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What topics do you want to read … followups

Thanks for everyone who voted in the survey (What topics do you want to read more about?) – very helpful.

You can help by rating the posts from now on whenever you see one that you greatly prefer / greatly dislike (I’ve added a plugin that lets you rate each post from 1 star to 5 stars without reloading the page or having to login etc).

Your top votes:

  • MMO operations issues / running online games (80%)
  • MMO programming (75%)
  • MMO design issues / inventing online games (75%)

So, you all want to know more about how to make and then run an MMO, huh? :)

But … don’t want any more Casual MMO analysis (15%) nor anything to do with Social Networking (5%), even though MMOs are really the world’s most advanced Social Networks and depend upon it for their revenue. Interesting.

So, I guess this reflects an interest in more of the MMORPG / $50 million budget side of the MMO industry? a.k.a. “how do you even spend that much money in a sensible way”?

A few generic areas there I’ve long been meaning to write about:

  • Mistakes in MMO design
  • Mistakes in MMO programming
  • Classic (and not-so-classic) MMO server architectures
  • What “running an MMO” looks like (staff, job roles, hardware, software, processes)
  • Better ways of running an MMO (mostly: different approaches to process and to software)

Is that along the right lines? If not, let me know (comment on this post, or grab my email from the About page) – suggestions / requests welcome too, although do that for information only, don’t expect me to automatically fulfil them!

And, as mattb pointed out, there’s at least one person wanting more on Component / Entity Systems. That’s tricky. The ES posts so far took a very long time to write (contrary to what some people have said, an awful lot of research and cross-checking went into them, in an attempt to clarify what has historically been a very murky and poorly-described subject, and prone to confusion and misinformation). Until recently it also looked like I was going to have an opportunity to see another ES go into production for a major MMO, and I was hoping to wait and see how that went before coming back to the topic. That ain’t going to happen now, which leaves me with several directions I could go in. Feedback needed, guys – what needs saying that isn’t already said? I’ve got one interesting post left that explains the whole “Future of MMO” part (although I think it’s pretty obvious already what that will contain), but I’m sure there’s a lot more advice and thoughts I could throw out if there’s specific areas people are looking at (except not source code – I’ve tried blogging source before, this is the wrong medium for that).

2 replies on “What topics do you want to read … followups”

From a purely selfish standpoint, I’m currently interested in the technical/implementation details. After rereading the series, there are some questions raised in Part 3… ok here, I’ll just quote it:

” how do you define the archetypes for your entities?
how do you instantiate multiple new entities from a single archetype?
how do you STORE in-memory entities so that they can be re-instantiated later on?

Big topics. Really big. Too big to go into here (ah. Now I know what the next post is going to be about…)”

That’s a cliffhanger if I ever saw one… =)

Non-selfishly I sympathize with how long that would take you to write, and that it may no longer be interesting to you to do so. I have some ideas, and I should probably just follow my gut and try it out… but it’s always good to get the scoop on “Best Practices” from somebody more experienced.

“ES as Future of MMO” would be a great read!

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