One of my hobby projects is a testament to the Ultima and Elder Scrolls games – a massive open-world, where everything you do impacts the world around you. This has long been promised by commercial games – and it sucks from a gameplay perspective; it’s just not fun. But a […]
MMOG development
56 posts
Cas (@PuppyGames) (of PuppyGames fame – Titan Attacks, Revenge of the Titans, etc) is working on an awesome new MMO RTS … thing. He had a weird networking problem, and was looking for suggestions on possible causes. I used to do a lot of MMO dev, so we ran through […]
Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two) It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:
I never imagined I’d reach anything even close to 10k rep. Lots of thoughts and some analysis to come on this in a future post – but I’ve got two deadlines coming up, so very rushed right now.
While upgrading Unity, I noticed the current download page is a great example of how it SHOULD be done: Unity 4 has some … issues … with backwards compatibility – but at least they made the “need an older version?” link prominent. And how many old versions can you download? […]
I noticed a few months back that Pat Wyatt has been blogging rgularly and in a lot of detail last year. This (IMHO) is big news: Pat is an awesome developer who held key positions in the teams behind many of the bestselling computer games (e.g.: Diablo 1 + 2, […]
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I […]
“I was in charge of scaling Dropbox … from roughly 4,000 to 40,000,000 users. … Here are some suggestions on scaling” The first section is a WTF – the guy advocates deliberately over-taxing your servers, without a good explanation. I’ve got some guesses at why they did it – but […]
I’ve posted a few times over the years the … disappointing … state of LinkedIn’s engineering. But this takes the biscuit: it appears they were storing deliberately insecure passwords, and someone leaked the list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309 (that page has links + info on how to check if your own password is […]
Hume just posted his Lessons Learned from the warmup for Ludum Dare 23 (48 hours to write a game from scratch – starts this weekend!) – and his positive experience using an Entity System. In his epic comment (sparked by a different Adam – not me, honest), is this gem: […]
Thanks to Mike Leahy for spotting this: http://blog.gemserk.com/2012/02/02/how-we-use-box2d-with-artemis/ …a short blog post (with code) on how a team is integrating Box2D (a very well known open source physics lib) with Artemis (a java implementation of Entity Systems which starts from the same point as my Entity Systems posts, but fleshes […]
I’ve recently been playing the excellent Realm of the Mad God – a very fast-paced 2d co-operative shooter. My feeling is that it’s going to be one of the most important games of 2011/2012, as it continues to grow in popularity. Typical experience of this game is that within 30 […]
There’s good reasons for adopting Mongo, I’m unconvinced (but open-minded) that performance is one of them. Here’s a ROFLMAO viewpoint on it: “If your write fails, you’re ****ed” Obviously, MySQL’s not perfect, but in most cases I’ve seen, it’s been lack of competence on the developer side, and the lack […]
The mashup (My new “preferred explanation of piracy + DRM”) The original (From Cyanide&Happiness webcomic, if you don’t know it already..)
If you’re interested in using an ES on indie projects, and you’re craving concrete examples, you might want to look at the comments (page 1 and page 2) on Mythruna: “Since this is a developers forum, I’ll describe a little bit about what went on behind the scenes. During the […]
Normally, I don’t allow “guest posts”, but I’m making an exception for my “10 Games You Should Have Played” series. I’ve been asking other games-industry people to write up their own lists + explanations, and that’s not always compatible with their personal/work/etc blog. When that happens, I’m happy to post […]
If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you: MT: We are griefers. If nothing is going to happen then we’re going to […]
I’ve just done a round of fixes for the source-examples of ES’s. Github projects updated on this page: http://entity-systems.wikidot.com/rdbms-with-code-in-systems Changed: Added a complete Java implementation of the most basic ES example Fixed some minor bugs in the Objective-C basic ES example; added some missing classes Added a missing class method […]
Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on. It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when […]
There’s a growing problem right now with Facebook Connect: it can silently log you in to websites that you *don’t want* to share your private data with. I saw a funny example last month where a porn website had integrated Facebook Connect … so when you visit the site, one […]