that be part of the game.

Instead of the specific "go here, kill x of y, come back, get reward, repeat ad nauseum until you have to do the exact same thing but now with a forced group of half-are-idiots". Exploration. That's something we're getting with minecraft often enough, and sure beats everyone having the same dungeons and all that s&%@ everywhere. If you get a quest, its some serious "you will gain a level or three doing this" stuff that's done with landmarks or rough maps, fully expecting you to have random encounters and quite possibly explore the wrong dungeon or cave network on your way.

Lots of things should be random; if you walk two hours through a forest, you're two hours through a forest. Maybe there's some old ruins there.

Taking a page from Minecraft and old roguelikes: Perhaps the world should use some random seed generation, and be reset after a certain amount of time. The areas outside of basic towns would be rebuilt a region at a time; Use two phases for this: The current one, and the new one. Someone in the 'current' once the new one is available can log back in and keep doing what he's doing, but once he travels out the region, coming back lands him in the new one.

Instead of level specific zones, a certain percentage [say, 50~, could be affected by certain things] of what you run into, both random encounters and randomly found dungeon things, are appropriate to your level. The remainder are truly random; you're going to have to learn to pick your battles, sneak, avoid stuff, and once in a while bask in the glory of having an actual army of a hundred "CR1s" trying to take you down.

Perhaps folks could have a small set of 'bookmarks', places that seemed awesome but they just weren't ready for, that they really want to get back to next time.

That's some serious power requirements though...

[NativityInBlack]

Great points and ideas Jamie, hope they are still reading.

I completely forgot about digging, even after playing Minecraft and Terraria for many hours I couldn't even imagine having that on an MMO.

:)

[Jamie Charlan]

Well the trick here is that what's missing from MMOs versus the tabletop is the feeling of adventure.

DDO, for all its flaws [and there are plenty] is one of the better games in that regard; it had a healthy amount of focus on looking around, searching, thinking about stuff and, often enough, alternate routes. I think anyone can at least remember the sewers in the intro region; there's support beams running along the ceiling you can hop around onto with a bit of skill; if you even noticed'em.

More recently but non-MMO, Dark Souls has a lot of that, but is about confined quarters as opposed to having a variety of large and open spaces [which MMOs tend to have, what with, worlds and all].

Its that whole "dude, we'd been wandering around that cave for like an hour when all of a sudden..."

An Automap with primary landmarks outside and line-art inside as you go along, if done well, would give a pretty good feeling, but many people unused to the pen and paper genre might be freaking out. Its handy for knowing where you've been or haven't been, though, but I'll admit not everyone loved that part of the old Descent I/II games.

[Elth]

Climbing and even just animated vaulting over a waist high wall section like Grand Theft Auto have been on my most wanted list of MMO features for a while now. GTA3+ while not fantasy have been some of my favorite games in recent years purely for the Exploring climbing and general "here's a city, do what you want in it" feel. I still play San Andreas and GTA IV to this day. Not for the story, just for the fun of climbing over things, exploring things and starting fights with civilians to see what happens. So for my true explorer desires please include climbing, jumping and vaulting and plenty if places to do so. It would be great to play a rogue in a huge kingdom where I could traverse rooftops to avoid the local law enforcement. Not in a acrobatic Assassins Creed style, but something that could work in dungeons, sewers, rooftops or just plain old getting over a wall

Also, a big thumbs up for intricate dungeon designs to get lost in. Descent was amazing back in the day.

[Qstor]

I'm not a computer/tech person but isn't there an enormous amount of coding involved? Do you (Goblinworks) even have 5% of it done?

Mike

[Coldman]

Elth wrote:

It would be great to play a rogue in a huge kingdom where I could traverse rooftops to avoid the local law enforcement. Not in a acrobatic Assassins Creed style, but something that could work in dungeons, sewers, rooftops or just plain old getting over a wall.

Just lit a fire under my imagination there. A MMORPG in which a thief could make an epic rooftop escape. Modern engines are very capable of such gameplay and the ability to deploy a fluid freedom of movement similar to that of Assassin's Creed would put the game in massively good stead.

And make it look like this.

I'm picturing characters who have sacrificed a great amount of 'available' knowledge/skills into Acrobatics, allowing them greater leaps, swifter vaulting over walls and greater gymnastic ability in combat.

I never really thought about it before, but Assassins Creed offers a visual style to movement and combat which would translate amazingly into a MMORPG. The 'combat mode' used in AC of practically encircling one another would be a great mechanic (toggleable/entered into by a hotkey?) to make hack and slash melee combat simple, but very exciting and skillful.

[DeciusBrutus]

Qstor wrote:

I'm not a computer/tech person but isn't there an enormous amount of coding involved? Do you (Goblinworks) even have 5% of it done?

Mike

The first 99% of the coding will take 90% of the total allotted time. The remaining 99% will also take 90% of the total allotted time.

Right now we're still at the 'figure how much time to allot and have some plan for paying the programmers' stage.

[Azure_Zero]

Qstor wrote:

I'm not a computer/tech person but isn't there an enormous amount of coding involved? Do you (Goblinworks) even have 5% of it done?

Mike

it'll follow the 80/20 rule most likely

the first 80% for coding will be done in first 20% of the time
the last 20% for coding will be done in the last 80& of the time.

