RPG MP Project

Hello again!

Last sunday I startet making a new MP system.
This time I want to make a plain RPG System close to the old Ultima Online System.

I want to implement the following features:
- Movement
- Names
- Textbased speech
- Simple meele combat
- Simple trading

Optional stuff:
- Login into an character/ accoutn
- Going into houses

Just a few minutes ago I finished a movement system that's smoothed out better than the western shooter smoothing.
The smoothing can even be adjusted through defines.
But I still got some problems with the names, but that's maybe a problem of the entity strings. It seems that they soemtimes are sent to the wrong entity (waht shouldn't happen with send_skill() ).

However this shall be a plain version in the furture as the features above state so that everyone here can use it as a basis for own MP RPGs.
This time everything in the code will be in english, that means comments and function names.

But it may still take some time since I always have to publish it, start the server and one or two clients what really takes some time for testing...

That's what it looks like when I'm testing:
The numbers (2.1 and 0.5) are the time passed since the last update from the server in ticks. The rest may be not that interesting in a picture without motion.

very nice! keep it up shore, we need more mulitplayerprojects iam looking forward to any news regarding this. good luck!

Hey Shorevietam,

How did you do those tests with running 3dgs more than once on one pc? Looks pretty interesting..

Cheers

@PHeMoX It's just to start multiple versions. I used to publish one and use that one as the client, while I used the IDE to produce the server.

Nice to see someone working on MP!

To run it multiple times I publish it and start the server and clients by batch files.

IMPORTANT!!!
Do NEVER EVER mix up published and development versions they are not compartible and you'll not know what happens in game!!!


I just finished the movement code (which is quite good I think), a few days ago I made a meele attack system (no stats used yet, only attack recognition) and a few hours ago I made the name and message system.

Thus I could now implement something like status values (strength, dexterity ect.) and maybe a simple level up system or changing weapons with extra weapon models or stuff like that.
If you have a specific "request" on what's important just tell me.

So that's what it looks like so far (I think I'll upload a first version soon):

GRATE!
I LOVE... no no… I LOOOVE ULTIMA ONLINE! The best MMORPG so far... ^^
If you need any help i would be glad to help... Maybe i am not that skilled in all areas but i would be glad to help in some way^^ and design items and so on...
I am finishing school soon so i would be able to have lots of free time
I have promised one more to help with modelling and so on... nut i would not be a problem at all ...
Just so you know ^^... and KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! I LOVE THE LOOK OF THIS!

(I have a brother that know a little 3D to and still plays UO… He would be glad to be able to do something to a project like this…)

but I don’t know if you are planning on making a whole game or not.. but would be fun any way


(Do I sound desperate? )

question, as it looks all great, how does a game handle with a huuuuge level, would it update every position of players around, or just players that are nearby ?

I've been strangled with this too while i was making an MMO in Flash..
though how i solved it, i parted everything up in areas, which then are stored in a variable, and only loads the stats of people in the same area, maybe you could do this the same with an invisible block, and use c_content ?

just a suggestion, offcourse this would involve a lot of them setups, but if it speeds up the game

regards,

It is not possible to send skills only to specific players.
If it was faster depends on the engine and I don't know how it works.

If it sends like:
Datapackage: Adrs1, Adrs2, Adrs3...

It was faster than sending everyone specific data.

However lateron I plan to implement the dragonrise sector system so that nearly every level object is a local entity.

To save eprformance for the poor little computers only players/ npcs in a specific range will do anything even if they (of course) recieve the data from the server.


I don't really plan making (another) big project.
I just wanted to make a working UO-like MP sys with GS once..
And since there are a lot of people around here that always wanted to make an MMO game I thought I could make one with the basics so that a lot of different games could be made out of it.

So I try to concentrate on the techincal parts and won't implement a complex game system, that's up to the developers which use it later.
However I think I got I quite well movement this time, even with only 4 updates per second I got smooth movements and player rotations.
As in UO you can type emotes like ": laughts" as seen above, but I got some problems with the name handling at the moment.
When player log out and others in again the names aren't updated by some strange unknown cosmic reason..


One question on houses:
Would you like that houses can be entered direct like in ultima online, or that houses have an seperated interior like in Ragnarök online for example?

Edit:
If you think I should have some specific items or sprites (for effects) in it you can make some of course Gafgar.
But I think I should do the coding part by my self!

machste des als open source ? wäre hammer ^^ sowas braucht man einfach immer

Jup so wie der Western shooter, nur dass es wesentlich weiter entwickelt ist.

well ^^ i love to make sprites and 2d art to ^^


The house thing.. It would be fun to see the house inside though a window or look out trough a window... but it would be lees items for the network to handle and easier to script if the inside was in a separate “world”...
I would love to have it al in one world but can get pretty hard? >.<...

are you going to have some example skills and example items and a example house to by and use before you give away the system?

That's true, houses as "seperate worlds" are easier and save performance in the "normal world".

