So...

I guess I will start. Hi everyone. My name is Ash, and Im a mmorpgaholic.

Jokes aside, my team and I have been working on a TC/LiteMMO project for the last 3 years, and the featureset is nearing completion.

We are using a standard game engine and it's toolset at the moment, labelling it as a mod and clustering the game servers (96 player max) together to make a semi-mmo.

At one stage, for about a year we bought realm crafter as we felt our current environment was too restrictive. Like all people who bought realm crafter, we ended up with an acrid, urine-like taste in our mouths.

Just an utterly, totally terrible product.

After completing our current project (less than a year away maximum, shooting for 8-9 months), the team would like to work on a small scale mmo to try make a bit of on-the-side cash from our day jobs, and work our projects up in scale from there.

We dont need to be a multi billion dollar corp with millions of subs and all that. We want to be a 'floating' team of people doing it more as a hobby rather than anything else.
Keeping the scale and the team small, we hope to put together a very simple, yet highly enjoyable game for people to play.

I have spent years studying/learning/etc in game design and architecture. I was taught in various institutions for years and have a lot of indy/modding experience behind me.
I have spent the last 13 years making games in one way or another. I first cut my teeth on klik and play, if anyone remembers that.

We believe we have a fairly solid, simple, enjoyable and longlife game concept and have started tentatively shopping around for something good.

Most MMORPG engines are centered around something like everquest and working up from there, featurewise.

What we want is something that plays similar to, say, mass effect.

Seeing that esenthel now has MMORPG support is frankly very exciting, as the bloodbath demo shows us that shooters are very possible in esenthel.

Seeing the mmo demo shows us that, well, MMO's are possible.

Our game structure design is somehow meeting the two. We want the run and gun feel of an over-the-shoulder shooter, with the tactical/ease of use targetability of an MMORPG.

Instead of using physics to calculate projectile trajectories, we intend to have something similar to VATS in fallout, but in realtime and without the excessive clicking. We have a theoretical concept that allows us to do this, without it getting in the way of the action.

I am a highly proficient AI scripter and systems scripter using various game languages, but have never done anything further, eg using pure c++ (even though all the scripting languages I have used are based on c++ or higher level implementations of it).

So, I have a few questions.

1. What is the network performance like for the mmo features? Do they include realtime position data of the character at the same rate as the FPS demo bloodbath, for instance? what are average transmit numbers for a lot of movement?
2. I gather there isnt an in-game scripting compiler, you need to use visual studio c++ externally from esenthel to make scripts - is this correct?
3. What is the max player count for the esenthel mmo server? is it clusterable?
4. I notice that things like "player vs player" is not implemented yet in the feature roadmap. Could I still write my own combat system using the tools available, and have it work over the mmo connection?
5. I notice that buying a certain license allows custom shaders - do the esenthel custom shaders support shell/fur grass?
6. What is the method to store character data in game space - for exampe, caching a player's stats after reading them from a database.
7. What database does esenthel mmo use?
   

I would like to stress at this point I am not some guy who "wants to make, liek, the wow killer!" or some noob who is wide eyed and has no idea.
My current project has taught me untold amounts of things about MMO creation, and I have worked in all parts from GUI to code to art to animation to terrain to music to... well, all of it really.
I have realistic expectations in regards to playerbase. While my current project at one stage had a fanbase of over 10,000 this was due to us using an already popular IP. I do not expect anywhere near that number for an original IP.

The IP I have planned to use, I have worked on for the better part of 6 years. It is part of a novel that I will probably, eventually, release one day.

All of the core game systems have been mapped out over the last 3 years in documentation in some place or another, though it is still in flux and will change with testing.

We have no messy classes/spells/abilities/etc and the core game mechanic is relatively simplistic.


So yeah, basically just those questions. Is esenthel right for us?

-Ash

Hi and welcome to Esenthel,

1. Esenthel MMO demo uses exchanging positions every 0.1 seconds which is enough for mmorpg. positions are exchanged less frequently automatically when there are more characters near you.
You'll have full sources so you can toggle the constants.

2. Currently writing codes is done only in c++, in the future I plan to add some script solution too.

3. It's not clusterable. I didn't test it on large scale, but 1 server should support thousands of players. There's additional peer-to-peer connections to offload the server http://www.esenthel.com/?id=feature/network

4. it means that it's not in the demo, but that function you can easily develop on your own basing on the sources.

5. no you can't do it with custom shaders.

6. once character logins, its character data is kept in the memory

7. they're just files, with safe overwrite mechanisms, preventing from data loss