Albion Online

Anyone give this a try? It's like runescape made in unity, but with a better f2p model. I played a little bit today and it's a pretty fantastic sandbox. NPCs stand around giving quests you can do once every however many hours and right now (they're changing this in the future) everything is interfaced with simply by clicking the left mouse. Or a tap on a mobile device. They want it to work everywhere, but will add right click context menus in the future.

An mmo made in unity! The maps are divided into multiple clusters with very brief loading scenes between each. I could go on to describe the game, but it's basically runescape, and I am really posting so people can stir up more mmo conversations because here's a fairly successful one!

It's also got a few .hack// elements, because you get skills from the gear you wear.

 

The client is made in unity - the server is not.

 

They are using Photon Server for the server part.

(https://www.photonengine.com/en/OnPremise/Showcase#albiononline)

 

That doesn't surprise me

That does surprise me

I like how the map is broken up as clusters. The heavy used of instancing should be good for scalability. And personal islands should cut down on the need to have several thousand people fighting over the same handful of trees I like a lot of the decisions they're making.

 

Why does it surprise you? Photon Server is extremely powerful and a proven product.

 

Because you pay a lot... and you use your own servers still... and you're only renting it...

Not my place to say anything though, I hope they always remain f2p.

 

They offer both subscription and perpetual licenses. It's not that different than Unity really.

https://www.photonengine.com/en/OnPremise/Pricing

 

I was referring to that page

$3,500 - is that "per server" meaning that every new server they open is another $3,500?

Not that I want this to become a discussion about photon. I don't think myself and sandbox interactive are operating on the same budget.

 

@Tomnnn - I believe that's per Server to Server networking (Multiple (Master) Servers).
Example - Server in Eastern US, Western US, Asia, Europe, etc.

So that's per *hub* server most likely.
Now to host your own game server, whatever they decide to charge.

But main server(s) and licenses, etc are expensive with photon. I believe the 3500 is for the Ulimited CCU and stuff of that sort.

EDIT - Oops I didn't click the link, I was right though ahaha.

 

Technically it's per instance of the server application. Same as SmartFox.

 

@Ryiah I haven't never used SmartFox, well I lye - I tried, but went straight back to Photon as I'm not making an MMO with Create Instant MMO Button at the top right! lol.

 

That's not better than what myself and the others were thinking

any albion related discussion or are people more interested in my obvious dislike of photon networking?

 

@Tomnnn: If it's anything like Runescape wouldn't the Photon discussion be more interesting?

 

Holy S***. Just tripped over several nostalgias. Me and a friend always wanted to play runescape from 2006 again. We know that old runescape exists but it just seems to be missing the player driven economy and most users have quit.

 

It's been one of the few MMOs coming out I've seriously considered trying. It thought it might be made in Unity but I never looked into it.

Photon Server is a decent product. You can host pure C# server apps with it in the backend, Photon is not just Photon Cloud or PUN like some people seem to think, and they likely opted to use Photon other than rolling their own due to the vast amount of platforms they target: Android, iOS, Mac, Linux and PC.

As per the pricing I'm pretty sure you could run multiple instances of your servers per dashboard app. So it's like one license per machine right? I can't remember, haven't use Photon in a loooong time. I mostly use Lidgren now.

Anyway, it's not unreasonable to think a competent development team has built adapters and such around Photon so that they can replace it post-launch. They only have so much time to bring stuff to the market so I'm sure when they can they'll revisit their networking solution, not that Photon is bad just costly, just like Rust did.

 

It is similar to runescape, but you get your abilities from the gear. The photon discussion would not be interesting because I'm quite bitter about things I don't like and don't have a good reason for it

Albion is coming out at just the right time then. It's going to be totally f2p... in the future. I spent $30 for a founder pack for early access on the 25th. It's going to be running for like 3 months or longer. There's going to be a wipe so it's going to be a lot of effort for nothing so yea, just like runescape lol

I didn't. I went into the file contents and fount qt creator files. Then I dug into the executable and found unity files. What a twist!

I guess that's a good reason, given their goal of creating modern cross-platform runescape.

I connected my phone, a tablet and my laptop to the same game with UNET and had no trouble so... what the fuz, yo. I even created a separated control scheme for each platform. Laptop => fps wasd and mouse look, mobile => top down click to move.

