its not possible to pull off an unlimited mmo no matter what, but a experienced veteran in mp programming could pull off the networking using a third party tool.

I beg to differ. I am using zoned terrains stitched together using third party tools. The way I do it is a bit complicated, but I have not had an issue yet, I spent about a year figuring this out. With my current map I have 64 zones. This is only for testing purposes for me to write my code and do my tests. As the players walk around the world the terrain far off loads (a hard coded limit I set). This is the only way to pull this off. I am certainly not saying that it takes 1 hour to cross my world at all, I am saying I have a highly detailed terrain that may take as of now around 5-6 minutes to cross by walking. This is small really, but I have allowed my code to expand later. This map I am making is only for testing.

By the way, my forum is down, I have been redoing my site a bit.

That 5-6 minutes... how far is that in QUANTS?
Do you have any ideas/solutions about what to do if you hit the edge of 3DGS space. (-1,000,000 ot + 1,000,000 quants)

What third-party tools do the stitching? And do you just mean vertex-stiching or something more?

PS Looking very impressive for a "1.5 man" team, and Im glad someone has tested Anet for MMORPG "type" networking.
Keep up the excellent work.

Quants, what a wonderful scale. The limit now on my map for the 5-6 minutes is about 8x8 zones, each zone consists of 100x100 faces with 50x50 quants, so max is 39,600 quants by 39,600 quants. I am using somewhat of a cheat for terrain. I am using PNP Terrain Creator. I make a huge map, then take 1 zone in the corner and render the height map in 256x256 pieces, so I get 64 pieces of height map. I export each of them with a "+1" scale as .bmp height files. I then open it up in MED and create the actual .HMP file. I do this will the 64 sectors and save them in a folder. Since I know my terrain is made up of 100X100 faces, and each face is 50X50 quants in MED, I know each terrain zone is 4950 quants. I then import all 64 sections using coding, fixing their Z axis so they line up perfectly. I have a function I use the up and down keys to lift it up or push it down easily. Since I know the X and Y axis pretty good, I can hard code that in by saying ZONE1.X = 0; ZONE2.X = 4950, and so on.

ANet is AWESOME, I highly recommend it, not a problem yet and it works flawlessly for what I am doing. Even testing it sending an array for the foilage in my world, it didn't skip any line in the array, it easily sent an array with 30,000 sectors within 1-2 seconds. Each player uses 0KBPS transfer when idle, but when they move they use less than 2KBPS.

When the player reaches the limits of the program....I will be adding another server for them to be loaded into. Using this along with a MySQL database it should not be any issue.

Here is an update of what I am working with on this project.

Here is my basic inventory system as of now, I still have a lot of work to do on it.


I have also coded in terraforming. The players are able to terraform the land even when connected with everyone else. I coded in the Server and Client portion of this and it works fantastic. I coded it in such a way to have the least amount of latency, or stress on the server so as far as I know, there have not been any bugs or glitches yet with our testing.


Last week I was able to code the Server/Client portion of my weather system. I have your basic rain, lightning bolts (which leave huge terraform marks to show its presence), floods, droughts, funnel clouds and snow.




The only thing I will have to work on later is dead reckoning for the movement, to make it look sexy to the eye.

I was able to upload a video this morning to YouTube if you were interested in seeing it. You can find it here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpk1Nq87BXo

The other part of setting up player accounts I also have. I made a php script to run on my Apache server where you can sign up a new player account. That account is then saved onto MySQL database, so when the player requests it at run time, it will find it.

looking very good!!

I miss shadows though...

Yea, I am having a problem with shadows. With regular models without alpha texture I have no problem, but I can't seem to get the trees to display shadows correctly on the terrain (hmp). I may of already solved my problem though as players are able to terraform and cut trees down and plant new ones, so baking shadows is out. The only shadow that worked looked terrible. If anyone has any ideas on this, please post your knowledge. Thanks.

Looks very promising!

You could try using the shadows of Slin or the shadow plugin of Chris3D.

I will certainly take a look at those, thanks!