MMO Construction Kit

I'd like to echo 3D Omelette Studio's question on server side collisions and terrain management. I know it's something you have said the programmers were to begin work on recently. How is that coming along?

Also, a second question. If I pay for the $70 Atavism pledge initially, can I upgrade to the Developer's pledge and pay the difference prior to beta? I want to get access on the 29th, but without seeing more of the art assets included, I'm not sure if I want to pay at the higher level just yet.

 

Thanks, we are still adding more stuff in. Ill have a chat with Andrew (Sooms) our Lead programmer and see what of those you listed we can try and get in for Alpha. As for server side collisions, we are still working on it but it wont be making it into the early Alpha release. Most likely it will be in for Beta release or before then. Its a bit of a bigger thing to add in as it includes many other features to go with it like AI and pathfinding.

 

You can still upgrade your pledge later if you wish to the bigger one, we are releasing some screenshots and so forth on the bigger package assets in next week so if you want to wait to have a look at them first you can.

 

What is the difference between skills and abilities? With the skills, abilities, and tab target system, does this represent the combat system? What is missing from it if anything at all?

 

The difference between skills and abilities is skills is basically your knowledge and abilities is what you use in combat like the action buttons that goes into your action bar. For combat mostly everything is there for tab targeting and all that's needed will be polishing it further.

This is only one combat system which we will have in alpha release, others like soft targeting system that Elder Scrolls has will be added later.

 

Where do character attributes fit in? Something like Strength, Intelligence, etc?

 

the plugin for that is there as well, sorry forgot to mention that.

 

Here is a update on the current plugin's we have in Alpha which will be released next week on 29, do note this wont be the final look as we are still polishing and changing things around but gives you an idea where its going.

 

Thanks for the screens, I would suggest taking the time to create videos on youtube demonstrating the features as I'm sure it will gain a ton of additional interest. I cant wait

edit: I know this is for an alpha release, the videos may be more suitable for beta up to right before official release. Either way, videos/screenies can only be a + for exposure after seeing what you guys have built so far. Keep up the good work.

 

Here is a model that will be part of the $340 Developers Package from our MMO game Neos land. This package gives you veteran License, closed alpha next week access and also all asset we will be developing for the MMO game. This concept was drawn live on Twitch a few weeks ago with the community input and then produced. If you want other type of creatures done please join us on our live twitch feed weekly and give us your ideas. For those who dont know you can buy the $340 pledge package now on our Neos Land website and the assets you will get with it when they get released will be worth over $3000.

 

When will the $340 Frame work be available to public for purchase? Will it have a DLL or will all the C# scripts be included?

 

You can buy it now on our Neos Land website , alpha release of Atavism Online will be on 29 November, next week. For the Atavism package everything you need to build a MMO and make need to change to make your MMO Unique will be included and will be C#. Some aspects to the server wont be included but you would not need to make changes to that, if you do we will gladly do the changes for you.

 

Nice looking model!

Thought I'd bring up a cross-promoting opportunity here. I just purchased the Axis Game Factory tool for terrain map building. It's a really intuitive, user-friendly method of building and painting heightmaps. I think it would be an excellent tool to try to get a plug-in created for Atavism. And since you are still working on terrain and collisions for the server, this might be a helpful tool to integrate.

I spoke with Matt (AGF tool creator) over Skype today, and he's very keen on collaborating. He's working with other Unity developers as well for other ways to make AGF's functionality work with other Unity tools and assets.

 

Thanks, yes spoke to Matt (AGF Tool creator) today.

 

Great to hear! I think there's a lot of potential with that sort of partnership. Matt and I chatted about his plans to add more game-related functionality in AGF that could be exported to Unity, such as character/avatar/NPC creation. He also said they are working on voxel terrain already, which may also be of added interest here.

 

Hi, I pleadge for 70 USD. Can I upgrade to developer later?

 

Yes you certainly can do that.

 

awesome! How will the alpha be rolled out on 29th?