If you have a small house you could show or send it to me? (otherwise I'd take one of Dragonrise's houses)

I've played and old demo it was really cool , and good graphics.

Your character models looks very good.
The good thing with that style of game : caus of distant camera ,
you don't need to bring as incredible amount of detail as for example
Oblivion characters on textures and models , so it saves lot fo time
to do other things and concentrate on gameplay, levels : )


What have happened to vain RPG ? it was also very good , that's sad
caus it had all necessary things and running: dialog, combat, customization
wearing etc ... ?

I hope to see a future demo of a complete level.
I'm sure you can make something commercial , even if not quality of Never winter nights 2 , with your own system , originality in levels etc ...
and story , atmosphear it would make the difference

I have begun a tile 3D system on 3DGS like in Dungeon siege game,
only near tiles are displayed with their objects like trees, grass etc ...
It's the way to go to create very quickly levels.

I always found your game very cool and good.
Keep improving, growing it up.

Hmh... well.. a house like them in UO would not be that hard.. I can maybe make one now ^^... i suppose a small house would be best to begin with?

Yes something like that ^^


I just got some string problems solved and thought I could come up with a first trial version.

There is still missing some redundancy data transfer blocking when values have not changed but that'll follow.


So what can be done yet?
- Walking around by right-clicking, the distance of the coursor to the plyer defiens the speed (quite smooth I think)
- attacking the enemy by double clicking him and walking into attack range (he won't die yet)
- talking by typing messages after pressing enter
- emoting by starting your speech with ": " (double point + space)
- logging in/ out and giving in your character name
- stats panel by double clicking your character (stats are just set to default values yet and have no further use)
- Code prepared for yet 10 players, can be expaned but since I only got comemrcial even 10 is more than I can support, that's why I included the WMP file of the level, so if someone with a prof version wants to compile it for more players....

MMORPG.exe - selfextracting WinRar archive (1.7 MB)

Yesterday I wanted to test it with a friend and we couldn't connect to each other, I don't know why, no server could be found...

OMFG that is just great ^^
maybe you didn't forwarded a port so your router or firewall blocked it?

alright, i set up a dedicated server to test

just add "-ip eddis-wurstbude.ath.cx" to the "connect to session.bat" and your in ^^

RPG.exe -black -cl -tcp -ip eddis-wurstbude.ath.cx

server is up 24/7

now somebody compile this with the pro vers and we can have a stress test



looking forward for the next version of your project

ive connected it is awsome

Nice. It works fine for me. Keep it up.

You could avoid double clicking to attack a monster ?
why not just a click : if the ray collision hit a monster than your character
would attack it,
and if you would click elsewhere your character would go to the clicked place.

And why not , a let your character continue fighting automatically once you have
clicked on a monster.

Another idea for later :
You could also copy some mmorpg interfaces and have menu icons for special powers that would replenish as time pass

very nice work! i tested it this morning with eigen and another guy from the forum.

some times it lags like hell for me. maybe this is because of the server from havoc?

i also noticed some animation problems when the character moves up the stairs. also when another player attacks the skelleton the numbers are not relative to the skelleton they fly wild around the screen if you move.

i think if i remember right i had constant up and download around 1kb average.

when you ask what you should implent too i would say a simple inventory, skill and cast/ability system would round things up.

great work keep it up! i hope this gets more ppl over to the mulitplayer forum

Hehey wait for me guys!

@TheExpert
As said before it's a close to UO system.
If you want a single click just do it then, this is not up to me.
If you want the left mouse button for walking just replace mouse_right with mouse_left in the player function, just as you like.
And in fact the character already does continue fighting, even if you walk away he'll recognize the last attacked enemy and continue attacking when he's back in attack range.

But maybe some kind of special attack/ spell should be in there so that the basics are predone, right.


@ulf
The animation problems at the stairs are described simple:
The actor has to pass the height distance end thus may get across the run-speed border and switch into run mode for a moment.
You can avoid this by making passable stairs with a flat collision block in it.

The damage numbers are just printed with draw text thus they have no connection to the object they originally come from.
That could be made, but you could as well create number-sprites (like I did in dragonrise) which may look much better than simple drawn text, and they'd be just around the position they should be at.



Oh and:

Thanks for hosting the game BoH_Havoc!

hehe np ^^

as for the lag: I have no lag at all when i play with a friend on the server. (and no, the server is not on my home pc, it's located in a large hall somewhere in germany (*gollum = on* i wont say the city...i don't want you to steal my precious root server...my treasure *gollum = off*) Counterstrike, serious sam, ventrilo etc. dedicated servers are all working without lag, so it has to be either a game issue, or you where downloading something and forgot about it?

I have a question though: are you going to use a database like mySQL, to store items,player attributes, player location when loggin out etc. or will you use a "3dgs integrated database"? Or will you use no db at all so everything is stored at runtime and will get lost when the server restarts?

