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ChiaPet

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Everything posted by ChiaPet

  1. I think your expectations on what their alpha was supposed to be like are unrealistic. SOE has been very upfront since the beginning of this process in saying that this is a true alpha, meaning only some of the features are implemented, and almost nothing is finalized. Pretty much every previous big budget MMO was only opened up to the public during a late beta phase, when everything was already implemented (or were close to implementation), and players were brought primarily for bug fixing, balance, and polish. This is, as far as I know, the first time that a big developer has brought in the general public before all those decisions have been made, which means the community can weigh in on the direction of the game, at least to a larger degree than they’ve been able to on a AAA MMO in the past. That does seem to be a bit more of a trend, with crowdfunded MMOs becoming more commonplace nowadays, as people seem more likely to pledge to a game for which their opinion on its development matters. So just like with Atavism, there's still a lot that is unoptimized and unfinished in EQN Landmark (which is not the full-blown EQN even, just to clarify). Having a bunch more money or people on your game doesn't mean you don't go through the same development hurdles and rough patches. If anything, it's even worse with a "big" game, because there's far more complexity with that type of project.
  2. But it's alpha. You of all people should be sensitive to the fact that an alpha version of a system isn't nearly as polished as what is expected for release.
  3. It's good to hear you've done your research on existing voxel terrain solutions. Sometimes if you want something done right, you just have to do/build it yourself. I do think it's a bit unfair to criticize the EQN Landmark alpha so generally, especially this early in their alpha. There are five worlds with over 40 zones apiece, and they are all full of claims. Since players are (finally) restricted to one claim per account, even just a rough estimate by math shows that there are tens of thousands of players in the alpha already. I doubt you'll get anywhere near that sort of load testing in the Neo's Land alpha (it would certainly be awesome for the company if that were to happen ), so to claim that AtVoxel runs better than VoxelFarm/EQN Landmark isn't necessarily a fair comparison just yet. Also, Dave Georgeson has already stated that the small islands approach is very temporary until they optimize their system further and can support much larger terrains. I would assume that means a similar paging system concept, where terrain blocks are loaded and synched to the client based on proximity, with those blocks distributed over multiple cell servers. At any rate, I'm very happy to wait until more information and demonstrations are released before making a purchase. Looking forward to more updates and feedback from those who buy into the alpha.
  4. Minecraft and Ineisis voxels are much bigger than EQN Landmark, and probably AtVoxel's as well. The surface blending and other features that allow you to make really nuanced shapes, along with the smaller voxel size, can increase the processing requirements exponentially, so you can't do a direct comparison with those other games. I honestly think you're too optimistic at this point, Dakora. For me, there's way too little that's proven about both AtVoxel and Atavism in general for me to invest more into these products until we get more evidence of progress. I really want this engine to succeed because of what it could mean for us little guys in game development. Unfortunately, there's still a lot more that's been promised than what has been delivered to us in alpha so far. I would much rather pay $285 later for a product I know works than $200 now for something that is extremely questionable at this point in development. That's the risk of buying into a product early, I guess. I'm not a good programmer by any means, but my profession has afforded me a lot of peripheral exposure to both software development and IT infrastructure support. The questions that I've been asking (as well as other folks) are legitimate concerns and requests to really vet out this software. The product page for AtVoxel has so little concrete information, and the video shows only one person manipulating voxels. Multiply that by 100 simultaneous connections, and things could get very bogged down potentially. Like I said, I would love to see this engine deliver on all its promises. I guess time will tell if that happens...
  5. The Neo's Land alpha will be a good way to test AtVoxel. I had forgotten about it being used by your game, so that's a good call. It does make me want to wait and see how your alpha turns out before buying AtVoxel on my own, just to make sure. I'll be interested in seeing more details as you release that information. Knowing more about your server setup and internet connection bandwidth for Neo's Land alpha will also be helpful to benchmark what we would need to have to run a game using your voxel tool.
  6. Also, I'd really like for a demo world to be setup that we can log into to witness how the voxel terrain tool works. Videos are well and good, but allowing potential customers to actually use the tool and see how well it runs for themselves is much better at eliminating doubt. I think it's a very reasonable request, as $200 is a lot to ask for from this audience.
  7. I'm in the Landmark alpha as well, which is part of the reason why I'm asking for a lot more detail on AtVoxel before even thinking about investing in it. If a multi-million dollar developer has had that many issues with the alpha version of their voxel tool, I'm very leery of an indie developed one without seeing a lot of convincing evidence that it works well. Not to say that it can't be done, but it seems like a very difficult task to accomplish. You say AtVoxel is faster, but what load testing with concurrent client logins have you performed to validate that that speed is maintained over many simultaneous connections? How many voxels were you synchronizing? Is the server truly authoritative when it comes to editing the voxel terrain? Just thinking from a processing perspective, it seems like you'll need a powerful server and/or some sort of cluster or federated computer to manage both the voxels themselves and the constant updating of the terrain to the clients. I'd like to see a lot more about how that all works, so that we as customers know exactly what we're getting into if we choose to use AtVoxel for our games.
