Engines Under Consideration: Options

[Hankellin]

This is a centeralized listing of the Engines that have been submitted for consideration.

Please give constuctive feedback. Likes, Dislikes and if you have used the Engine for game modding/production.

A number of existing engines were looked at and we were lucky enough to have someone with an understanding of a number of these engines with us (thanks KevinMc).


Torque is a GREAT platform, very easy to use, very well documented, with multiple MMOs under development already, including Adellion. Bad side or Torque? It was designed as an FPS; the net code is superb, but needs to be scaled back for an RPG. There is no built in persistence, although many people have added it. It's all C++, and requires strong coding skill to use.


The community there is slow. Development is a snail's pace. And the community itself seems very ingrown. =/ If we stormed in with a ton of energy and started moving development ahead on things, we might get seen as trying to take over, or messing in their sandbox.

(Nevrax Library)
Nel is an option, but the code that was released under open source is fairly basic; a lot would have to be added, mostly in terms of tools for game design and management. From taking a one-hour look at NeL I'd say the code would be extended significantly or completely replaced for a final product. For a prototype, I think the engine itself would cope without too many changes


RealmCrafter is in beta. Assuming Solstar finishes it, RC will be THE way to go - fully integrated client/server engine and MMO-creation tool set. RealmCrafter bad sides: it's in beta; right now, it's not in a usable state, as not all features are in and working. It could fold; beta's can do that. =/ If it completes, it'll still be a few months before we can use it.


CrystalSpace already has an MMO developed using it. For a full listing of features:
Here is the "Plug" by the developer of CrystalSpace:



The Irrlicht Engine is a cross-platform high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is a powerful high level API for creating complete 3D and 2D applications like games or scientific visualizations. It comes with an excellent documentation and integrates all the state-of-the-art features for visual representation like dynamic shadows, particle systems, character animation, indoor and outdoor technology, and collision detection. All this is accessible through a well designed C++ interface, which is extremely easy to use.(Straight from the Website)

A merge with PlaneShift is also being considered:


There is an offer by Boundless-Adventures, if you read the letter, to form a partnership:



The offer I extend to you today is of a potential partnership.
Although Boundless Adventures is a commercial project, the aim is not
to make money for the sake of making money, but rather to use our
income to support, as WISH did, constantly changing live content,
stories, quests and events. We have, from day one, invited members of
our player community to provide all their thoughts about any number of
facets of the game, and because of these discussions we have revamped
many major concepts to be as players want them to be. I believe that
we can help one another, as a commercial operation there are some
things we can do that an open source shop will have trouble with, such
as hosting world servers that can support as many players and as large
an NPC population as WISH was designed for, as well as providing
programming assistance for the open source version of the game engine; this could possibly lead us to having two engines, one open source and one commercial.

[LiqqY]

The irrilit engine sounds good.
But what features can be implented :o

[Fuinelen]

The engine sounds very good indeed.
What mostly caught my eyes on the homepage though was this line



Too bad that the link doesn't seem to work :/

is really a good game engine. Basically it's the Tribes2 engine, which includes also a map editor and script language. But as has been said in the public forums, it would require from each of the people who have anything to do with the code to acquire a license. it's not high for a game engine, but it's still 100$.


is, at best, in early beta (i'd even say still in the middle of an alphastate). Apart from the starting town, the maps they have are especially dull : very small, constrained pathways that feels more like corridors than open space, and I'm not sure whether it's due to the limits of the engine or just "work in progress".

didn't check out the other engines yet :)
bbye,
Fuinelen

[Hankellin]

engine sounds very good indeed.
What mostly caught my eyes on the homepage though was this line



Too bad that the link doesn't seem to work :/
~snip~

didn't check out the other engines yet :)
bbye,
Fuinelen

[KallDrexx]

Irrlicht is well... not great. I tried it out last night and I'm goign to give it a chance tomorrow but it seems to have a great amount of features but the graphics just seemed poor in the techdemo and other examples (sure it says it is amazingly fast, but the models they use are extremely low polygon, if it didn't go fast I would be worried).

I also have to check out the code though as it is supposed to be very easy to learn, use, and implement new features, but I definentally wouldn't use this for the prototype.

[cyress8]

The engine Irrlicht seems to be great but the offer from boundless adventure sees good also, since there game seems to try to have all the features Wish had

*edit* didnt notice what kall said above ill pull my statement about irrlicht

[Jerky]

That ICe mentioned on the Irrlicht page does not seem to be ZeroC's ICE. It does not look like it is the same thing.

[pearle]

Another graphics engine that might be worth considering is Ogre.

http://www.ogre3d.org

[Greatness]

Choose any graphics engine that is fast and that has pretty good graphics

[Triss]

It's not that easy, the engine must be something more than just a 3D engine or Project Wish team would have to add a lot of stuff like sound and networking to it.
Engine needs to have all the basic parts needed for an MMORPG.

[Blacksmile]

Pearle, some of the ogre screenshots were really looking good and the fetures sounded good as well, but after all it's just graphics and not a framework.

[pearle]

Yes, but we could choose a stand alone graphics engine for the client depending on which project we choose for the server.