 

I think they went with Photon because its a proven solution and imo pretty nice. Sure it cost some, but if you have an actually decent budget its not too bad. Server cost will be the bad one.

 

That's the case for everything

 

Yea but they started development of this project even before 2013 afaik. uNet was not available then. Photon was the optimal choice around the time they started their project as if I recall there weren't many competitors then nor many that offered standalone C# servers. Running Unity serverside never seemed like a good idea if you could avoid it but it's worked out for stuff like zone servers for me but who knows if it would scale well. I didn't really pay attention to resource consumption.

Also, not all the money they spend is purely on the license. Photon, according to them, offered great support and they even visited them in-person a couple of times. I'm sure those exchanges were valuable and Photon likely did everything they could to help Albion succeed because in the end it means more licenses unless they do what Rust did but Rust claimed to have only switched due to feeling pressured and coerced into paying more by MuchDifferent.

 

Thats not the point. For people who make games at that scale for a living, the price is not that bad. 3500$ is less than what you pay for a programmer for a month. And based on what you get it makes sense for many companies.
I worked on a project that used Photon Server and had to scale for 1000s CCU. It is very solid when it comes to that. Stuff like UNET has not been tested at that scale at all on actual released projects.

Anyways its getting off topic. Albion Online looks and plays great. If only i had time to dedicate myself to a game like that!

 

You say that like it's good now I can't wait to use it! Once they can give us a sample project that doesn't have the client and server desync instantly.

Well don't forget who started this thread ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Can this discussion move toward gameplay pls? It's nice to see systems from 2002 make a comeback I mentioned that the game had unity files and then suddenly photon discussion.

More acceptable branch conversation - call of duty also brought back a handful of gameplay & aesthetic elements not in the series since cod3 and 5! Explosions can actually blow your limbs off and when you melee you hit with your gun!

 

Never heard of the game until this thread. Did a quick search and then watched the Gameplay video on the website.

Looks very good to me based on the video. Graphically it is certainly pleasing to the eye and more than acceptable for the game IMO.

Gameplay looks solid based on the video.

Regarding making such a game in Unity in general... I think certainly people can make anything in Unity or most any of the game engines and frameworks out there. These days the frameworks and game engines are not an issue. It is just sticking with it long enough to complete the games. A little or a lot of learning along the way depending on where you are when starting on such a project. And getting all of the content you need.

Still... when you get right down to it... it is all more or less the same in any game. I mean you have these same basic systems and so forth that apply to a number of games. Some games just have more to do than others and some games require more content than others.

Obviously, multi-player games have the challenge of the client-server architecture. Then again single-player games would need more of other stuff to help bring some life to the game worlds.

Each game has core elements. The things that are critical. So if people focus on those they can slack on the others to varying degrees.

In this game the main things I see are the resource gathering, crafting, combat and rankings/accomplishment systems. I mean of course there are a load of other things such as character movement, collision and such. Those are examples I mentioned above of the kind of things any game will have to some degree in some form.

Anyway, taken one at a time you could knock it out. Get you a gathering system going so your character can move up to rocks, trees and so forth spawn an animation and set a timer or however you'd want to do it. Devil is in the details. Once you get that system working size of the world is irrelevant meaning whether it is a single screen or an area the size of 1000 x 1000 screens as far as gathering is concerned you can populate resources the player can gather.

I'm not knocking the game and making light of it. Definitely not. All of this stuff will take time to build, test, debug, tweak and polish. Just saying certainly you could do it given enough determination and time. And of course content. Seems to me like the asset store would help tremendously for such a game. For 2D games not nearly as much but for 3D games and particularly something like this I think you can find a lot of usable content on the asset store.

Also, I think you already know these things @Tomnnn. So you should have a playable demo done by what... tomorrow afternoon? lol

 

When I find the right engine & networking solution, I'll proceed. There are a few things I want to make. Now that albion exists, runescape-in-unity is off the list. Can't be done better than those guys are doing it.

What's next is .hack//.