[NativityInBlack]

Coldman wrote:

Elth wrote:

It would be great to play a rogue in a huge kingdom where I could traverse rooftops to avoid the local law enforcement. Not in a acrobatic Assassins Creed style, but something that could work in dungeons, sewers, rooftops or just plain old getting over a wall.

Again another important point on how a decent engine could make a great MMO.

I don't believe Gamebryo's and Hero Engine's (and not even Epic Unreal Engine) could pull that off under a MMO netcode.

Hope Paizo is aware the kind of attention this project could have if they hinted at those shiny new features not available anywhere.

Only beware of digging some jerks will certainly make holes on my lawn that will ship me straight to some magma pit in the middle of the planet in my jammies.

The corpse run will be a bish. :(

[Blaeringr]

In a rather primitive kind of way, DDO allows players to jump along rooftops. You occasionally tun into invisible barriers.

[Ryan Dancey]

@Fulgor - I think that any MMO engine could do "character running across a rooftop". Just not that hard.

The hard thing is designing a space that's supposed to be accessible by people running on rooftops. You know that bit in Star Trek II about "2 dimensional thinking"? It's not just for 20th Century Genetically Modified Supermen.

The important thing to understand is that the "middleware" doesn't dictate much in the sense of this kind of gameplay. Running across a roof is no different from running across the ground. Falling off a roof is no different from falling off a platform or a raised area of terrain.

You know what's hard about roofs? The camera. Think about a complex roof, with all sorts of dormers, gutters, garrets, etc. There's a lot of physical objects on a complex roof, and making it possible to do anything useful there without driving the player NUTS with camera swoops could be a big challenge.

Another thing that's hard about roofs is unkillable opponents. If you make it possible to snipe at people from roofs, you make it pretty easy to establish an effectively unbeatable higher ground / better cover advantage. Which, in an MMO, just means that everyone will travel on the rooftops and the streets will be jarringly empty. (This goes to the rule of "wouldn't it be cool if X ..." followed by "nobody does X".)

I'll share this video with you. This is from the Korean sandbox MMO "ArcheAge". This is by far the most expensive sandbox MMO development ever. Over $25 million has already been invested in this game. Its unclear if it will ever be brought to the Western market, although I'm sure they're hoping they can.

Anyway, here's what one development team did with Unreal Engine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ocs53DyGip4& hd=1

[insorrow]

to be honest i just hope they license the engine of darkfall

if you check videos on youtube the game looks crap but this is because everyone turns everything to low , the combat is very very fast and mostly fps so everyone wants maximum performance and minimum quality. If you bother to turn everything to high the game gets pretty nice .

the good points are that , it can handle fast combat in an open world with more than 500 people simultaneously , while it keeps track of aiming , hitboxes and weapon reach etc .

the engine was built with an mmo in mind , unlike cryo for example .cryo and unreal seem to be built around fps games and then mmo developers adjust the engine to their needs.Most of the times i am not happy with the results

[NativityInBlack]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Anyway, here's what one development team did with Unreal Engine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ocs53DyGip4& hd=1

Thanks Ryan that was really nice. :) Happy to see that you guys are on top of whats possible today even all the way around the globe!

[Nihimon]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

You know what's hard about roofs? The camera. Think about a complex roof, with all sorts of dormers, gutters, garrets, etc. There's a lot of physical objects on a complex roof, and making it possible to do anything useful there without driving the player NUTS with camera swoops could be a big challenge.

How difficult would it be to allow the camera to maintain a static distance from the character and ignore all the intervening objects?

It has always been extremely frustrating to me to walk under a low tree branch and have my camera position pushed in toward my character. I'd much rather be able to have my camera set back, but only render the stuff in front of my character.

It doesn't seem easy, though.

[Coldman]

Nihimon wrote:

Ryan Dancey wrote:

You know what's hard about roofs? The camera. Think about a complex roof, with all sorts of dormers, gutters, garrets, etc. There's a lot of physical objects on a complex roof, and making it possible to do anything useful there without driving the player NUTS with camera swoops could be a big challenge.

How difficult would it be to allow the camera to maintain a static distance from the character and ignore all the intervening objects?

It has always been extremely frustrating to me to walk under a low tree branch and have my camera position pushed in toward my character. I'd much rather be able to have my camera set back, but only render the stuff in front of my character.

It doesn't seem easy, though.

Having the camera simply 'noclip' through objects whilst reducing the transparency of the object (i.e once the camera clips the object, it is 90% transparent).

Always preferred that form of camera to the conventional floating camera which seems to obey the laws of physics, to my own discomfort.

[NativityInBlack]

Whelp 300k go shop for a kickass engine and middleware!

Watch out for the 38 Studios massive failure, don't grow too much!

Best luck!

[Gruffling]

For those discounting the importance of quality graphics, keep in mind this aspect of development can take an extraordinary amount of time to produce anything of quality. Its also usually the last aspect of designing a game that'll get a revision.This is also, more or less, the face of the gameplay, and if its dull, simplistic and boring, these qualities will be applied to the game itself. Regardless of how awesome the gameplay is, if the environments are bland, and the characters are static in their animations, the release will be panned and canned.

I guess my point is, for the quality I'm hoping for, every facet of development should receive attention to detail and hard work (both those usually = money spent).