How to make an MMO in UDK!

[CrystalCore]

This thread is here to answer every post on how to make an MMO in UDK. I intend this to answer the question once and for all, that way we dont need to see thread upon thread about this subject, as its causing quite a lot of hate on these forums, which should be a nice and helpful environment.

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Can i make a MMO in UDK?
--- The Short Answer ---

No, you can't. UDK only (officially) supports a maximum player number of 64 per server.

Can i make a MMO in UDK?
--- The Long Answer ---

Yes, if your willing to take on the following tasks, you can, in essence, create a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game with UDK.

1) Create a new server/client structure which supports more than 64 players per server, you'd be looking at allowing at least 2,000 players per server to be considered "Massive".

2) Develop an entire world inside the UnrealEditor. However the editor is not well designed for MMO development, features such as the terrain system are not well developed for the scale you'll need for an MMO.

3) Create a massive amount of content. Lets put this into persective. To match the character density of a game like Warhammer Online, you'll need around 50-100 non-playable character models per location, and those are just quest givers, they need dialogue, quests to give, and each one has its own material or set of materials, its own animations, and so on. Thats just non-playable characters, now think how much content a player needs to customise his character.

4) Money. You'll need a lot of money, not to pay your team. You'll find loads of people willing to spend hours making an MMO in their spare time. But you'll need a server from day 1, those are not cheap, and by the time you come to launch, your going to need 10+ servers at least, for a smooth launching of your finished game.

5) Time. MMO's take years to develop when working in teams of 100+ paid staff members. If you can get a team of 20 you'd be doing well for a non-paid team, so that should take you... 15 years? Good luck finding a team who will stick around long enough to release your game.

6) Billing. While this is probably one of the easier parts, your going to need to set up a company bank account, some form of online transaction system, billing support, and keep legally required information on a daily basis otherwise your going to be taken to court before you can hot potatoes!

7) Customer Service. If you've got this far, hats off to you! But now you need a large number of staff to support your customers in all of the bugs, game issues, complaints and other unhelpful drivel they will phone you for. This also costs money, your not going to be able to get a large support team without paying people, and you need this team before you release your game, so no profit shares!

As some have pointed out, this list could go on forever, i think i've made my point now. Please just make something small, fun and unique!

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Please dont take this thread the wrong way, this same trend happens on all of the game development websites. I'm simply trying to tell you that you'd be 1,000,000 times better off spending your time developing a game with 2-3 other people over a few months, something small and fun. Sell it if you wish, and then perhaps you might be a tiny little way onto becoming ready to tackle an MMO, if companies like Funcom are struggling with Age of Conan, you've not got much chance.

If you still persist on making an MMO with UDK, then good luck to you. I hope you find great fortune with your MMO, and you'll make yourself and Epic extremely rich.

[CrystalCore]

I would like to add. Perhaps if you would like to make an MMO with UDK, you should look at All Point's Bulletin. While you could still not achieve quite the same as they have, you could quite well pull off a 64 player per server online game, which would still allow for some great gameplay. However you'd be stuck with those 64 players, and as the game developer, you'd need a ton of servers to run the game. Something to think about though.

[ScribbleHEAD]

Hopefully this will finally put the last coffin nail to those answers - we all know people get excited and want to make their dream game, it happens every time a new SDK is released.

So please, MMO ideas are good - but totally unrealistic, this isn't a harsh fact to dissuade anyone, it's a FACT plain and simple.

[Brexer]

Hopefully this will finally put the last coffin nail to those answers - we all know people get excited and want to make their dream game, it happens every time a new SDK is released.

So please, MMO ideas are good - but totally unrealistic, this isn't a harsh fact to dissuade anyone, it's a FACT plain and simple.

Me and 4 more are making a MMO (though highly experienced in how to actually "archive" this).

You might call it unrealistic, but its not, noone says you have to recreate the intire planet to begin with.

