On Dec 8, 2005, at 12:35 PM, Joseph J. Strout wrote:
At 9:11 AM -0800 12/8/05, Gerald Bailey wrote:
I was thinking of using RB as my development tool to design a new
MMORPG because:
a) I wanted to release the game on multiple platforms at the same
time
b) I'm thinking the game could be created faster
c) A few other people seem to think it would do the job for me.
These are all true, at least to some extent. However, making a
large game (like most MMORPGs) is a *huge* job, and not even
REALbasic can make it a small one. Things like optimizing your
code and level designs for the sort of performance seen in
commercial games takes hundreds (or thousands) of man-hours,
regardless of what you're writing the code in. I'm only saying
this to make sure you have realistic expectations, and can plan
accordingly.
You ask "Do you want to make something the level of WOW?" My
answer is a definite YES!
I can't seem to find any hard figures for this particular game,
however most commercial games of this scale cost between 10 and 20
million dollars to develop (and take several years). Be prepared
for that sort of investment, or else scale back your ambitions to
something that DOES fit within your budget.
And, if I recall, hundreds of team members (including management)
I agree with Joe here. And I think it would take even a couple of
years work for a few developers/designers to make a MMORP that was
fun to play, looked good & only used a tile-based/chessboard world.
It is very important to keep scale in mind when starting projects:
it's fun & easy to start big projects but takes a lot of hard work to
finish even the small ones with any level of polish.
I'm sure many of use would like to make something on the level of WoW
but you really have to think about how much work goes into a project
like that, the ideas, the countless art revisions, the tree
balancing, debugging, and simple quality touches don't happen without
a lot of inspiration and hard work.
I don't mean to rain on your parade or anything, but am just trying
to present a realistic picture for your evaluation. There have been a
few of MMORP 3d games started in RB only to crash and burn as the
scope/duration of the project got out of hand.
Also, projects of this scope and magnitude don't usually start out by
asking minor technical questions such as 'full screen mode?' or
'MDI?' etc. I've seen a lot of big project stall because the team
members work hard coding detail aspects of the project, such as
fussing about optimizing a binary file format or some other dead-end
optimization while failing to grasp the enormity of their project and
how they are going to bring the whole thing together. So, another
word of unwanted advice might be to try and catch yourself from
working too hard/long on the 'corner-staring tasks' or tasks of
diminishing returns that have you looking at the trees instead of the
forest. And don't spend too much time looking out the window either. ;)
John
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