uMMORPG Official Thread

Oh my, seems everyone is still in here on old forum
Anyway, here is some interesting bugs or "features" ive been noticed on v1.28:
- When you create new warrior character then it comes with default skill on its skillbar. But when player tries to remove that first skill on skillbar, then game crashes and an error comes up:

Code (CSharp):

1. SendMessage OnDragAndClear has no receiver!
2. UnityEngine.GameObjectSmiley FrustratedendMessage(String, Object)
3. UIDragAndDropableSmiley SurprisednEndDrag(PointerEventData) (at Assets/uMMORPG/Scripts/UIDragAndDropable.cs:53)
4. UnityEngine.EventSystems.EventSystem:Update()

- Skill without damage is still doing damage - make new skill with zero damage, then go on play mode and make new character. after that clean the skillbar (if there is any skill) and add that newly made skill on skillbar. try cast skill during the time when you attack skeleton and keep casting that skill until you see attack animation and also damage number above enemy (also enemy loses some hp). I might assume that default skill will be activated somehow even when it's not on the skillbar.

Here is video about issue -

 

Is there another support forum now?

 

https://community.unity.com/t5/Asset-Store/uMMORPG-Official-Thread/m-p/2522166#M469270
But seems its halfway to mixed up. Seems somekind merging issues

 

Thank you, I had no idea about this. Seems I have a lot of reading to catch up on.

EDIT - But they seem to be rolling back to these forums now?

 

Thought they got rid of that joke already....

I clicked on forums today and i guess because of saved cookies it brought me to the new forums... I was starting to worry haha

 

I was doing some more work today and found a bug in quests/monsters.

If you change the name of a Skeleton to something like 'Skeleton01' or 'Bone King', it will no longer count toward the 'Beginners Journey' quest. It seems like there could be an entity Name and separate monster Type, so you could have more flexibility with setting up quests.

Thinking about this some more, I think that the game object name should not be referenced from the scripts. For organizing and editing a larger map, it would be good to be able to give names that would sort easily in the inspector. I.e. Tomb Skeleton##, Graveyard Skeleton##, that sort of thing.

 

In Player.cs, in the functions SetIndicatorViaParent and SetIndicatorViaPosition, change the value you multiply indicator.transform.position by to 0.05f.

This puts the indicator icon just above the ground again.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56258304/SharingPics/2016-07-13 21-25-22.zip
2 minute video of a party system ive been working on. I haven't done anything to share XP or loot yet, but the players can join or leave, and HP MP and status effects indicators are all shared between them, along with a simple color change to yellow to indicate party leader and green if player is in a party.

 

Progress Info: V1.29 was submitted for review. Changes can be seen in the first post (new deterministic finite state machine)! I am really happy about this update, because the state machine is not painful anymore. Less weird things can happen, states and events are clean and simple.

Take a look at NetworkManagerMMO.OnServerAddPlayer. It loads player data before adding it to the world (the Database.CharacterLoad function shows you the details).

Take a look at Player.SetIndicatorViaPosition/ViaParent. You can modify the *0.01 to *0.02 etc. and see if that works better.

About the environment model that you added: can you send me the project with a step by step instruction so that I can see the error for myself?

About the icon missing when dead: which icon is missing when who is dead? Again, can you give me a step by step instruction to see it for myself?

Yes, a raycast would probably be easier than doing collision handling.

About the attacks on cooldown: that is intented right now. This too is open for discussion, would be interesting to see what others think. I can think of situations where players do not want to attack the target with a normal attack if they clicked on a stun. This could make PvP very annoying if they can't do their strategy.

Creating a character doesn't add a skill to the skillbar. Did you modify the code?
Also I tried creating a warrior and then dragging normal attack to and from the skillbar, it worked so far.
There is this Unity bug where all tags were replaced with weird numbers. This might have happened to you, check your tags.

About the skill damage: it uses the player's damage + skill.damage. So a skill with 0 damage would still make player.damage.

This is it right here. Unity introduced a new forum that was full of bugs, then they rolled back to this one here.

