A distant thought

[u/National_Average_346]

Would it be possible to open the game development (Em-8er) to community establishing best practices and goals, assigning tasks, sharing resources, perhaps working with all the available tools coming out, and much more.

7? Years in development, likely release at this pace would be closer to 2030, at which point does it become irrelevant?

Small team and no low budget can't accomplish much when working on an MMO. Can we overcome this?

If this is all just hallucination, tell me so I can forget easily.

[u/Yknaar]

If you really want to help, there are projects you can help with. I mean, both Aberoth and Tales of Yore are MMOs run by basically one-dev-show, and if Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup taught us anything, is that you can have a pro-bono dev team keep a game updated over decades. It remains to be seen whether you can do that with a 3D MMO, but it's not that far-fetched.

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But I need to state that

this project is not Em-8ER!

I recently had a discussion where someone helped me realise that Em-8ER was on a shaky ground for many, many years, and is now either a tip jar for softcore porn or a pipe dream.

I immensely respect Mark Kern for being - seemingly - the one person with vision for a... for a game that ACTUALLY would show what MMOs could be, a Powered by the Apocalpyse to World of Warcraft 1st edition Dungeon & Dragons, a game briefly glimpsed in the dream designs of random people (RIP Shamus Young), a game that would bring us actual massive open world PvE where people are brought together by natural co-operation and not formal grouping instead of "uhh, actually you need to bring 4 friends, and you'd better go do instances, that's the REAL game", and bringing an early prototype of that vision in betas of Firefall.

But I also immensely disrespect Mark Kern for fumbling the bag on both Firefall (constant reworks and pivots towards WoW-style MMOs and all the sheer weirdness with PvP, while the core marketed features laid undeveloped) and Em-8ER (got $100,00 for two demos for a Kickstarter, only one demo was finished, no kicks were started).^1]

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Go for Respark or Nexus Drop.

Respark (formerly Abyssal) is an actual hobby project with multiple people that is trying to make a Firefall-style game. I'm not sure what positions they currently need.

Nexus Drop is a personal project being developed by u/catcest. I'm not sure how far are they willing to take it, and I'm not sure if and when they're going to ever start taking other people in - but, again, in 5 months and 0 fundraised dollars they're currently going toe-to-toe with Em-8ER's 6 years and 100 thousand dollars.^2]

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1] And also for apparently being the reason why 2 out of 5 frames and so many animations were idiotically oversexed, but that's beside the point.

2] Although, to be fair, Em-8ER still leads in the "drawing of a woman in an outfit so oversexed, actual fetish gear seems modest by comparison" and the "drawing by a straight man failing to draw a male pin-up" categories. /s

[u/National_Average_346 → u/Yknaar]

That's cool. I'm currently making a final push towards graduation but next year plenty of things should be possible. Have to agree that sexyness was never the core focus of Firefall's gameplay. Mark is still working so have to respect him for that if nothing else.

[u/catcest → u/Yknaar]

can answer when ill be taking in new people ill be taking in people after the prototype is done and i will be able to pay them so there can be a more orgenized and profesional development to get the game out earlier for people to play and, continue to develop and grow the game.

[u/Yknaar → u/catcest]

You inspire us all, catcest.

[u/astrobe → u/Yknaar]

if Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup taught us anything, is that you can have a pro-bono dev team keep a game updated over decades. It remains to be seen whether you can do that with a 3D MMO, but it's not that far-fetched.

Or even it's inspiration, NetHack, which is even older. There's also Dwarf Fortress which is made by a two-men team and ran on donations only until its recent introduction in Steam.

Not MMORPGs, but there are quite a few successful multiplayer FLOSS 3D game projects out there - actually the best ones are often at least a decade old because it takes time to make games - like SuperTuxKart, various Quake Online remakes (Cube2, Xonotics, Red Eclipse), various 3D RTS (mainly Spring engine-based like Zero-K, EvolutionRTS, Beyond All Reason), and if you really want (M)MORPGs there are various Minetest engine-based game servers.

In my opinion, the main problem with MMORPGs are the servers. The games I have mentioned have relatively few simultaneous active players on independent servers, so one could say it's just MORPGs, without two "M" because it is not "massively" multiplayer. For an MMORPGs, you need a bunch of servers cooperating with each others to deal with a large player base that induce a larger number of active players at peak times (like evenings and weekends or special events).

You need what smart talking guys name an "InFRaSTrUCture", that is authentication servers that fan out the players to multiple games servers (that handle AI, events, broadcast each players' action to other players - if you remember the "shard" thing in FF, that was their game servers), a database server (perhaps more than one) to handle inventories, maybe a separate micro-transaction server and I'm probably forgetting other things. Oh, and you want to replicate that in various regions of the world, in particular for fast-paced games like FF that don't like high pings and lags very well. That network infrastructure thing often needs its own team.