  8. There's an alarming lack of information on specifics of the tool and how it performs in a client-server setting. Here are a few questions that immediately sprung to mind: 1. Who's the developer of AtVoxel? Is it NeoJac? I was under the impression that this was a tool being made by another company and you were integrating it with Atavism? Judging by the name, it looks like this is an in-house tool. 2. Can AtVoxel be used independently from Atavism? If so, how is the functionality exposed for use by other applications/platforms? 3. What sort of load testing has been done to determine feasibility of voxel terrain synchronization across client and server? How many voxels can be realistically managed by a server and with what machine specs? What are the client processor and memory requirements to accommodate receiving all the voxel synchronization data? What about connection bandwidth requirements? 4. Where can we find more detailed information about the tool, its features, its technical requirements, etc.? 5. Is there a demo world that we can log into to see firsthand how the voxel terrain functions? $200 is a lot to ask without a lot more information and proof of the tool's feasibility.
  9. Adding my own comments/questions into this thread. Thanks for starting this btw, Swampdog. You and Count have stated a lot of things that I echo with my own project and plans. Two additional questions I have around the server architecture: 1. Will the server roles be split up and allow for assigning different machines to those various roles (e.g., master server, proxy server, world server, database server)? 2. Will dynamic load balancing and fault tolerance still be implemented? That was a conversation on these forums a long time ago, but I was wondering if it would still make the cut for the final engine to us. I have to imagine you will want/need that sort of robustness for Neo's Land to be successful. Finally, are all of the features on the roadmap going to be available to all customers who buy at least the base license? I'm not sure if any features are being reserved for those who go with a higher license.
  10. That's precisely the reason why I keep asking for more information on authoritative terrain and geometry. Even if it's possible to extract and manipulate terrain by hacking the client, ensuring that the server has final say should mean that cheating is prevented, short of hacking the server as well.
  11. Yeah, I would imagine the approaches will be different between voxel and heightmap terrain. For traditional terrain, they could store a reference to the navmesh in the database, but I would assume it would be more efficient to actually load the mesh up from a file at runtime (or at least on server startup). My head explodes when I try to wrap my head around how voxels would be managed. Jacques said that this unrevealed voxel terrain asset is already authoritative on the server. Not sure what the approach is if that's true.
  12. I suspect that your particular example will be tied heavily to server side collision and terrain management, so if/when we get more information on how that will be implemented, we should know how terrain and geometry will be synched between client and server. I think the most user-friendly experience would be to be able to export scene terrain and collider meshes from the editor and into the server as a navmesh. There's an asset on the store called RecastUnity that does something to that effect. It takes terrain and geometry and converts it to an external JSON or BSON file that can then be imported and interpreted by a server that isn't based on a Unity instance.
  13. Thanks for posting. Yes, I totally agree that the Viking demo will be easier to use for RPG systems, and I would definitely prefer if using that demo/assets was an option.
  14. Glad to hear that engine development is going to resume. I'd like to suggest some ways to help keep us all in the loop on how that development is progressing. I've posted my thoughts in this thread: link.
  15. Thank you, sooms, for the information. Sorry to hear you have been ill this last little while. I have to admit, I'm rather disappointed to find out that the Atavism server has not come farther along at this point. As the server is still in a very early state and lacking fundamental authoritative features at this time, I am afraid I am going to refrain from participating in a community project until server development has progressed. I have some serious concerns that the features that have been promised both for this engine and the Neo's Land game itself will not be feasible with an authoritative server. The voxel terrain alone seems to pose some serious technical and performance implications in an authoritative server, massively multiplayer setting. I don't know whether you can truly, definitively claim that such a feature, as awesome as it sounds, will work in the final engine and game if you do not have server side terrain management and collision detection yet. The performance load on the server to manage and communicate the state of all of those voxels could really bog the system down. If your demo videos are basically client-side renderings only, then you've essentially just been showing a single-player game this entire time. The bootcamp demo video is the only video I see that has any multiplayer aspect, and even then, without server-side collision, it's really just a peer-to-peer networking situation--not a true MMO engine. I would highly recommend shifting focus back to the server to ensure you can really meet the commitments you've made to your growing community. You will need a robust, authoritative server for Neo's Land anyway, or else your game will be far too open to player cheating and hacks for you to be successful. It's better to establish that foundation now, rather than showing shells of these features that are just client-side concepts. Once the Atavism server engine is farther along, I will reconsider backing its development, both financially and via participating in a community effort. Until then, I will likely just be watching these forums and the Unity threads to see how things progress.
  16. I'm going to withhold my final bid to participate until after we get an update from the NeoJac team on timing. True, this is just a demo, so not all features need to be in place, but to me, there are a lot of unknowns with respect to feasibility and performance of the engine without authoritative server functionality in place. I'm guessing the recent push with the voxel terrain and building features have been to draw more interest to the Neo's Land game and more Kickstarter support, and I totally appreciate that strategic move. I just want to make sure that as a potential developer using this engine, my expectations are met. @3DOmelette: No one asked dreamlarp to start this thread, but the devs did post in their Unity thread that they are interested in a community project using the engine.
  17. Yeah, sorry I've been a bit MIA. Day job and all has been a bit hairy as of late. I'm not exactly sure where I would best serve. I'm not a great coder, but I think I am decent at higher-level aspects of planning and understanding programs. I'm also not a published writer, but I do edit and proofread documents as part of my job. @3DOmelette: The engine right now does not enforce a centralized, authoritative server for terrain management and collision detection. From what I understand, each client currently dictates those aspects for the player character under that client's control. The devs have said implementing the authoritative server functionality is of high priority, as it should. Any engine without these features would be very easy to hack/cheat.
  18. I'd like to assist as well. My only concern is how quickly the authoritative server functionality will be implemented, especially with respect to terrain and collisions. I feel like this is something that should be ironed out before the community invests in a group project.
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