 

We will have our new account system in place mid this week for our websites. This will allow you to see everything you have bought from us and we will be making the downloads available on your account page for you on Friday.

 

New Fire texture for DragonDog



View attachment 76149

 

New Ice Texture for DragonDog

 

Hmm did not post image.

 

quick questions:
will the alpha server release be able to escalate thru multiple hardware nodes to load balance?

or is it just for 1 hardware node only atm?

also will the AoI and seamless world features be functional for alpha too?

thanks

 

Hey.

The alpha version of the server won't have the multiple hardware nodes functionality included. This is to be released either Beta or Full Release depending on how things are going.

The seamless world is touch and go, we are finalising the terrain solution at the moment. It currently allows for huge areas, and it may be within a month or two after alpha release we make it fully seamless.

I'm not too sure what you mean by Aol, can you please elaborate.

Regards,
Andrew.

 

Area of Interest/network LoD/Interest Management

a must have feature for mmos to only sync data of network aware objects close to the player for large and populated worlds to save bandwidth and server wont choke on large open worlds.

I am just a little bit concern, since am looking for a basic must have mmo functionality to scale and optimize server side performance ie:

-multiple hardware functionality for load balancing and scaling

-Area of interest for only sync data of network aware objects close to the player so server wont choke with large world.

-seamless worlds

-server side collision detection to prevent most common mmo cheats


this must have features wont matter for a regular casual small scale multiplayer game, but for an mmo
are a must have and should be already included from the getgo imo since they are a very low level mmo feature and one wont be able to add since your server will be released as a black box(compiled binary)

As you mentioned some of those features are on the works, but my concern is that if they ever going to be added or fully implemented,
some of us are really counting on those features and will really hate to find out that they never get implemented due of whatever show stopper reason. and we will end up in the middle after several months of work and then having to look for another backend alternative and start all over again.

sorry , do not mean to sound upset, but am concerned if there will be a guarantee if the mmo features be fully implemented soon or before all the rest of high level features are added.

thank you for your reply.

 

Most of that features is implemented in the server already, when we say we are working on it, its a matter of getting the client side working with it. Before we used Unity as a Client we had our own client and those features where in, we then decided to move to Unity and use it as a client as we could not compete with the special effects and quality that Unity has to offer. Allot of features is already been implemented on the server long ago, the work has been to get them linked in/ work with Unity as a client.

"-Area of interest for only sync data of network aware objects close to the player so server wont choke with large world." Is in and works.

As for others, this release in a few days is Alpha so many thing wont be in or be working fully. I understand your concern and maybe it would be better then to wait till Beta release or Full release for you. Pretty much everything else you have listed is already implemented on the server , its just a matter of getting it implemented on the client. And that will definitely be done as we are also developing our own MMO game so it is needed for our self's as well.

 

thank you for the reassurance about the features, this puts me at ease,

now, when you mentioned that all those features are also needed for your own mmo, so does this mean that the $70 atavism pledge licensees will also get all future game logic features updates from your mmo game in development?

 

All game logic,where its that we develop our self will be included in the Atavism Engine, we will also develop game logic that makes scene to have in the package if enough people request it.

We have more than one game lined up for future development, one of them is going to be something similar to League Of Legend style Lobby MMo so that logic will also be in the package when it gets developed. One other thing to remember is that other developers can also create their own logic plugins which they can add and sell as well.

 

Will there be documentation released with the alpha?

 

Thank you for the info Cookimage,

you got me sold with the features plans for the engine

I went ahead and did the $70 Atavism Pledge already from your neosland site.

please set me up for tomorrow's alpha release.

are you going to provide access info via email or via the neosland account?
can you please clarify it.

thanks again

looking forward to alpha release

 

Thanks for your confidence. We will be allowing access through our account system, basically you will get a download through that. Time so far is set for late tomorrow evening. I will keep every one up to speed on that. Please do note that this is a early Alpha so do expect many bugs. As for documentation, we will have as much as possible in on Alpha release but it will definitely be needing more.