[Blacksmile]

Agreed.

[andrantos]

I may be stupid as I'm not really knowledgable about coding and engines and such. But from my understanding, NeL provides a basic framework for pretty much everything. If we wanted to, couldn't we mix parts of a graphics engine we like and fit them into the NeL engine?? Please bash me on the head if this is indeed a stupid question.

[Jerky]

After reading through the entire White Page (82 pages, I am tired) listed in another thread, I followed one of the links for a MMORPG server system made for 1 server that can handle up to 10,000 players. The plus is that they make 2 versions, both with possibilities of being no cost to us at all. Obviously, after we have a team and a plan, we need to discuss this. For those who want to see it now: http://www.grexengine.com/

Please do not contact them yet. If we need to, we will do it as a team when we have arrived at that point.

[Fuinelen]

Another aspect to consider when choosing an engine is this : how do we want the world to function? I see three alternatives :

A) Zoned world (like EQ, and most other MMORPG on the market)

B) Seamless terrain with zoned dungeons and possibly Buildings (like Morrowind)

C) completely seamless world in which the player can enter and exit dungeons and complex buildings without loading (like what Wish did)

All grafics engines are capable of handling type A, some are capable of handling type B, only a few can handle type C (TORQUE for example, but like many others, I'm not too hot about using Torque for many reasons)

bbye,
Fuinelen

[Lucky_Luciano]

Ok, I did some research for free engines and the best ones are indeed already listed in the starter's thread. There are some very good engines (especially for MMO's) in development (like Realmcrafer), though those are mostly in alpha/beta stages so I wouldn't consider these...


Pro:
- Seamless terrains(!!) and seamless indoor/outdoor
- Good network-code (though, written with FPS's/race-games (read: max 32 people online) in mind)
- Very good support from the developers
Con:
- 100$ working on the engine. (Perhaps we can make a deal with the developers to lower the price, but I doubt it)


Pro:
- Free
- Written with MMO's in mind (!!)
- Already one commercial MMO (Saga of Ryzom) uses this engine
Con:
- Not sure if the engine can already handle a totally seamless world. (Does Ryzom have a seamless world?)


Pro:
- Free
- Written with MMO's in mind
Con:
- seamless terrain (it's in the FAQ)
- not stable (Beta state)


Pro:
- Free
- Nice engine
- Good terrain engine
- Good documentation (!!)
- Seamless indoor/outdoor
Con:
- Slow (!!)
- Basic code base (I don't think there is network support let alone support for an MMO ;))


Pro:
- Stable engine
- A lot of features
- Good terrain engine
- Easy to work with
Con:
- No seamless terrains?

Personally, I think a seamless world is a . The thing that made Wish so special and lifelike was the freedom you had as a player to run through/over/under/in/... anything in the world. Also, a seamless terrain offers more freedom in worldbuilding (you don't have to use ugly 'tricks' to "hide" zone-endings (like cities with high walls so you can look inside, or uncrossable mountains, etc...)).
On the other hand: a seamless terrain is hard to do: It needs good memory management and some very smart programming to keep it fast. Shadowbane is a good example of how we do it ;)

So, with this in mind: I would say that Nel or Torque are definatly the way to go. With a slight preference for Nel cause the engine is written for MMO's and it's free...

[KallDrexx]

I told fuin this but I will have to say this again. YOu can't count Torque as having seemless terrain in the form you get it. All torque does is take one heightmap tile and it loops it, so when I'm at the right edge of the map and keep walking I'm now on the left side of the map, facing right but i'm considered off the map and I won't see any objects or buildings that should be on the map (lighting still shows where buildings should be).

Thus we would have to go inside the source, turn looping off and write a system for dynamically loading heightmap tiles. Furthermore, in torque all the lighting is calculated before hadn (for buildings and stuff like that) so we will have to change that too, as there's no way we cna let it light all the tiles beforehand, Then we have to get the server itself to manage all that is happening with all of the tiles.

Furthermore, torque's netcode is not built for an MMO and thus will probably have to be ripped out and redon for a lot of it. That isn't nearly as easy as it will sound becuase then we have ot reimplement the new netcode into the engine.

Another thing is scalability. Some of this ties into the netcode, some of it doesn't. Either way torque servers are made to be just ONE server. There is no mechanism for tying them together at all and thus we will have to implement some type of system for that.

Furthermore, because we can't release the source this limits tools we can use. If we are rebuilding the network infrastructure it makes sense to use middleware such as ICE to help us out and allevaite the pain, but we can't because ICE is GPL unless we pay a certain licensing fee of around $2.5k.

[Hanayo]

If you guys really want to 'rewrite' wish i would choose Nel (or Irrlicht). Both are powerfull and well documented.

[Blacksmile]

Con:
- Not sure if the engine can already handle a totally seamless world. (Does Ryzom have a seamless world?)

I can remeber , that there were zones, but i think they were really huge. Cities were part of the world map and not extra zones as far as i remember. So there must have been some dynamic loading code. The only time, when you had to reload was, when you entered a cave network or a new continent. I think this could be seamless enough for us, and if it was not, we could try to extend this part of the engine.