[edit] huh? i just connected, and now there a 3 playeravatars standing around...all of them have a 0 at their legs. whats that supposed to mean?

ShoreVietam , this looks very good I like the fighting system , I havent played UO , I havent seen it too , but this looks very good keep working on that...btw , I couldnt open the stats panel , and I didnt saw 'on_key' or something in the scripts to open it , have you made that already or ?
I have a feeling that this MP project will become a game very soon

ulf
"i hope this gets more ppl over to the mulitplayer forum"
about me I could have been on the mp forum for a long time if someone wanned to help me understand how things work in mp , but because everybody has his own project and doesnt have the time to help me I'll be on singleplayer , and I think that this isnt only with me...but , I hope you're right , I dont see more than 1/2 posts per day in the mp forum it looks sad.

You're right, it is no issue of your server.

I think I just fixed this problem.

I know, those actors are from me... I think something crashed... oO'
If an object as a "0" above his head it means that this object has _no_ character value, thus if it is a player model it hasn't get the data from the server...

I won't use any database, a textfile based save/ load system is easy enough to make.



to open the stats panel you have to doulbe-click on your character within 5 ticks, there in no on_something to open it.
It looks not that interesting:

Good work ShoreVietam , we need more Multiplayer Projects
I also like your Wild West Multiplayer Game.


P.S. Weiter so und vergiss nicht alles gut zu kommentieren

I try to comment everything important but I already got the response that it is not good enough...

So if guys have any advice on how I could comment it better I try to do so.
I don't know who already took a look at the code but it seems to be hard to understand for some, so if you have any request about something to document and/ or how just tell me.

In the end I don't want that it is no use to anyone because it's too hard to understand.

You could write a step by step tutorial.

What do you mean by "step by step"?

This is a code skeleton for MP projects, thus others continue developing with it (maybe).
It is not like some kind of MP tutorial. :-/

I mean you could write a Document and explain a function (how it works and whether it's for client or server) and after this explain the next function and so on.

Sorry that i have been taking that much time... but my days are really full thanks to my school... but i have just the texturing left now... maybe you can use a temporary house and get this one little later? ^^

(402 triangles)

hehe very cool ... shoreVietam wennde 3dmodel oder sprites brauchst ich bin dein Mann ^^... will ja auch das des ne gute "template" wird da ich an sowas volltests interesse habe und schon lange sowas suche ^^aufjeden muss nen account/login tool her was den char auch speichert und maybe wie bei ragnarok so emote smilies wenn man z.B. /no1 oder so eintippt das dann einer mit daumen hoch (smilie) über den kopf schwebt kurz ^^...nur so ne kleine idee ^^ aber sehr geil immo scho^^

Hello

I got the next version right finished with the features that I wanted to implement until this morning.

Without talking too much, new features:

- Teleporting (entering houses for example)
- Step Sounds (should work now, fully local)
- Basic construct for design objects (smoke-object included)
- Stats transmission (server->players)
- Character save/ load (giving in the same name as before loads the previously created character)
- Movement lag fixed (I think)
- Server shutdown across the game network


That's how it looks like:


MMORPG.exe - selfextracting WinRar archive (~2.4 MB, wmp included)

If you were so kind to start the new version on your server BoH_Havoc?

The manual will come later, I think it only makes sense after a certain point when there is not so much left that can still change.

Lol, intresting that you had the same Idea as I did when the server will shutdown.


Anyway, nice to see your project coming up!

I swear I already did this days ago!!!

No it simply has to be, the players have to be noticed somehow.
If the game just quites they'll think "Huh!? WTF!?"

sweeeeeet candy

server has been updated.

btw: you should add some kind of version check in future releases... at the moment you can connect to the updated server with the old client and a "0-Player" is created


keep up the great work, im really looking forward to this

You could make the house transparent if the player is behind it.

Yes you're right about the version check.


Transparent houses can be done by anyone, as well as rotating the camera.
No multiplayer script is needed for both of them.
(nevertheless it is part of the wmb thus it had to be a map entity or model so that it was able to blend it out)

seeeehr geil
achja was ich noch geil fände is halt wenn man noch so seinen char bauen kann und halt nen pw system ^^ und maybe das man vielleicht am anfang fest legt ob distance waffen oder nahkampf waffen so als kleine job wahl ^^ nur so als idee ^^... aber sooonst echt das coolste hier ma wieder... respekt respekt...^^

Quote:

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Lol, intresting that you had the same Idea as I did when the server will shutdown.


Anyway, nice to see your project coming up!

---

A lot of games have this, but most of the time it's when they are going to change the map, but not when shutting down the server, that'll just freeze the server's activity and will continue to let the player walk around while local functions just go on ... Yep, a 'warning we are shutting down the server' message is a good thing to have. It get's pretty annoying pretty fast when you can't open doors anymore because the server is down and you need some time to figure it out ,

Cheers