Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

Originally posted by Gravarg

Technically it is easy, but just extremely time consuming.  Once you've learned programming languages, it's all about recalling input and output commands.

You sir, are wrong. Anyone who uses the word easy to describe video game development, has no clue what they are talking about.

Do not be part of the problem.

 

Everything is easy once you've learned it... sort of....

The rules for coding games is a little bit different from making spreadsheets and databases, but not by much. As time goes on, games become more and more data driven and less code driven. Not that you won't have to be fluent in several different scripting languages. Python and Lua are the big scripting language trends in indie developement right now.

Having said all that, you don't even need to try to make an MMO unless you've at least set up a MUD or Rogue server. In fact, I probably wouldn't recommend that someone makes the attempt until they've done at least three Quake 3 mods using ioquake or some other mutation of the quake 3 engine. At the very least you should have made a simple platform game or JRPG.

From personal experience, I was involved in a total conversion private server a few years back. Since the five of us involved in the project were unemployed at the time, we were able to get it running in about two weeks. Of course, we had to modify a shit ton of content, develop world maps and dungeons, write quests and I also had to track down bugs in the emulator then fix and recompile about a hundred dozen times. It wasn't "easy," but it also wasn't as impossible as some people around here make it out to be. Then again, we were running on one server with four instances (quad-core server). If it had been more than that then we would have need considerably longer and went through way more stress. And we were never short on stress during those two weeks.

You are still trying to use that word.

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Originally posted by Mrbloodworth
 
According to 99% of posters on this site. Just thought i would point out the observations that that 99%, have no clue how much effort and work goes into a production the size of a MMO.
My favorite line is where a poster acts as if some developer somewhere is trying to punish the player base, that one gets me every time. Where in the 9 levels of hell does that make sense? at all? I can guarantee every developer in the game industry, and the subgroup that is mmos wants people to enjoy their game.
Have some respect people.
 
(i make exceptions for games and development houses that have no respect for others in the industry)
 

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Unless you're SOE then you have fun punishing your player base and then denying it.

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

Originally posted by Gravarg

Technically it is easy, but just extremely time consuming.  Once you've learned programming languages, it's all about recalling input and output commands.

You sir, are wrong. Anyone who uses the word easy to describe video game development, has no clue what they are talking about.

Do not be part of the problem.

 

True, bad coding is easy, great coding requires expertise developed over many years.

Quake is an example of great coding for it's time. Graphic and network achievements that blew away what others were doing. WoW is another example of great coding.

Originally posted by Hashbrick

 

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Originally posted by Mrbloodworth
 
According to 99% of posters on this site. Just thought i would point out the observations that that 99%, have no clue how much effort and work goes into a production the size of a MMO.
My favorite line is where a poster acts as if some developer somewhere is trying to punish the player base, that one gets me every time. Where in the 9 levels of hell does that make sense? at all? I can guarantee every developer in the game industry, and the subgroup that is mmos wants people to enjoy their game.
Have some respect people.
 
(i make exceptions for games and development houses that have no respect for others in the industry)
 

---

 

Unless you're SOE then you have fun punishing your player base and then denying it.

Your one of those then a?

I'm not referring to some corporate entity, I'm talking about people, you know, the individuals that make the game(s). You do know people, not companies make the games right?

You will get commentary like this no matter what type of forum you go to. Anytime people are given a chance to express their opinions, they do. Whether or not you agree with them, they have the right to say it and you have the right to disagree with them. If you think what is done here is bad, go to a sports team message board. You have hundreds of idiots who think they would be the perfect general manager that could get their team 15 world series or super bowl titles. Gaming forums are not exclusive to people who think they know better than the experts

Interesting discussion. Just as a joke: I prefer to be in the client side.

I talk a lot about this topic with my brother, he says a lot It will be awesome to build a mmorpg but We always end up talking about how much problems and how difficult it would be. I think when you like programing, dreaming with making a mmorpg is some kind of, well, dream, you develop a game, you develop an "alive world" and people actually play and interact with each other in this world, this looks awesome as an idea and this is why, in my opinion, a lot of people talk about doing their own mmorpg.

I found this video about where to begin game development earlier today and thought it might be relevant to this discussion. I especially like the fact that the guy making this vid pulls no punches about the fact that making games requires years of commitment and practice....

