Developers Corner

In an MMORPG the developer needs to decide what the minimum requirements for their game will be. What graphics card will be the bare requirment? And other questions like that, but since technology is being researched much more often, and growing faster by the minute, what would be a good set of minimum requirements for an MMORPG now, if it takes the developer years to creat it?

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Originally posted by Jakk2

In an MMORPG the developer needs to decide what the minimum requirements for their game will be. What graphics card will be the bare requirment? And other questions like that, but since technology is being researched much more often, and growing faster by the minute, what would be a good set of minimum requirements for an MMORPG now, if it takes the developer years to creat it?

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The minimum requirements for any game, whether single player or online depend completely on the resources used during the game's development. For example, if you were developing an MMO with an engine similar to the one Origin used with UO, then your requirements would be that much lower than that of someone developing a game with the graphics of EQ2.

What I'm trying to say is the 'bare requirements' depend on what you are going to use in your engine.

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Originally posted by Jakk2
In an MMORPG the developer needs to decide what the minimum requirements for their game will be. What graphics card will be the bare requirment? And other questions like that, but since technology is being researched much more often, and growing faster by the minute, what would be a good set of minimum requirements for an MMORPG now, if it takes the developer years to creat it?

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yes... no offense... but if you cannot answer this question on your knowledge alone, then no one can.

Different programs use different amounts of memory, require different graphics cards for 3d acceleration, whatever. You cannot say "well every game should have these minimum requirements... thats just plain stupidity.

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Originally posted by Jakk2
In an MMORPG the developer needs to decide what the minimum requirements for their game will be. What graphics card will be the bare requirment? And other questions like that, but since technology is being researched much more often, and growing faster by the minute, what would be a good set of minimum requirements for an MMORPG now, if it takes the developer years to creat it?

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Best way to do it is make you game then test it on the crappist machine you can find. If it works you know your system specs. If not find a better machine, rinse and repeat.

I really cant understand those answers. If your game will be released in a few years the minimum requirements should be todays cutting edge systems ofcourse ... atleast if you want to create a state-of-the-art game.

Ragosch

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Originally posted by Ragosch
I really cant understand those answers. If your game will be released in a few years the minimum requirements should be todays cutting edge systems ofcourse ... atleast if you want to create a state-of-the-art game.
Ragosch

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if you cant understand those answers then you have no business developing video games. If you dont know how a computer works, what RAM is for, why you need a video card with lots of memory, give up now.

Variables take up RAM, the more you have, the more RAM you use. When working with 3d models, every face takes up RAM. The more detailed your models, the more faces they have, the more RAM they take. Your textures take up RAM. The more detailed the textures, the more RAM you need. Then, each one of these variables in RAM needs to be processed every cycle the game takes (Ever heard of Frames Per Second?). Every cycle the game makes is called a frame, every frame needs to be processed anywhere from 60 (low end) to 120+ frames per second (depending on system speed and screen refresh rate limits).

So basically, you want the game to run around 60 FPS, minimum. Meaning, a system needs to be able to run every sequence 60 times per second. Your processor speed tells you how many processes it can complete per second. Theres where you get your processor requirements from.

Understand? This is how you figure out your game requirements. Think about this, and youll find it out. If you didnt understand this, once again, give up now. Thanks

Before you post, theanimedude, please read and think first. Your answer has nothing to do with what I have posted ... I simply stated that you should take todays cutting edge technology as minimum requirements for games which will be released in about 3-5 years from now ... simply because at that time todays cutting edge technology will be a crappy systems then.

Ragosch

Btw:

Your requirement of 60 fps minimum is much too high for todays systems if you want highly detailed scenes. Assuming a maximum of about 10 million triangles per second a scene could have at most 167,000 triangles which is not a very detailed scene if you allow about 70,000 to 100,000 triangle for terrain and nature (plants, trees, animals, rivers, lakes, oceans, weather) in an outdoor scene.

We limit our frame rate to the area between 25 and 50 fps in average allowing scenes of 200,000 to 400,000 triangles per scene with detailed terrain and nature in addition to our hightly detailed game objects and avatars. This is not too low assuming that the european TV standard works at only 25 fps.

no offense, but thats a really low framerate to aim for, no matter what you are looking at.

If oblivion can run at 80fps on a middle-of-the-line system, then you must be aiming really high with your standards.

And frankly, I dont see anything wrong with what I said. I think that is what should be aimed for in todays world. Just because you aim for unreasonable goals doesnt mean the rest of the world does

It is a difference if you run a single-user program like Oblivion or a multi-user program like an online game. I do not want my application to take 100% CPU time because I think of my own behavior here. I have some other software running in the background and do not want it to be interrupted just because of an online game running in the foreground.

That is bascially why we limit the performance to 50 fps and raise detail if it would run much faster resp. drop detail if the performance would drop below 25 fps otherwise. So instead of running at 100 fps with about 100,000 triangles per scene we run at 50 fps with around 200,000 triangles per scene with detail enhancement and let very high detailed scenes go up to 400,000 triangles before we limit detail in order to provide atleast 25 fps.

So you see we use better performance to enhance detail and produce better looking images instead of repeating the same low detailed images more often. Anyway, this isnt fixed, the user can choose what level of detail he wants and which degree of on-the-fly detail generation he likes.

Ragosch