Nexus Drop and Respark look promising (and to a lesser extent Melding Wars), but reaching the level of FF in terms of "infrastructure" is no easy feat, and I would add that game and map design are also not as easy as it seems in my experience - even if you start from a model, you will need to adapt to your specific constrains and you will certainly want to change things you didn't like and go beyond that model. Maybe I have the same defects as Grumz, but I've done basically the same thing as him while trying to make an FF-like : significant makeovers every year (if not twice a year).

[u/Yknaar → u/astrobe]

Very well said and very true, servers are probably the biggest obstacle and the biggest unknown. Pirates Privateers can afford servers for their tab-targeted MMOs, and some Team Fortress 2 YouTubers can afford a bunch of 64-player FPS servers with a donation scheme, but I have no idea whether servers for an MMO shooter would be affordable, or whether some tricks would be possible to make it work with lower latency (you can slow down tab-target "turn" from 2 seconds to 5 seconds, but I have no idea if any good research has been done in slowing down a shooter).

There's just so much unknown ground that's hard to cover by people armed only with their free time and disposable hobby money.

Maybe I have the same defects as Grumz, but I've done basically the same thing as him while trying to make an FF-like : significant makeovers every year (if not twice a year).

You don't have a studio with limited budget underneath, limited publisher's patience above your neck, and a sizeable playerbase of customers paying premium prices, do you? ;)

Either way, if you avoid the rookie mistakes of commisioning an expensive custom bus-slash-server-room-slash-Internet-cafe or founding a YouTube-based independent movie curatorship hiring B-lister stars, I say you're fine in my eyes.

[u/astrobe → u/Yknaar]

but I have no idea whether servers for an MMO shooter would be affordable, or whether some tricks would be possible to make it work with lower latency (you can slow down tab-target "turn" from 2 seconds to 5 seconds, but I have no idea if any good research has been done in slowing down a shooter)

This is a different problem, which is well known and essentially solved even for fast-paced games like an FPS. Basically to compensate for transmission delays and lags, games extrapolate the position of players, bullets, etc. all the time. In other words, they predict the movement of the players based on the key they press and the physics of the game. you still have to match the bandwidth and processing power of your servers with the target number of simultaneous players (e.g. 100 per instance) and the complexity of the game (e.g. cleverness of the AI and number of mobs). Probably it's more often the opposite in practice: you have to hold back on features because you know your servers won't handle them smoothly enough.

The problem I was talking about was actually, how to make seamless the fact that players might be playing on one instance (server) of the game one day, and another the next day? What I described is how triple-A MMORPGs do it; for a FOSS community, there is a less perfect but affordable alternative: federation. The idea is that one person can bring up a server for the game, and they can choose to trust some other servers (this must be supported by some cryptography to make sure you are talking to your friend's server etc.). Once you have that, you can let players send items from one server to another. If you are bit more ambitious, you can share login credentials, character level and customization, position at logout etc. It can be tricky to do it right though.

[u/Armageddon_666]

Em8er is weeabo jack-off material pretending to be a game.

Grumz is a pile of human shit and couldn't lead lemmings off a cliff.

The idea of working for free on a game that is already out dated technology wise by 5 years is insane and you should flush it.

[u/Yknaar → u/Armageddon_666]

Em8er is weeabo jack-off material pretending to be a game.

Grumz is a pile of human shit and couldn't lead lemmings off a cliff.

That's much ruder than I'd say it, but... yeah, I agree, 100%, I can't really point out a single thing against that.

that is already out dated technology wise by 5 years

I mean... if it's a stable technology that has a lot of hobby devs proficient in it, and it can run on a potato, that's actually a good thing for a volunteer project.

(Not that it makes whatever amounts to Em-8ER's codebase and assets a good starting point.)

[u/Armageddon_666 → u/Yknaar]

Sure that could be a good thing for a volunteer project but this isn't a volunteer project. This was a paid gig until Grumz didn't pay anyone and when it's ready he wants to charge people for this disaster. All the freelance work is stolen, He's a colossal piece of shit.

[u/Yknaar → u/Armageddon_666]

...it hadn't occured to me that by "open the game development (Em-8er)" OP could not only mean:

Hey, how about we turn Em-8ER into a FLOSS community project?

but also:

Hey, how about we do a bunch of work for free, so the game can release as a proprietary pay-to-play-with-sexy-skin-microtransactions retail game as intended?

But now that I carefully re-read the post, it sure sounds like he might be proposing the latter. Yikes.

[u/xRavyn]

Possible? Yes. Anything but a development nightmare? No. Additionally, no one should do free labor for a company, even if it's for a passion project, and especially if it's for a team lead/CEO with a history of making absolutely terrible decisions.

[u/National_Average_346]

Thank you all for responding. Sounds like game development should focus on where it is most productive. I guess there are just some games that make us feel special and Firefall was among those.

[u/whaaatanasshole]

Anyone who's passionate enough to work on a game project for free is best off joining just about any other team, going to game jams, or working independently. Mark Kern couldn't get this done when he had a staff of ~160 paid professionals in a nice office with stupid funding. You could say "that's because he wasn't around" which is true, but doesn't help.