Let's Code... an MMO

Shamus Young has been doing a vaguely similar series lately, which you can find at: <a href="http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=66" rel="nofollow">http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=66</a> Note that that page, unlike most blogs, is sorted earliest first, so I'm actually referring to "Project Hex" at the bottom. Though you may find the others interesting too. Interesting to compare and contrast the two fundamentally different approaches, which nevertheless have produced reasonably similar screenshots initially.

I was thinking of (one day) creating a "Let's build a" series in the following order:<p>1) Students learn about assembly, opcodes, etc. They write programs for an imaginary machine and only run them on paper for now.<p>2) Students write their own CPU emulator (in C) that can run and test the simple programs from 1.<p>3) Students write a compiler to a simple HLL which allows them to write more complex programs, and test against the emulator.<p>4) Students build the processor which was being emulated in HDL, and download it to FPGAs, testing outputs of the programs generated by their compiler against the emulator.<p>I think most schools already do something like this, but mine missed the compiler part.

This is a pretty damn cool article, but it's an odd choice of bounding spheres for frustum culling of octree nodes. Yes, it's cheaper in terms of CPU time than using the actual octree nodes (which are either cubes or boxes -- cubes in this case), but it's far less precise, meaning you're going to be 1) checking more nodes, due to recursing further when you have a false positive, and 2) most likely sending more data to the GPU than required, especially considering the density of his world.<p>Can anyone think up a reason why spherical bounding boxes would be beneficial here?

This is really cool! I can't wait to come back and give it a proper read through. Hurry on weekend :)

I've been looking into game programming in my spare time and I was wondering how to best implement the UI as a hobby project. I know there's Scaleform, <a href="http://www.scaleform.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scaleform.com/</a> , that's used for major games like Starcraft 2 but the price tag is way out of my league. Anyone have any suggestions?

As for an Octree-based implementation, <a href="http://sauerbraten.org/" rel="nofollow">http://sauerbraten.org/</a> comes to mind. Sauerbraten (aka Cube 2) also has a real time collaborative world editor.

Uh... I'm getting a 404 for this.

The article is called "Let's Code... an MMO" - but it is just a simple Octree tutorial.<p>I don't mean to be negative, like the guys friends that laughed at the project - but coding an MMO is several orders of magnitude more complex than putting together an Octree renderer.<p>Best of luck with it, but, so far, nothing to see here.

Honestly i don't believe that he will get to the point of having something playable. I watched too many projects like this fail and some succeed.<p>Those who succeeded all did NOT focus on their technology when talking about their project and seemed to focus more on getting it to a point where you could actually play something.<p>Of course you'd think that for a mmo a good technology base is key, but it isn't because if you're honest: Your mmo won't attract a that large crowd in such a speed that you won't have time to merge to something better and spend the money you've earned from your customers of the first hour on improving scalabililty.<p>Find something fun, get it done and then make it work would be my advice to any aspring independent gamedeveloper.

Where's the maths?

Oh piffle to all you nay-sayers. Look at what he's done! What fun! How great it is to zoom around a world entirely of your own creation! Who cares about the rest? Not me. Sure, I would have just used a 2D structure instead of a 3D one, and maybe experimented with hex maps instead of squares, but this guy now knows more about 3D oct-tree terrain rendering than I do, and anyone who has commented so far, I'll wager.<p>Creation is never to be sniffed at.

been checking some simple game development solutions in my spare time ... been looking into SlimDX, and then discovered pygame - <a href="http://www.pygame.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.pygame.org</a>, works on linux and windows, it's a Python based lib, now i dunno python but it was really easy to start crating nice stuff in no time.