-class & skills from gear - present in albion too!
-central hubs called servers
-warp gates that bring users to seeded-randomly generated worlds that have their own dungeons and other things to explore
-a fourth wall struggle where players fight to protect the npcs from a virus / glitch that has the ability to kill npcs permanently

There are other things, but the series is a game about a show about a game...

back on topic

The game systems changed a little on the recent release. You pick your weapon based on your purpose to the group. That's explained in the combat 2.0 video

 

That looks pretty good to me! We avoided Photon because everyone one said it was so expensive...

 

The conclusion from that aside in this thread seems to be photon isn't so bad if you're operating on an mmo-sized game and have the cash for it.

 

Keep us posted, Tomnnn. I would love to try Albion, if only to give them a bit of support since they use Unity.

 

Runescape in Unity3D you say? Someone is working on some sort of port/interop for using Unity3D to render Oldschool Runescape here: http://www.rune-server.org/runescap...606873-runehd-old-school-edition-unity3d.html so Runescape in Unity3D might be done by... Someone porting Runescape to Unity3D.

 

haha well I was talking about the genre/formula, not a direct port. But I guess once both are ready we can compare them. I like albion's f2p model and map system much better. Nothing is locked away from free users, but premium users get bonuses to save them time and mitigate the effects of taxes.

That's probably the biggest reason that I posted. I've been waiting on sixense to deliver so I can have a real solid unity project, but they just delayed until april so... albion closed beta will be a fine distraction until then.

They have QT and unity for the client. Nice combo. I was told in college that QT is the best c++ gui toolkit.

 

Last time I've checked it was in "founder pack" phase with high prices (and in itself "founder packs" phase is worse than even farmville/candycrush f2p, but that's something for another discussion). Unles that had changed, I have no intention on playing it.

 

It's ultimately going to be free. The different founder packs just give you access to different phases of the beta. The cheapest one gives you access to the final closed beta - which is right now. Then there will be an open beta and the final game is free

It's a significant bonus, but you can do without it. It takes 50-25% longer to accomplish the same thing as someone who has it if you don't. Collect 30 coins? 10 are lost to taxes. Do you have a temporary founder bonus? You get a bonus 10 coins. Are you gathering resources? No founders pack means 1 log is 1 log. Founders pack bonus means 1 log has a high chance of being 2 logs.

I think there's an 'experience' bonus as well. But besides that, all of the content from mounts to building houses on your own private island will be free. In my play time so far (a few hours) I accumulated 500 silver. So it'd take a bit longer to get that without the bonus, and the house costs 1200 to start and probably a smaller sum afterwards to maintain.

Basically, they're pulling an h1z1. A free game selling you early access.

 

Ahh, one of those. Okay, maybe I will wait and just take a look when it is out and free. Doesn't sound like my kind of game. I prefer a subscription based game or at least one with paid tiers.

 

They do offer a subscription, it's called premium status, and p2p only MMOs no longer succeed in the market imo. Any game that is going to have p2p elements MUST offer in-game currency conversions for gametime like Eve, Runescape and WoW offer.

Wildstar had to go f2p, Rift went f2p, Swtor went f2p and any game that comes out now better be f2p or it's going to be really hard to get anyone to bother playing it.

 

Actually, I disagree. Some do succeed. Depends on the audience and the game.

 

Trying it when it's out sounds best Who knows what systems will change between now and then anyway.

Maybe that was regarding new games trying to enter the market? It'd be pretty hard to build an audience for a new subscription based mmo without a ton of funds for marketing... that would compete with the existing ones somehow.

That's what I was describing I don't game enough to bother with subscriptions. I do long single sessions on the weekends so paying for a whole month usually isn't worth it for me.

 

Who wants to make games that will compete with existing ones? Not me.

 

Do you have a demo available of your game?

 

We are far from a demo, GarBenjamin. But I will make sure I let you know when we do.

 

looks pretty cool when does it become F2P ?? .. like Jan? Feb?
money founders thing (somewhat pay to win, doesnt seem Too bad though) seems sorta lame, but they gotta make money somehow lol, game looks pretty cool though ill probably check it out

yeah... dont like photon... barely looked at it though lol but seems kinda lame,
id prefer if each player has an option to run their own dedicated server or somesuch for LAN/ private server for their buddies , dont think thats possible with Photon.. is it?

