Hey smarty pants! That's why I said it's a step in the right direction. I don't think anyone assumes the editor can give you drag-n-drop MMO's/FPS's that can compete with WoW or CS respectively. And if anyone does, give me their address and I'm going to order 100,000,000 pizzas to them.
The editor isn't drag and drop though. That's just it: it's not DESIGNED to make those things. It's designed to be flexible, but within the confines of a limited toolbase. No one CAN compare it to WoW; it's not a game engine like it's compared to. It's just an editor; engines are so much more complicated because there is so much more they can do. You don't have to worry about all of these things because you don't have a choice in the matter. The way it's distributed, the way assets are stored, security, networking, server software, shaders, none of this is taken into consideration; these can be as hard and complicated to deal with as the rest of the game is. Even the foundations, like the terrain, NPC programming, and the game programming itself is so extremely limited that the comparison is unfair. It might be significantly less complicated than engines might be to use (and even that can be argued; it's far from as simple as it could, or even should be), but you can't make a game doing something not allowed using the standard toolsets without extensive workarounds that usually don't work very well.
I've currently investing my spare time trying to make a game by playing with my knowledge of C# XNA and my knowledge of UDP/TCP and its been interesting experience :S so far i made a dummy game using udp that has 2 coms and they send the x,y of an image to each other and moves each others location. Quite fun and interesting. I could do with a bit more knowledge on UDP though :P but ye im sure you could make a MMO in XNA with UDP multicast. It wont be easy but if making network games was easy it wouldn't be worth it.
It's just an editor; engines are so much more complicated
Most of the time, editors are running the engine in real-time. When you edit a map in SC2, you actually run the engine AND edit the content of a file while the engine is running. It's even more obvious when editing a map in a 3D editor (Unreal, Half-Life, Farcry,...). WoW doesn't have a real-time editor as far as I know... I assume they use a completely different process, one that you can see very often in the video games industry (unfortunately, I might add):
Sometimes the editor interface is very limited and you barely have any preview of what you're doing, it's all about lines of code to add references, handling timelines and such, using only scripts. When you have to deal with this kind of level editor, you're glad the SC2 editor is so well-done, easy-to-use and so open to modding. It's a walk in the park, you don't have to directly edit lines of code everywhere and you have access to much more features than you need to (as a level builder, that is). If you want to edit more content from SC2 than what's already available in the actual editor, you'll probably be looking for the SDK. But it's completely another matter, you're not making maps anymore when you have to come to this degree of editing. You're actually modding the game, modifying the core itself, it's more about programming than level editing. Remember that the level editor is just, as the title says, a LEVEL editor. And as such, I think the SC2 editor is already way more advanced than it needs to be. You just need to know how to use all the tools efficiently.
Bumping this thread shamelessly. I just noticed APB Reloaded is now Free-to-play (available on Steam). This game is a MMOG in a urban environment and uses the Unreal Engine, as mentioned in . It could be interesting to give it a try and check how it's done thoughtfully. Hopefully you'll find more information while browsing the internet, maybe even contact the team to get answers from the horse's mouth.
It really doesn't let you do what you want to then, does it?
@Varine: Go
Hey smarty pants! That's why I said it's a step in the right direction. I don't think anyone assumes the editor can give you drag-n-drop MMO's/FPS's that can compete with WoW or CS respectively. And if anyone does, give me their address and I'm going to order 100,000,000 pizzas to them.
The editor isn't drag and drop though. That's just it: it's not DESIGNED to make those things. It's designed to be flexible, but within the confines of a limited toolbase. No one CAN compare it to WoW; it's not a game engine like it's compared to. It's just an editor; engines are so much more complicated because there is so much more they can do. You don't have to worry about all of these things because you don't have a choice in the matter. The way it's distributed, the way assets are stored, security, networking, server software, shaders, none of this is taken into consideration; these can be as hard and complicated to deal with as the rest of the game is. Even the foundations, like the terrain, NPC programming, and the game programming itself is so extremely limited that the comparison is unfair. It might be significantly less complicated than engines might be to use (and even that can be argued; it's far from as simple as it could, or even should be), but you can't make a game doing something not allowed using the standard toolsets without extensive workarounds that usually don't work very well.
I've currently investing my spare time trying to make a game by playing with my knowledge of C# XNA and my knowledge of UDP/TCP and its been interesting experience :S so far i made a dummy game using udp that has 2 coms and they send the x,y of an image to each other and moves each others location. Quite fun and interesting. I could do with a bit more knowledge on UDP though :P but ye im sure you could make a MMO in XNA with UDP multicast. It wont be easy but if making network games was easy it wouldn't be worth it.
Most of the time, editors are running the engine in real-time. When you edit a map in SC2, you actually run the engine AND edit the content of a file while the engine is running. It's even more obvious when editing a map in a 3D editor (Unreal, Half-Life, Farcry,...). WoW doesn't have a real-time editor as far as I know... I assume they use a completely different process, one that you can see very often in the video games industry (unfortunately, I might add):
Sometimes the editor interface is very limited and you barely have any preview of what you're doing, it's all about lines of code to add references, handling timelines and such, using only scripts. When you have to deal with this kind of level editor, you're glad the SC2 editor is so well-done, easy-to-use and so open to modding. It's a walk in the park, you don't have to directly edit lines of code everywhere and you have access to much more features than you need to (as a level builder, that is). If you want to edit more content from SC2 than what's already available in the actual editor, you'll probably be looking for the SDK. But it's completely another matter, you're not making maps anymore when you have to come to this degree of editing. You're actually modding the game, modifying the core itself, it's more about programming than level editing. Remember that the level editor is just, as the title says, a LEVEL editor. And as such, I think the SC2 editor is already way more advanced than it needs to be. You just need to know how to use all the tools efficiently.
So you kind of just reinforced what I said.
The truth is, you can write a server yourself. There are also "okay" open-source server engines for gaming.
You can download open source graphics engines with decent capability (see OGRE3D)
Voila, that's all you need to create an MMO.
Total cost? $0.
The real question is why, in god's name would you ever want to create an MMO?
Maybe take up a more rewarding hobby, like putting your dick in a blender.
@Mephs: Go
lol nice trolling i found it funny.
Cept it's true.
It also about triples the amount of time you're going to take to make your game.
Bumping this thread shamelessly. I just noticed APB Reloaded is now Free-to-play (available on Steam). This game is a MMOG in a urban environment and uses the Unreal Engine, as mentioned in . It could be interesting to give it a try and check how it's done thoughtfully. Hopefully you'll find more information while browsing the internet, maybe even contact the team to get answers from the horse's mouth.
Unban Mephs already, don't cry when people say it how it is and you don't like what you hear.
@Mephs: Go
It'll be cool when we have serverside-bank data... in a way that is almost giving us a method of server stuff...
Quote from DogmaiSEA:
Unban Mephs already, don't cry when people say it how it is and you don't like what you hear.
----
Except that's not how it is.
Mephs was banned for a post in another Thread...
@Taintedwisp: Go
What was he banned for? Took long enough imo.