Hello,

I'm planning to make a sandbox MMORPG for Windows and Mac, and am considering between Esenthel and Unity 3D.

I do realise that making an MMO isn't an easy task (I've been making games for 5 years now, both 2D and 3D, and .. I know it's not as long as some people, but I do know quite a bit) and don't mind putting in 3-5 years into this.

I've got some questions:

1) Does Esenthel have a mac client, or if not, will a finished game run on mac as well as it would on windows?

2) I know C#, a bit of Lua, but I've never touched C++; would it be very hard to start learning it now, and continue as I go along with development?

3) Would I be able to have..deformable terrain, in a way? For example, if a player begins mining into a mountain, would I be able to set it up so that he'd break away the terrain, and go into the mountain, finding ore, etc.

4) Similar to question 3, player housing. -- Would I be able to have a system for the player to create his own housing by setting up 3 walls and a wall with a door, and perhaps a roof/auto placing a roof (I'd create multiple wall models, of course)?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

~Sh1ntu

Hi,

1) Yes Mac is fully supported (except some minor things in physics, like clothing, cars/wheels)

2) c++ is very similar to c#, plus im finishing the Code Editor which will make it 2x easier.

3) there's no built-in support for that, but you can try do this manually

4) you can just insert them as custom objects in editor or dynamically in game

3. Look up voxels: http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...?tid=3202. Their are plenty of engines that support them and they sound like what you are looking for. You can have them appear as cube's (think Minecraft but much smaller) or you can smooth them out (like in Crysis (I think...)).

(02-25-2011 05:16 AM)runewake2 Wrote:  3. Look up voxels: http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...?tid=3202. Their are plenty of engines that support them and they sound like what you are looking for. You can have them appear as cube's (think Minecraft but much smaller) or you can smooth them out (like in Crysis (I think...)).

I'm trying to go for something like this:

Player beings to mine against a rock face, after X minutes and a bunch of rock, the wall breaks down, possibility of ore behind it or not (I guess it's similar to Minecraft, but on a larger scale - I'm not copying it, I just feel that having players actually mine instead of finding a vein on the surface adds to the game world).

So if I were to use voxels, how .. hard would the entire process be? And would I need to place all the ore veins, or could I make it so there's a chance to generate it behind each wall?

bump

http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...p?tid=3202

As for that ore veins. That would depend on your game design, not the engine.
You can create objects randomly at runtime, or you can place them in the world editor, which would make them set in stone (no pun intended).

If I were you i'd avoid voxels, and fake this effect. e.g:

Have a model/generate a model of a rock face, with the same material as the cliff in the world. Also have an ore model. In the world editor, position the ore model on the cliff, place the rock-face model over the ore model, so that it covers it completely.

In codes, have the server randomly set some of the ore models to be hidden or not (even though they're all invisible behind the rock face). As the player starts hacking at the rock-face, move its slowly vertexes against their normals inwards (towards the cliff) (draw it on CPU to update it - or rig it with bones to do this faster on GPU). Use particle effects of smoke and bits of rock coming off to hide any artifacts. Eventually the ore will be visible.

You need an engine with good voxel terrain built in for this, that will allow you to blow holes, dig and mine. Typically you would procedurally generate the subsurface based on some rules ... like 'near low lying areas there is 20% chance of a ore vein' etc, using rules to procedurally generate makes it more consistent than a random generator. Same rules to define the 'hardness' of the soil etc.

Don't try to build your own voxel solution, unless you are content with simplistic cubes etc. Its something that needs to be well implemented. Esenthel mentioned adding voxel terrain .. but it is likely still far off as its quite big thing.

I like that idea Chris. Never thought of doing something like that. Might have to try it sometime!

As for you OP. You can use either Chris' idea voxels. It's your game so look them both up and find out which offers the best solution for what you want. Then design your game.