 

It's possible with Photon. It doesn't really have anything to do with the tech. If a company wants to host authoritative servers for their MMOs, and they almost always will want to do so, then they won't let people and their buddies run their own servers.

You can do anything you want with Photon more or less. The Ablion developers a post talking about it and they use it as "[their] transportation layer only". I don't know what you find lame about Photon. I typically build a similar API around Lidgren when I'm doing stuff. The only thing bad about Photon is the license, forced dashboard use and I think being locked to windows for your severside. That's why I don't use it.

 

Someone has to fund development. Might as well be those insane people who spend a fortune on MMOs.

 

How about Kickstarter or IndieGoGo? A.k.a. reputable sites that only fund projects worth funding and through which scam risk, while still existing, is lower than giving your paypal/credit card data to random site on the internet?

 

An MMO needs to be hooked up to a payment backend to handle subscriptions and/or IAPs. You may as well have it handle the initial purchases as well. After all last I checked Kickstarter wasn't handling the payments themselves but rather relying on Amazon for it. I'd imagine a similar situation for IndieGoGo.

 

Edit: I looked into it and the compiler emits and Activator.CreateInstance<T> when T is constrained by new() and new is invoked. Interesting, another solution may be more preformant though. Resources indicate compiled expressions may be better. This isn't a big deal though but other reports indicate, for some reason, Activator is slow. Hmmmm, it's too late to look more into it. Here's a source for that and compiled lambdas, which I've never personally used: http://www.marccostello.com/newing-up-t/ the charts for Activator in net35 are scary.

For anyone curious about how they read their packets coming off of Photon they seem to have written a thin layer around the dictionary of objects that Photon Server serializes when you send an OperationRequest, Reponse or EventData or whatever.

To be honest, it seems a crude way to me but maybe they experienced issues with their AOT platforms. I don't know. Anyway, this is sorta how I handled packets with Photon in my second attempt at writing packet handling logic before I moved on to other designs, mostly relying on Protobuf-net, before moving on from Photon all together as I didn't like a couple of their restrictions. I'm surprised they don't use protobuf-net as Marc supports Unity3D and many other platforms.

Anywaaaaaaay let's look at the meat of how, as far as I can tell a minute into broswing the assembly, Albion Online handles packets.

First, note obfuscation:


This is a static generic method they reference all over their assembly. I'm not going to criticize design because it seems like a great game thus far, from streams and videos at least because I haven't played it, and who am I to armchair critique the design of their application when I don't yet have anything comparable published.

For example, see this...

Packet handler maybe? I can't tell, it's too soon to say but it appears to inherit some sort of handling methods, virtual ones, that process OpResponse and EventData. You can see the the line of interest is the first one. They make a generic call to ai4.c<t0> (ai4 is the class of the static method I posted above). This essentially builds data into a reasonable form, no a dictionary<byte, object> is not reasonable, it builds an instance of t0 which is

I haven't looked into it but that attribute probably is just meta-data for packet ids that may correspond to packet codes/operation codes. They may pre-build some information about their packets before the game gets going via reflection. They probably do pass over the Types and do something to them, maybe, but I don't know. t0 just looks like a collection of strings. Nicer than directly accessing the dictionary I suppose but like I said before; it's a thin layer. My main issue with the code, if I were to take an issue, is what they do in ai4.c<>.

Before I make any comments on it though let me explain, for those who don't have access to the assembly or don't quite get what all these b's c's and 123s everywhere are doing.

1. Creates an empty instance of generic parameter Type a using reflection (Why? It's constrained to new and Activator is slow and afaik doesn't have a cacheing policy. Maybe they know something I don't)

2. They reference ai4.c, which is a dictionary seen here: and they appear to grab the types associated with the packet out of the static dictionary above. Why? I don't know, it's not referenced again.

3. Some call to av3 sets the Photon returncode and optional debugmessage but I see no such method in the constrained class type so maybe it's an extension method. Though I see no fields or members that could hold this information in Type t0 so I don't know.

