Back to Unity

[xcalpro]

About a year ago myself and a few others were looking into creating an "MMORPG" and considered using Unity(I know, another one with delusions of grandeur). I knew it was possible as 3D Buzz was doing a whole training course on it. I read up on what 3D Buzz was using on the back end and discovered they were using Photon and Raven DB. I looked into both and was able to get both working. As it turned out, Unity is not the best engine for MMORPGs. It would be like building a house without powertools. It can be done, but why put yourself through the unnecessary pain.

Anyway, along came HeroEngine and it seemed to be the answer to our prayers. So, being the most tech-minded of the team, I learned all there was to HSL and the inner workings of HeroEngine. It seemed the perfect engine as Star Wars: KotoR was built using it and our game would be Sci-Fi also.
Well needless to say, HeroEngine is not an easy engine to learn and does things differently than most, but I was determined to figure out what I needed to get things working. As we approached a key design point we realized that HeroEngine would not be able to do something that was a key feature to our game. HeroEngine does not support Render to Texture in the way that Unity does. This kind of threw a wrench in our plans and it was back to the drawing board.

I had always known that creating an MMORPG was a long shot, but didn't want to be the barer of bad news to the rest of the team. This bump in the road provided me an opportunity to smack some sense into the rest of the team. I tactfully brought up the idea of creating a casual game as a side project to raise funding while HeroEngine continues development and hopefully they will incorporate better space flight controls and render to texture features. This seemed like a good idea and the team was on board so the MMORPG idea was shelved. I began doing some research on browser games and came across Halls' tutorials on YouTube and that led me here.

I have since looked at various other engines for creating a simple game and we have now come full circle. It turns out that we have decided to go back to using Unity after all this. Since it has been about a year since I used Unity, I now have to relearn everything I did back then. Thankfully, we are just going to create a PBBG and not an MMORPG.

So after all this I feel confident that Unity is the right choice for what we intend to create. I have noticed that there hasn't been much Unity discussion on this site lately and I would like to take an active role in collaborating with other Unity developers in hopes of exchanging ideas and help those who are in similar situations.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

[OldRod]

The 3DBuzz MMO class looked awesome and started out strong... it even got me to sign up for a Member Sponsorship so I could get in on it. Then it's pretty much fizzled out.

I keep thinking I'll return to Unity again, but then I get to tinkering with PHP/MySQL again and get sidetracked

Good luck with the project!!

[SpiritWebb]

My team and I use Unity, and hopefully will be upgradding to Unity Pro soon. I love it. And it can do MMORPG's as long as its done right. One game still in Beta is Family Guy Online, which was done with Unity. Its also really good if you want to do an older style multiplayer game over lan and with that, you can use Unity's built in Networking tools to achieve that.

I look forward to your Unity progression!

[Jackolantern]

If I was going to do any kind of 3D game development, Unity would be my first choice sure. I can't think of any other engines with indie-friendly pricing that AAA studios routinely use as well.

I had never heard of that 3D Buzz MMORPG tutorial so I looked it up. I am not a subscriber, so I could not actually look at them, but judging by the descriptions and video titles, I can definitely see how it seemed to "fizzle out". Was the last chapter really dedicated to creating a programming language parser? Really lol? Why would someone waste their time with that? The sum total of the series looked very far from being even a simple MMORPG platform. I could be wrong, as I have not watched them obviously, and probably won't due to their system where you cannot watch all the video series in one month's subscription. It had some promise, though.

[xcalpro]

Yeah I had high hopes for the 3D Buzz series as their other tutorials are well done. I never subscribed for the MMORPG series, but from some of the images, I was not impressed. I was glad that they introduced me to Photon as it appears to be the best way to network MMOs with Unity. As for Raven DB, it is a JSON based DB and seems fairly easy to use, but I am more familiar with MYSQL and PHP so it's the direction I plan to go.

[OldRod]

Yeah, Photon looks like a pretty good option, but I wasn't that impressed by RavenDB either - just seemed too complicated compared to what I was used to. Still, I would have loved to see more done with it. They had an actual working MMO prototype apparently, that they did before deciding to do the class. Wish they'd just show how they did that instead of trying to do one from scratch

[Jackolantern]

NoSQL databases such as RavenDB, MongoDB and CouchDB really shine in situations where you cannot be guaranteed every entry will have the same number of columns, or where one entry may have a one-time column. This really works well for retail e-commerce websites where 1 item may have more or less dimensions of information than another. MMORPGs and other online games really don't fit into that paradigm, since pretty much every character is going to be largely like other characters (it would make the game systems a mess to allow players to have meaningful, dynamically-added stats). So at that point you are really jumping on a NoSQL database because they are trendy, and following trends in development without worthwhile benefits is never a good idea. That is how we got sites covered in BLINK and MARQUEE tags

[Cayle]

I don’t know how those other „NoSQL“ databases work and I’m not terribly familiar with JSON, outside of the context of “this is what results from Wolfram Alpha look like”, but I am familiar with object databases, such as the google app engine datastore and ZODB.

With an object database, you are basically doing object oriented design. Suppose my mmo has orcs and vampires. These two tropes have very, very different qualitative attributes. If I create an SQL table that could handle both, I’m looking at forty gazillion columns, many of which will be null on specific records. With an object database, I might create a mob class with attributes common to all mobs, then undead and humanoid subclasses with attributes specific to generic humanoid and undead. Then, I could further subclass these for orcs and vampires. I never have to worry about normalizing anything, or bothering with bridge tables, or long chains of joins killing my performance.

There is no one type of DB is better than the other. Whether you choose to go relational or object should depend on your game design, how complex your object are and how much variation there is from object to object.

[Jackolantern]

I could be wrong because I haven't used it too in-depth, but I don't think JSON-based databases such as MongoDB support inheritance. That sounds like it could be quite different from the one you describe. I am sure they both have their solid use-cases

[OldRod]

The guys at 3DBuzz were really sold on RavenDB in terms of using it for their MMO, but from what little I saw of it, I just couldn't see why. I keep meaning to dive into it, but there's so many other things to look at I just haven't had time