Although some of us weren't commited so much as just bored and had nothing better to do with our time. Programming is a cheap hobby folks. And by "cheap" I mean free.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0B6Gbsu3N0&feature=related

If you want to program a game from scratch, go to Devmaster.

If you want to use a game engine, go to MMORPG Maker.

If you just want to bitch about how devs don't make good games, and talk about how cool your game would be, don't go anywhere, you're already in the right spot.

First of all, I agree with part of this.

It's high time the majority of the player base of all MMOs stops whining and screaming when something changes, doesn't work, gets nerfed, or whatever.  99% of the time, connection problems are on the user's end, or the fault of the service provider.  99% of the time the reason graphical glitches happen, it's because the user needs updated drivers, a better GPU, more RAM, whatever.

I agree with all that, wholeheartedly.

However...

When you go somewhere, be it college, tech school, whatever... and you get yourself EDUCATED in the field needed to be part of a TEAM working on an MMO... be it software engineering, graphic design, content developer.. whatever.. then that is your FIELD.  That is your area of expertise.  That means, that the ability for you to do your job should be mostly feasible.  And that holds even more true with MMOs, because they're like the All-star teams of Game Design.  There are alot of big names from past game design companies attached to many MMOs.

Making an MMO may not be easy for anybody here.  And it shouldn't be, unless you do it for a living.  Now I agree that the scale is massive, and it requires many things working in sync.  But that is no excuse for the level of FAILURE that some MMOs have experienced running (or limping I should say) out of the starting gate.  Bugs will happen.  Balance issues MUST be addressed, and it would be stupid to think that everything is going to work the first time.  But these are teams of experts and professionals, not a bunch of people from this forum.

I go to work everyday, and I am EXPECTED to handle, in a consistent and experienced manner, all matters that relate to the field of technology that I am educated in. 

Brain Surgery is also not easy.  But you don't see doctors posting in forums about how everybody should give them a break.  They are educated experts at what they do.  So they just do it.

With that being said, I'm proud to be one of the ones who, when something doesn't go my way in an MMO, I step back... maybe go play something else for a bit, maybe go take a walk, or not bother with the game for a little while, until that issue is addressed, or I'm told it won't be addressed. 

In either case, it's not my call, and I leave it in the hands of people who know far more about their product than I do, and I just live with it.  So yeah... good topic, it needed to be said by somebody.  

I'd say that a lot, but not all, of the coding is very easy compared to actually designing a good system to begin with.  Though, if one wanted to get technical, the design could be considered part of the coding process (though when you are coding something the design happens on a lot of different levels).

Punching code into a system is the easy part. QA-ing (that is short for quality assurance for our highschool armchair crowd) that code, is a whole other beast. A single extra space or a misread colon that should be a semi-colon, or a comma that is supposed to be a period, can really mess up the formulas in the code. Multiply possible errors like that, seeing the same code every day and only once in a great while having fresh eyes on it; that folks is why only the crem de la crem code mmos.

Great quest writing would require story telling skills reserved for the best authors. Then you have editors. Then you have the guys who type it up into the files that are executed by the code. Basically, when you buy an mmo, you are comparatively buying your neighborhood library. That folks, takes YEARS of experience, and not something someone who hasn't been writing for a number of years (and usually has a college background in writing) can do.

Then you have guys like myself. The graphics whores who slave away in our caves of madness to dream up concepts based on the quests, then model those concepts, then rig those concepts, then animate those concepts all for your viewing pleasure. Many times, by the time we have gotten a good leg in the lake, Autodesk comes and throws us a new curveball with expanded features (or recently the whole new program interface). This takes a special type of masochist willing to subject themselves to impossible ends to achieve the beauty you see before you. Usually the cg whores and the coders have given up the 6 months of their lives prior to release, where they don't even leave the studio until their baby is born.

Dont even get me started on the sound techs...

Who has it easy? The player. Ok, maybe the voice over actor too, but I digress...

Edit: I didn't even begin to mention the systems designers that tell the coders what and how each piece is supposed to link to each other in the programming, nor did I mention the other higher ups. Their cubes are bigger than mine, so I am chalking it up to jealous ommision .

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

Originally posted by Hashbrick

 

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Originally posted by Mrbloodworth
 
According to 99% of posters on this site. Just thought i would point out the observations that that 99%, have no clue how much effort and work goes into a production the size of a MMO.
My favorite line is where a poster acts as if some developer somewhere is trying to punish the player base, that one gets me every time. Where in the 9 levels of hell does that make sense? at all? I can guarantee every developer in the game industry, and the subgroup that is mmos wants people to enjoy their game.
Have some respect people.
 
