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.

[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.

[SiDima]

I don't think seamless world is really the top priority. Because WISh was seamless it took up a huge amount of resources, only monster machines could have it set on "full".

[dezwo]

Actually, the only extra load a seamless world will put on a client - when done well - is that ot preloading terrain tiles or regions or whatever you want to call them.

The performance hit on full details in the original Wish was mainly caused by 6x Antialiasing and parts of the SpeedTree scenery (mainly high density, high visibility grass).

Later,

dezwo

[Cathbad]

I think we can use zoned world for underground dungeons or cities, when the only connection to the world is a gate. If there is a time lag at a gate, or if time seems to flow differently underground, it can be part of RP (I think of the legend of Bran).

[Corky]

Researched all of the options, Nel appears to be the best for creating what we want.

[Valkyrie]

It is not an engine per se but for physics and free for non-commercial stuff:
http://www.novodex.com/downloads.html
Any useful?

[dezwo]

It is not an engine per se but for physics and free for non-commercial stuff:
http://www.novodex.com/downloads.html
Any useful?

The demo on that site is based on the "Open Dynamics Framework", which is already on our list of possible physics engines. Thanks anyway for pointing it out :)

Later,

dezwo

[Valkyrie]

http://www.cegui.org.uk/modules/news/ a free GUI api

http://www.rakkarsoft.com/ multiplattform free network api

(If I'm not helpful, please tell me, I have no tech background to judge that)

[KallDrexx]

Actually we already have that gui api under consideration as al lthe engines we are looking at all have hooks to use that :)

The networking API may be worth a look, thanks!

[Pashta]

Boundless Adventures sounds like it is heading in the same direction as Wish was. There are no screenshots though to judge it, it seems to be all ideas.

[GageEndal]

I would just like to put in a vote that I would like to have the outer world seamless except for major cities and dungeons. Don't have anything really be spawned neer the lines and make sure there is a no-combat marker for the first bit of area there. That lost EQ a lot of players, one of which is speaking now.

I think this is one of the major reasons the Wish went down, their server had the power and the ability, it just cost too much to maintain.

[kwesi]

http://xeonxstudios.com/?url=RealmForge

seems to have potential though it is a c# only framwork. it is crossplatform

[Sirholmes]

We want a seamless environment. So if the other features are great and i think they are. i like NeL

[Lasastard]

I was just wondering...reading the contents of the free-NeL Distribution compared to the advanced packages of NeL - do we have the know-how to develop all these tools missing in the basic package all on our selves? Patch System, Client Application and so on?

[Blacksmile]

Lasastard... well the NeL at least would give us the basic framework to do that, i think we didnt need to implement everything the NeL gives us a basis for (or implements in it's advanced packages). But if we wanted to implement a Patch system and so on it would help us greatly to have the basics that the free-NeL Distribution gives us.
From the package overview i have seen so far it seems to cover a huge variety of aspects already. And the code of NeL i have looked into so far seemed to be quite understandable and SoR provides an example, that the NeL is in fact able to serve as a basis for a large scale MMORPG...
The only downside i see on the NeL is the lack of documentation as far as i coudl experience this.

[blanko]

I could be wrong but the main feature in Wish that i'm sure everyone wants to recreate is Live Content. To make sure Live Content is in, we would definitely need to have the tools for Story GMs to run live content. And I don't think anyone released code that has anything to do with this for free yet. So I think it is best if the framework we are choosing facilitates easy (means good documentation and support etc) ways to implement these new features.

So far the most promising one in that respect is either Irrlicht or NeL imho.

[Dwilf]

It should not mater what engine you use it will have a server and clients. All you need to do to enable Live Content is develop two types of client, one for players and one for GMs where the main diffrence will be the functions available and possibly the UI so that GMs can easily access the extra stuff they can do.