MMO construction kits???

#1 Maybe:

www.heroengine.com/

#2 You can take a look at the Torque MMOKit:

http://www.mmoworkshop.com/trac/mom/phpbb

#3 Okay thanks guys. I didn't think the MMOKit was still around. I'll use that.

#4 I just wanted to comment about HeroEngine.
It's a good tool to make a fast prototype for Teams. They offer team only licenses and is not for the Indie.
You'd have to contact them to even get a price quote since they keep it secret until you contact them.

Speaking of secret, I don't appreciate an engine or OS that does everything for me.
The engine intices you to get into feature creep.

Lastly, their engine doesn't do anything that Torque cannot be made to do. This is the beauty of Torque.

My humble opinion is to stay with Torque and build on your copy of the engine.. this way you know exactly what your getting and if it breaks you'll also know where to fix it.

On the other hand if your wallet is too fat to fit in your pocket, HeroEngine is there to help slim it down for you.

#5 Yes, I just wrote to HeroEngine to find out what the pricing was like. Here's what I received (in short):

"A regional license for North America will be around $300,000 plus 7.5% royalty or $600,000 royalty free."

So, unless you have about half a million bucks laying around that you just can't seem to find a use for, this engine might not be the best choice for you. But, if you are anything like most of the people crawling these forums, cash is at a premium and careful choices must be made as to what it is spent on. :)

#6 When I spoke to a friend at work about making an MMO indie style he said don't bother because it would cost too much to host the servers. How would an indie overcome this problem? How does Minions Of Mirth and Crowns Of Power do it?

#7 If finding hosting that can handle the bandwidth actually becomes an issue, you have gone further than 99.99999% of all other indie/OSS/hobby MMO projects and surpassed hurdles far greater. If you can make it that far, that little hurdle should be easy to overcome.

#8 Well.. your price model should support operating costs. So, "it would cost too much to host the servers" is bad advise. Now if you are trying to produce an MMO that has no subscription fee, then you have to make sure enough copies will sell to support it. Guildwars supports this model with regular expansion packs.

As far as what engine to use for an MMO depends on your goals and budget. If you have more budget than time, them buying as much as you can makes more sense. If you have unlimited time or just want to learn, then moding out an engine like Torque to support your feature list makes more sense. Certainly there are exceptions...

On the note of the price of hero engine... that licensing price is just the beginning of the costs of developing an mmo. You still have considerable amounts of content that still need to be developed before you can even get into the area of worrying about post-launch operating costs.

Another thing to remember about large scale MMO's is that the new funding model started by, or at least fully utilized by, Blizzard is pushing development costs into the potential of subscription income. Where as previous MMO's covered their development and deployment costs up to launch time entirely on the software sales, newer MMO developers spend well beyond that initial software sales income on their product. This makes it harder and harder for new companies to move into the genre of flagship MMOs. At least at the finance level.

So with that in mind, I suspect the indie scene is where the next MMO revolution may very well occur rather than the rediculous development investments of the class A MMO market. I wouldn't be surprised that many big MMO projects could get put on hold are canceled all together considering the current financial times. Perhaps the coming years may be a perfect time for a small project to emerge...

#9 I agree with Brian Wilson and David Stocker.

Aim lower: you do not need World of Warcraft-grade servers to host a startup project. You can even separate your machines for your website community and your game to save on the impact on one machine -- you can get webhosting very cheap, it's specialized, and it decreases all of that traffic on your other server. (i.e. all of the search engine bots, the people just browsing for things to look at, and etc. will be put against your website, and the real customers will be put against the server that their subscription fee is (primarily) paying for.)

You can do alot with a little nowadays, also. Be sure to let your community know that you are always monitoring bandwidth and looking at complaints of lag in the game. Encourage people to complain when they start getting lag, and you will be able to see what your "prime time" is. It's not always 5:00pm - 7:00pm EST, that's more of a rule for huge communities where the laws of large numbers actually start making a difference. (The more people you have, the more you will see a migration of the prime time number towards that "getting off work" time.)

If your community likes your game and you are making a valid effort towards providing a less-lag environment while providing more content and fixing bugs, they will tolerate the lag and try to find less-laggy times to play until the problems get worked out.

So, in short, you can get by your first bit on small hardware that you know you will outgrow until you get to the point where you actually do outgrow it. Base your subscription fee on the next stage of hardware, and don't get caught up with the success blindness -- there's no need to go from $5.00 a month to $15.00 a month if your server power is not tripling. But, on the same note, don't raise it by a dollar or two every two months either. People will get the impression that the subscription will continue going up every couple of months, and they will start putting benchmarks on how long they will play "if this keeps up".

In closing, with each subscription hike, you should try to include a new patch with some new content when you can. There are people who will defend you in public if you are both increasing the server power (reducing lag) and increasing the game content (more fun) at the same time for a small increase in the subscription. It also helps you combine things into one subscription hike, rather than making two different increases for content and server power at different times.

#10 Awesome - thanks guys. I will start planning my kick-ass MMO then :) Well, I will go away and come up with some solid gameplay first me thinks :)

#11 www.theplanet.com/servers/

#12 "Lastly, their engine doesn't do anything that Torque cannot be made to do. This is the beauty of Torque."

You don't seem to understand what an engine is.

So, you're saying it would be better to get Torque and then program everything HE does, instead of getting HE?

Uh... The whole point of getting an MMO framework engine is because people don't WANT to have to program all of that, they want to actually start working...

#13 It would all depend on what your budget capabilities are, of course. If you have deep pockets, HE is of course more attractive than Torque in many ways. It looks alot like the Aurora toolset to me, and I loved designing in Neverwinter Nights, but if I had that kind of funding, I would not have to worry about learning C++ beyond understanding what it is and what programmers are capable of doing.

Thus, it's the same argument: if you have the money, you could go with a more-feature-packed engine, but if you want affordability but a little more legwork on your end, Torque is a fine solution.