 

For those who has done the $340 Developers Pledge, here is a look at some icons you will be getting with the package. Many more to come!!

 

As we release assets to the asset store they will be made available to the people who pledged for the Developers Pledge Package.

 

thank you for the info,

ok, so ill take it the account system you guys will be using is a separate one from the current account we created and pledged under from neosland.com site?

 

We are using the same login information , but you will not be going to the current profile when you click to view your profile tomorow. You will go to our main website which is Neojac ( Currently under construction and will be opened tomorrow morning). There you will see all your purchases from us and what you can download. We have set it up basically similar like World of Warcraft have with their Battlenet account system. This will also allow you to purchase any other products from us and have all of that in one account for easy access.

 

wonderful,

thank you.

 

Just pledged for the $70 Atavism level as well! I'll definitely look to increase to the developer's package as I see more of those assets. I'm excited to get access to the engine!

 

Thanks, yes what we are going to show in the next few days I am sure will change your mind. With the UMA character system we already have a second race you can use in your game as a playable race, although we are just using them as bad guys (mob) for Neos Land lol

Here is the concept of this race, this was done by community input a few weeks ago.

 

Hello,

is Alpha released??? Cant wait

 

Not yet we are looking at much latter today so far.

 

Looks like a lot of work going in to this, but at the same time I'm always a little hesitant when I see things like an unlimited user license. I'd like to see some details of the testing you have done.

How many real concurrent users have you tested? Which features were available in the tests?

How many concurrent users have you simulated (i.e. full simulation spinning up test clients in the cloud and simulating real client actions). What were the simulated users doing?

What kind of testing have you done on long term persistence and data growth. Its one thing to get many users logged in, its quite another to maintain that performance as you persist their data over weeks, months, and years.

EDIT: It's definitely good that you are drinking your own kool-aid so to speak (i.e. developing an MMO with your own engine). Do you plan on this being live before you start selling the engine licenses? The performance of that system will go a long way to proving your concepts (if you can get the users).

 

Testing is a big proses, thus early alpha release to help us with that. In the month to come we will be doing allot of stress testing, so far all our testing has been good but there is still a ton of optimization to be done at this stage to make things even better. The biggest thing with frame rate is how the client deals with things which is where Unity comes in.

 

I haven't gotten any notification on alpha yet. Are you still launching it today for those who backed via Paypal?

 

Yip we are working on that, We will be releasing with a few less features than what we wanted to as we ran into some bugs. So we are trying to get the release out any way and keeping those plugins that's bugged out till we fix them in the next few days.

 

ok,

I am ready to alpha now, its friday, got the whole weekend for testing and learning atavism engine



but same here, no engine yet :-( havent got a notification so far

any news on the release?

 

Release should be in about 2 hours from now

 

Sorry people we came across a major bug when we started to compile code for release with character creation. Been working on it for about 3 hours now and not fixed . As that's a major part of the code as you need to be able to create a character we cant release today, will have to be tomorrow. The fun of alpha release, dam bugs always creep in when you are just about to release it. Thanks for your understanding, we will be working on it through the night.

 

yup, it figures, I sensed the no release due of the quiet day here on this thread.
so was expecting the no release,

one cant predict last minute bugs.

not kool

Anyways

hold on, are you talking about the UMA character creation deal?
if so are we stucked or force to use it?
reason i ask is because when i tried the demo from neosland site i found it quite sluggish/laggy/resource hungry, which i did not like, rather
use a more fixed character creation than the procedural UMA .

is it possible? or are we stucked with it.

 

It will be possible to use any character you want, just for alpha release we went with UMA as there is many that wants to use that one with its morphing capabilities. There is a more upgraded version of it we are using than the one on the demo with better resources usage.

 

I see,

but will one be able to replace UMA for our own fixed character creation with out the need of server source mod to make it work?
or do we need to depend on you guys until you mod source and do other release with new char creation choices?