It also depends how/what kind of mmo your making, noone says your making WoW, there is smaller games you build upon.

It does not have to be 10000000x10000000 sq mile to begin with you know, you dont have to have 100 of thousands of items and 50 classes, nor 2 million quests, what makes a MMO great is the gameplay, nothing else, dont kid yourself in good graphics and a million sq mile map is a good MMO, its not, if gameplay sucks you wont be able to hold your customers.

While yes, administrative it is TONS of work (webpage, support, billing, GM'ing... ect), though server lines comes cheap here (im even on a 60mbit fiber at home and it cost me like 75$ a month without limits at all).

Our cost will be server hardware when that time comes (also, requirements is depended on your game "software"), does not have to be cheap, also we need of course things like UPS, DB Backup drives, Firewall, ect.

If you then do a "pre release" sale, you have a fairly good idea of how many will actually play the game and buy hardware accordingly (and you already have a bit of founds in the pre launch sale aswell then).

It is NOT easy though, if you havent had any experience at all (game making, team work ect), you cannot do this, the stress alone will kill ya, dont make ANYTHING public until your sure you can manage it all, press, public, and what not, same time as making the game ect..

But, if you can handle it all, dont stop because people tell you its not possible, i can tell you, it is (though not always, as stated above)

[CrystalCore]

...

Brexer, i do hope you make an MMO. It would be great. But if i had a pound (or dollar xD) for every time i've seen a MMO thread on gamedev, moddb, udk forums and various other community websites, that post 4-5 work in progress images and then epic fail on their backsides, i would be richer than Bill Gates. Seriously i find it hard to believe that unless you either have a lot of money or a hugely talented team. You wont get very far with an MMO project. I think the only two i can think of that are indie developed MMOs are Planeshift and Minions of Mirth.

If you are really wanting to make an MMO, don't use UDK, your just adding even more issues to your development cycle. Use something thats already got a framework in place, like the Planeshift engine, or the Torque Game Engine. UDK is just not fine-tuned for MMO development.

[Brexer]

Brexer.....

We own Torque3D and more, and we are awere that UDK isnt "MMO" friendly (but same goes for Torque3D at this point), but we hope that should be run into something severe, that the Epic guys will help us get past it (maybe something that isnt working as intended), else we would just work around the problem (the biggest issue atm is the massive in the networking) .

Server base code, client base code (besides the TCPLink stuff) is ready, and its made for 2-3000 players pr server (WIP testing), we also did some preliminary tests in Esenthel (we need world streaming so T3D is a no go).

We didnt find any problem "yet", other then of course the usual problems other people are having wich is simply bugs

And its true, if someone ask "Can UDK make a MMO", then yes, it can, but they cant, if they really have to ask, and dont know out of experience, doubtful they can manage the task.

Since this is a huge task, we of course post NOTHING, no images, clips, anything (other then this), until we are at the point that
1) We know we are close and it will be 100% playable
2) We can handle the workload of the "now" added things like website management, press, statements, community ect ect.

Anything else will kill your developement time..

[ScribbleHEAD]

Well the pure definition of a massive multiplayer online game is a video game which is capable of hundreds or thousands of players at one time.
I'm obviously basing my judgement on the handfull of pure 3d MMORPG's that has ever been successful.

You might prove me utterly wrong, but the statistics are stacked against you....my comments, and well, smug critique isn't aimed at being personal or anything, but people have to understand that an MMO is a gigantic undertaking.

[musilowski]

Create the RPG first, then consider adding the MMO part in it.

[Brexer]

Well the pure definition of a massive multiplayer online game is a video game which is capable of hundreds or thousands of players at one time.
I'm obviously basing my judgement on the handfull of pure 3d MMORPG's that has ever been successful.

You might prove me utterly wrong, but the statistics are stacked against you....my comments, and well, smug critique isn't aimed at being personal or anything, but people have to understand that an MMO is a gigantic undertaking.

