koobas.hobune.stream
Can I make a MMORPG with unity?
Is it possible to make a mmorpg on the scale of star wars gallaxies or WoW and all the other big names with any of the unity engines. If so which ones would be capable and is there help out there for networking and server setup and such things, Thanks for the time.
James P
I don't think this question deserves downvoting. It may be a little nave, but still it will serve as a useful post for others who come searching with the same question.
It's been a recurrent topic every game development forum I've ever belonged to...
you came here and registered just to say that? Sorry, but I don't take advice from people who can't think of anything better to do with their time than that.
That's a rather subjective amount of bashing which Unity doesn't deserve, in my opinion. How do you define "real" game program$$anonymous$$g, anyway? Does it have to be all in C with fine-tuning in assembly code before your elitist behind is satisfied? Novel algorithms in C++ with pointer-magic and bitshifting going left and right? Tsk. Such drivel. You have to realize that what Unity does, which IS special, is to lower the entry-bar to game program$$anonymous$$g. It provides a layer of abstraction that wraps the university-level stuff in cotton so well, that thousands of hopeful young people become interested enough, and encouraged enough, to try out program$$anonymous$$g. If you're a beginner, it's way easier to understand what's going on in a 3D coordinate system when you can rotate and move your objects in an editor ins$$anonymous$$d of hitting your head against a brick wall every time you forget to wrap your transformations in calls to glPush$$anonymous$$atrix and glPop$$anonymous$$atrix, and your world gets completely fucked up because of it. What Unity does is bring graphics to the masses, and the more people try their luck with it, the more are going to come through, and get really good at program$$anonymous$$g in the end. Do you really think OpenGL, linker errors, a borland compiler and Emacs for an editor would accomplish that? If so, you're the idiot here. What you've got here is an application that makes thousands of young people learn about vector calculus ins$$anonymous$$d of just...well...trolling the internet. What are you complaining about? I think it's brilliant.
Short answer is yes. You can basically create whatever you like with Unity. If you have the manpower and motivation to put into such a project, Unity is surely capable of doing just that. Search the forum and you will find more details there. Check out http://www.fusionfall.com for an example of a successful large-scale project.
Some forum threads with more information:
What it seems to boil down to (according to opinions in the forum): Have a look at middleware for your server technology and Unity should suffice for the interface which your clients will use (see Forumlink 2). You should be able to go pretty far without touching any source code. People have pulled it off before and there's no reason that with the right attitude and resources, you or anybody else shouldn't be able to create a large-scale MMORPG with Unity.
There's also a tutorial on how to set up an MMO with SmartFoxServer on the Wiki. See this link
As for your question of "Unity engines", I suppose going for Unity Pro would make sense. Iphone deployment creates additional restraints which you could look up in the forums.
Here, this is also an interesting example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xf4I1ODpbQ
can you explene the mmo with smartfox server to me :( i dont understand it the problem is the exention pm me :)
don't have any experience with smartfox server. try asking a separate question or might also try the forums if its rather unspecific
SmartFox is a socket server.
Basically, its just a communications hub.
You cannot build "an $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$ORPG like SWTOR" with a SmartFox server or any of the other boxed socket server solutions.
You asked one key question-- which is scalability. Another key one is security. It is relatively easy to get scale without security (which is what most indie Unity projects that try for scale do.) It is also relatively easy to get security without scale. (Which is what the Unity "authoritative server" model provides.) What is hard, and what both of those games do, is get massive scale AND game security.
And there is no out of the box solution for that. I can point you at technologies, but you will have to build on top of them. And build a lot.
Discouraging reply: probably, but if you need to ask that, you likely don't have the resources to make anything of that scale; otherwise you would pull two or three guys from your team to evaluate the various engines and give you a conclusive breakdown of how they fare against your requirements.
(I guess this will be a chance for me to see what happens to my account when an answer gets downvoted into oblivion)
my first thought too - re$$anonymous$$ds me of those shops where "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" :-)
Yes it is very much possible to make your own MMORPG using unity, both as a Server(using the mono version of .NET and run the server in something that looks like a cmd on windows) and as a client...
If you would like to start to make your own MMORPG, then you shouldn't start the project as a single player project, because when you then are ready to go multiplayer then you will need to change almost all of your code, and when you do this, you will find new problems that you never seen before. Myrecomendations would be that if you start making an MMORPG and isn't very experienced with programming, use the builtin unitys networking system, especially the RPC calls and then keeping the game to a LAN game, this way you learn how to think when programming a multiplayer game. However if you have a little programming knowledge, and you could use Smartfox for the server part. If you again on the other hand, does have more programming knowledge and like to jump down into what it's all really about the computer bytes, you could make your own Server on a TCP or UDP protocol.
Hope this clarify what all the others have said, otherwise here is a little summary of it:
Yes, it is very much possible to make an MMORPG using Unity Recommended technologies to work with based on your programming experience
Level Technologi -Beginner Use Unitys builtin network support especially RPC's -Intermediate Use SmartFoxServer,Photon or someother kind of Middleware -Expert You don't need this answer, you are already an expert, Program your own Server side, and use Unity for the client
Just keep in mind, WoW's initial art budget was something on the order of $50 million - spent mostly to create insanely optimized art that still looks great.
Not to mention, the hardest part of an MMO aside from building it is ensuring that people will play once you have built it - typically that is a result of great IP.
Warcraft and Star Wars are probably the best IP you could hope for in that regard.
Given the art assets and IP, I think the client technology is actually fairly unimportant in an MMO. With a $50 million dollar art budget, rolling your own client (or licensing the source to an existing one) isn't too bad. When WoW came out, it really wasn't particularly impressive looking from an engine perspective, just highly optimized (and if you ever visited Ironforge in WoW 1.0, you'll remember it wasn't even THAT optimized, either).
All that said, Unity is a great place to start (and when you get the IP and art sorted, I believe you can license the Unity source, if need be - and if you are building WoW, you will need it eventually). Long reply short, if I were building WoW without a $50 million art budget, I'd definitely use Unity.
For networking, it will be .NET sockets, and server of your choice, or creation.
For license, it will be Unity Pro, or iPhone Advanced, specifically for plug-in support - and further down the development road toward WoW, a source license.
using a MMO middleware is the best solution for creating an MMORPG game but those engine's have high prices. if you want to create an MMO. you need to choose a server technology. (mono programming [.net], photon, netdog). you don't have automatic weather system or any other MMO special features. there is a good avatar customization example in example projects of unity. you have database connectivity and XML and .net sockets and any basic feature that you need. you can download your world part by part and load them without intrupting the game. i think unity is the best engine for creating MMO clients in engines in this class. one of the other engines has built in VOIP support and a better server side technology but they don't have nvidia's physx and some of other features that unity has.