(i make exceptions for games and development houses that have no respect for others in the industry)
 

---

 

Unless you're SOE then you have fun punishing your player base and then denying it.

 

Your one of those then a?

 

I'm not referring to some corporate entity, I'm talking about people, you know, the individuals that make the game(s). You do know people, not companies make the games right?

 

 

People make games, people make up a company, therefore companies make games. 

Originally posted by sanders01

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

Originally posted by Hashbrick

 

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Originally posted by Mrbloodworth
 
According to 99% of posters on this site. Just thought i would point out the observations that that 99%, have no clue how much effort and work goes into a production the size of a MMO.
My favorite line is where a poster acts as if some developer somewhere is trying to punish the player base, that one gets me every time. Where in the 9 levels of hell does that make sense? at all? I can guarantee every developer in the game industry, and the subgroup that is mmos wants people to enjoy their game.
Have some respect people.
 
(i make exceptions for games and development houses that have no respect for others in the industry)
 

---

 

Unless you're SOE then you have fun punishing your player base and then denying it.

 

Your one of those then a?

 

I'm not referring to some corporate entity, I'm talking about people, you know, the individuals that make the game(s). You do know people, not companies make the games right?

 

 

People make games, people make up a company, therefore companies make games. 

A company headed by actual people and not money grabbing bean counters is a rare commodity in any design industry.

I think that people generally only look at the results, but ignore the process. By looking at the end product and failing to see the labour going into its creation people tend to think that something is easier than it actually is. Hence all the people who think they can effortlessly become the next Brad McQuaid, the next Billy Beane, the next Martin Scorcese, whatever field it may be.

Originally posted by wl03br

I think that people generally only look at the results, but ignore the process. By looking at the end product and failing to see the labour going into its creation people tend to think that something is easier than it actually is. Hence all the people who think they can effortlessly become the next Brad McQuaid, the next Billy Beane, the next Martin Scorcese, whatever field it may be.

TBH, as consumers we only care about the results. The effort that the developer put into a product is really not our problem or concern.

Having said that.... Yeah, a lot of people seem to think that making games is more time consuming than difficult. This is really only a half-truth. If you're working with a ready-made engine and you're intimately aware of said engines limitations, then developement will be largely a function of time producing content. If you're making any code from scratch then how easy or hard the project is will depend largely on your programming experience and it can several years before someone is competent enough to code on the fly. I know comp sci PH Ds that can't do that.

The real problem is that total n00bs walk into game development wanting to make some shit like Gears of War "only better" and get scared away when they see how many lines of code it takes to make something as simple as space invaders. Those that stick around, ditch the unrealistic ambitions and focus on making smaller games that mess with gameplay concepts rather than graphical overkill and tired genre conventions. Of course, not every hobby game developer is Cactus either...

Ambition is good, but those that want to make games will make games. Those that want to talk shit will talk shit. And those of us that are bored will do both.

EDIT: For those of you that would like to dabble in making games, but have limited programing and modelling experience, you should run (don't walk) to the Game Studio web site and download Atari Lite-C and the 25 part tutorial file. I would recommend you use Blitz Plus while starting out, but Atari Lite-C is free and uses the A7 3D engine whereas Blitz Plus costs about $60 and only does 2D. If you don't have the patience to get through the Atari Lite-C tutorial, then you probably have no business making games on any level.

O.o

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

O.o

Yeah, Cactus has that effect on people....

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

Everything is easy once you've learned it... sort of....

The rules for coding games is a little bit different from making spreadsheets and databases, but not by much. As time goes on, games become more and more data driven and less code driven. Not that you won't have to be fluent in several different scripting languages. Python and Lua are the big scripting language trends in indie developement right now.

Having said all that, you don't even need to try to make an MMO unless you've at least set up a MUD or Rogue server. In fact, I probably wouldn't recommend that someone makes the attempt until they've done at least three Quake 3 mods using ioquake or some other mutation of the quake 3 engine. At the very least you should have made a simple platform game or JRPG.