Name a MMO that has 100.000 players online on same server i want to see it, in my 32 years, ive never seen it.

Even WoW only has around 3500-5000 players per server (last i heard anyways)

I, personly, consider (depending on mmo map size) a 500 player+ as massive.

Hell, even 1000 ppl living the same place is considered a small town you know

And its perfectly fine to critique, and it is even well placed (99 of 100 prolly dont make it), but there is still that one

[JasonG]

Great post. Indie MMOs are mostly a pipe dream. The two indie MMOs, mentioned in the posts above, were created by people who had shipped several game titles previously and were seasoned game devs with crazy, above average talent. I know this is the case for Minions of Mirth. I see alot of people site Minions of Mirth as justification for creating an MMO but it should be understood that Minions of Mirth is an exception to the rule, not the rule. It's usually not a good idea to base conditions for success on exceptions to the rule. The fact of the matter is that 99.999999% of indie MMOs fail outright.

The work mentioned in these posts probably represents 5% of what is required to actually build an MMO. Think about it. An indie developer asking about an MMO is about as laughable as a construction worker asking if it's possible to build the empire state building. The problem is that people see a game like WoW and don't understand the size and scope of what they're looking at.

When you play WoW just keep in mind that behind this game are 22,000 servers and a technical staff of 5,000 people. So the question: can a game engine make an MMO, is usually the wrong question. The right question is do you have the money, manpower, and ability to do it. If you have those three things the game engine issue is irrelevant.

All that said, I don't want to sound like a dream squisher. Nothing is impossible, however, it is wise to understand what you're up against before you dive in.

[immortius]

Name a MMO that has 100.000 players online on same server i want to see it, in my 32 years, ive never seen it.

He said hundreds or thousands. And he said game, not server.

[kyoryu]

Great post. Indie MMOs are mostly a pipe dream. The two indie MMOs, mentioned in the posts above, were created by people who had shipped several game titles previously and were seasoned game devs with crazy, above average talent. I know this is the case for Minions of Mirth. I see alot of people site Minions of Mirth as justification for creating an MMO but it should be understood that Minions of Mirth is an exception to the rule, not the rule. It's usually not a good idea to base conditions for success on exceptions to the rule. The fact of the matter is that 99.999999% of indie MMOs fail outright.

The work mentioned in these posts probably represents 5% of what is required to actually build an MMO. Think about it. An indie developer asking about an MMO is about as laughable as a construction worker asking if it's possible to build the empire state building. The problem is that people see a game like WoW and don't understand the size and scope of what they're looking at.

When you play WoW just keep in mind that behind this game are 22,000 servers and a technical staff of 5,000 people. So the question: can a game engine make an MMO, is usually the wrong question. The right question is do you have the money, manpower, and ability to do it. If you have those three things the game engine issue is irrelevant.

All that said, I don't want to sound like a dream squisher. Nothing is impossible, however, it is wise to understand what you're up against before you dive in.

Great post.

If a developer is truly capable of producing an MMO, then they are able to do so regardless of the existence of the UDK. The number of problems that must be solved to create an MMO are very large, often beyond the knowledge of even experienced, non-MMO game developers.

In other words, whether UDK can make an MMO or not is irrelevant. If you have to ask if you can, then it is most probable that you do not have the experience or knowledge to make an MMO, regardless of engine.

[GamerKnight]

Eve!!!

How about one of the most epic games ever EVE!!!!

1 Game, 1 Persistent World, not really one server but 1 fing mega cluster

hahahah

He said hundreds or thousands. And he said game, not server.

[elmuerte]

Can i make a MMO in UDK?
--- The Short Answer ---[/CENTER]
No, you can't. UDK only (officially) supports a maximum player number of 64 per server.

[...]

This post needs to be sticky'd in the forum.

[Brexer]

He said hundreds or thousands. And he said game, not server.

My bad, it was late i was so sure it said Hundreds "of" thousands but im sure you guessed that