4. The weird stuff now. They iterate over the collection of ac6s which are pulled of the base class of the generic class constraint. It's from a dictionary<type, List<ac6>> and appears to be instances of a class that manage/cache delegates that point to private get and set methods for certain types expected in the packet. In this case ac6.b is the delegate type that sets values. It looks like this:

They cache a FieldInfo type, I don't know when these get built and haven't looked, and use it to get/set values in the packet instance. They set up all these dictionaries to sorta cache this. I think they might find a benefit looking into something like Marc's Protobuf-net or alternatively Marc's https://code.google.com/p/fast-member/ which may provide considerable increase in speed of setting or getting values via reflection which their current implementation relies on. I've never used it but I've considered it. This seems like it could be slow, especially on the serverside if they do this.

So yea, for each FieldInfo delegate cache instance (ac6) they pull objects out of the dictionary<byte, object> (photon) and call the _ac6.b delegate (the setter) to set fields on the newly created instance _a (which would be of Type t0 in the case we're talking about and the only field in that case would be an array of strings) to the value of the object that came over in the wire in the dictionary.

5. Return the packet to the caller.

All and all I think it's likely much slower than it needs to be. There are a lot of static references and dictionaries afloat and it'd very likely be better to just use proven serialization methods such as protobuf-net, or at least better manage reflection (Ex. don't use Activator because it's an order of magnitude slower than new T() and maybe profile the ac6 FieldInfo getter and setter option vs CreateDelegate caching vs Marc/Jon's various reflection library speeds).

What can do you with this knowledge? I don't know, maybe write a packet parser or write a bot at the packet level or something. If you can do that stuff then obviously this crap from me wasn't needed.

I want to thank the Albion Online developers for what looks like a great game, the chance to browse industry networking code and for the great work they've done highlighting Unity3D as a professional engine! I also mean no malice or harm by this post either, cheers to you guys living the dream and making an MMO!

 

Not a good idea to start decompiling the game on public forum even if it's for fun or out of tech interest. If any part of the game EULA etc. say you are not allowed to do it you would be breaking it and also forum rules here... just saying

 

They open beta should roll right into release, so... after some patches after 3-4 months of the current closed beta

It's pay to progress faster, like you see with other freemium games except this one doesn't try to get in the way of normal play. It's about 30% faster than non-paying players. But you can join a guild and share an island with friends so if you have even 1 friend you're going to out pace 1 person who is paying.

Except host the server on a non-windows machine?

Well at this point it looks like they're going to exist one way or another. I don't think a funding campaign is necessary because their community has floated all costs, apparently.

I did see a few bots, which blows my mind. How can people who write bots be dumb enough to try to put bots into a buy-in phase of a game? There's hardly anyone to advertise to and you're probably gonna get caught by the devs more easily lol.

Albion and kate upton have something in common now

 

Yeah I'm not sure why more multiplayer games don't take advantage of protobuf to be honest. Using union types you can easily create a fairly performant network protocol with minimal fuss. From what you just described it seems like that's all they would need and no need to roll their own serialization.

 

I'm no lawyer but as far as I can tell I'm not bound by a EULA. Their download is publicly facing and you don't have to register an account to download the installer. Their installer has no EULA/Terms page associated either. So whether it violates their EULA seems like a non-issue since since I'm not a register user nor have I agreed to their terms.

Yea, that's one of the reasons I no longer use Photon. I mention that somewhere in this thread I believe.

As far as I can tell with protobuf-net you will not need union types. ProtoInclude can mark up a base class with child class types that derive from some common base payload class. Protobuf-net will basically send, in the binary chunk, the include ID the child refers to and will know which child to deserialize to because of this.

Unless you mean something else by union or if the google specification and use for union types is just one of many uses.

 

I think that's what bothered me initially. I was looking for a good server solution some time back and came across photon. Even if I were to go through the trouble of getting a windows machine to host, I'd still have to pay. I wanted a reliable LAN solution, photon is definitely not what I need. UNET might get there eventually.

 

It's not alone. I stumbled upon another one by the name of Novus Inceptio while browsing Steam sales.

http://www.novus-inceptio.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novus_Inceptio
http://store.steampowered.com/app/386590/

 

I remember that thread in the Works In Progress forum and it is one of the better looking games in Unity for sure. I'm not one of the people who goes nuts over graphics but I definitely thought the game looked exceptional and can appreciate the effort and time he (originally one guy) put in to pull it off.