From personal experience, I was involved in a total conversion private server a few years back. Since the five of us involved in the project were unemployed at the time, we were able to get it running in about two weeks. Of course, we had to modify a shit ton of content, develop world maps and dungeons, write quests and I also had to track down bugs in the emulator then fix and recompile about a hundred dozen times. It wasn't "easy," but it also wasn't as impossible as some people around here make it out to be. Then again, we were running on one server with four instances (quad-core server). If it had been more than that then we would have need considerably longer and went through way more stress. And we were never short on stress during those two weeks.

 

 

You made a mod. That's not making a game.

There is a huge differnece between making a mod for NWN, Dungeon Siege, Fallout 3, etc and actually making the game your mod is built on.

Game design is more than just learning a programming language. It includes creating a cohesive and fun game. It includes the development of a functional and user-friendly interface. It includes...

You know, I get the feeling no matter what I explain to you in this post, you'll still content that designing a game is still easy, so I'll just stop here.

"The rules for coding crappy games is a little bit different from making spreadsheets and databases, but not by much."

Fixed.

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

Everything is easy once you've learned it... sort of....

The rules for coding games is a little bit different from making spreadsheets and databases, but not by much. As time goes on, games become more and more data driven and less code driven. Not that you won't have to be fluent in several different scripting languages. Python and Lua are the big scripting language trends in indie developement right now.

Having said all that, you don't even need to try to make an MMO unless you've at least set up a MUD or Rogue server. In fact, I probably wouldn't recommend that someone makes the attempt until they've done at least three Quake 3 mods using ioquake or some other mutation of the quake 3 engine. At the very least you should have made a simple platform game or JRPG.

From personal experience, I was involved in a total conversion private server a few years back. Since the five of us involved in the project were unemployed at the time, we were able to get it running in about two weeks. Of course, we had to modify a shit ton of content, develop world maps and dungeons, write quests and I also had to track down bugs in the emulator then fix and recompile about a hundred dozen times. It wasn't "easy," but it also wasn't as impossible as some people around here make it out to be. Then again, we were running on one server with four instances (quad-core server). If it had been more than that then we would have need considerably longer and went through way more stress. And we were never short on stress during those two weeks.

 

 

 

You made a mod. That's not making a game.

There is a huge differnece between making a mod for NWN, Dungeon Siege, Fallout 3, etc and actually making the game your mod is built on.

Game design is more than just learning a programming language. It includes creating a cohesive and fun game. It includes the development of a functional and user-friendly interface. It includes...

You know, I get the feeling no matter what I explain to you in this post, you'll still content that designing a game is still easy, so I'll just stop here.

 

"The rules for coding crappy games is a little bit different from making spreadsheets and databases, but not by much."

Fixed.

Actually we were working UO. I didn't want to get involved because I knew what a thankless job running a MUD was so I really had no desire to be a part of this project for the long term. The only reason my friends approached me about this thing is because they didn't know how to code in a real programming language and the emulator was written in C. I help them get it running, I didn't say it was exactly the same as making a game from scratch.

Now that we have that little bit of business out of the way. Most commercial games aren't built from scratch. Most AAA titles run on engines that have been either been licensed or canabalized from other projects. In short, there isn't a whole hell of a lot of difference between making a total conversion mod and making game. The only limit is the versatility of the engine you're working with.

BTW, you need to read my posts in this thread again. I'm not saying that making games is easy. What I'm saying is that making games, even MMORPGs, is not as impossible as many people with no coding or development experience seem to believe that it is. The key to making anything, is confidence and persistence. I don't care if you're writing a poem, carving the world's largest still life in granite, making a independant film or even making a 200+ hour long epic RPG, if you believe that you can do it and are willing to stick the project out to the end, you will acomplish your goal. Maybe not entirely to your satisfaction... In fact, I doubt it will ever be to your satisfaction, but you WILL get it done. Even in failure, you've gone farther than those who give up before they even start.

Just remember this: Cave Story took Pixel five years to create. One guy did all of that. The graphics. The music. The level design. Everything. Pixel released the game as freeware and didn't get any money for the game untill it had been out for several years and Nintendo decided they wanted to sell it as WiiWare.

The moral of that story is that Pixel had a game that he wanted to make. He didn't care if he never got paid. He was dedicated enough to the project to spend five years of his spare time to making it. I'm pretty sure that he didn't give a damn about whether anyone else thought it was possible or not. Make games because you like making games and fuck the nay sayers and assholes that think every damn game has to be commercial to be of any value. You can't really know whether or not you can do something, unless you try.