The monsters are all of type 'monster', so the name is currently the only real type indicator. You can of course also modify the QuestTemplate.killTarget type from Monster to string and use it for just the name. Right now we refer to the prefab because if the prefab's name changes, we won't have to change the quest (which we could easily forget and then introduce bugs).

 

I totally forgot that player prefab has also damage attribute and i`ll take a look if tags were replaced to random numbers. About warrior default skill, it seems it happens time to time when creating new character. Sometimes there is that skill on skillbar and yet another time there is no skills on skillbar. Everything was tested on new project which i didn't modified, but i`ll try check again after i`ve been patch my unity 5.3.5 with latest patch.

 

It probably happens when you create a character with a name that you used before. Then it loads that skill from your settings again and assumes that you are playing the old character.

 

I`ll check that later, but i assume you are right. Because i were using same character or character name quite often.

 

This was all part of the icon being too low, once I made the changes I mentioned in post 757 above, everything was back to normal. I think that because the original value was based on a flat plane in the demo scene, as soon as the nav mesh required rebuilding for any reason, that value was simply too small.

Excellent point, I hadn't considered that scenario.

I see the logic in referencing the prefab name, but I'm concerned that once a user creates a variety of different monsters, and wants to create more robust quests, the current system will be limited.

 

Quite interesting. Well done!

 

Progress Info: working on the next version which will have a few code improvements to make things simpler.

The perfect solution would be to reference monsters in the scene by dragging them in there. But Unity doesn't allow that. So right now I only see two options: using a string or referencing a prefab.

 

Once i workout a few bugs get a few more aspects implemented and clean up the code I'll share it with the community

 

Update: V1.29 is now on the Asset Store! Changes can be seen in the first post (new deterministic finite state machine).
Let me know if you find any issues with the state/events. Everything seems to work really great and is much easier to read and understand.

 

v1.29 isn't working.


Could not start compilationWin32Exception: ApplicationName='"C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Data\Mono\bin\mono.exe"', CommandLine='"C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Data\Mono\lib\mono\unity\smcs.exe" @temp/UnityTempFile-31f4a4da29644d047850fe582f4d016c', CurrentDirectory='C:/Users/takapi/Documents/Unity Projects/uMMORPG/Assets/..'
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start_noshell (System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo, System.Diagnostics.Process process)
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start_common (System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo startInfo, System.Diagnostics.Process process)
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start ()
(wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.Diagnostics.Process:Start ()
UnityEditor.Utils.Program.Start () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Utils/Program.cs:33)
UnityEditor.Scripting.Compilers.MonoScriptCompilerBase.StartCompiler (BuildTarget target, System.String compiler, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 arguments, Boolean setMonoEnvironmentVariables) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Scripting/Compilers/MonoScriptCompilerBase.cs:31)
UnityEditor.Scripting.Compilers.MonoScriptCompilerBase.StartCompiler (BuildTarget target, System.String compiler, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 arguments) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Scripting/Compilers/MonoScriptCompilerBase.cs:18)
UnityEditor.Scripting.Compilers.MonoCSharpCompiler.StartCompiler () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Scripting/Compilers/MonoCSharpCompiler.cs:43)
UnityEditor.Scripting.Compilers.ScriptCompilerBase.BeginCompiling () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Scripting/Compilers/ScriptCompilerBase.cs:47)

 

When did you get this error? Looks like a Unity bug, considering the call stack.

 

Awesome, ill be now away, need to test those new changes About update, updating from v1.28 to v1.29 is working as expected.

 

Seems there is small bug

And when i open canvas layer then i see on inspector window that player trade request related fields are empty. At the moment it`s easy to fix by finding PlayerTradeRequest layer and drag missing components to the fields. P.S: don't forget to save project or those changes will be gone

 

Progress Info: submitted V1.30 for review. New tooltips and syntax improvements that I did when reading through the whole code again.

That only happens when you update from a customized version, because Unity doesn't update the Hierarchy. Which is probably a good thing too. Anyway, your solution is correct. I renamed some of the variables there, so they have to be set again if needed.

For people who download a fresh uMMORPG V1.29, everything should work fine by default.

 

Actually i removed everything under Hierarchy window and dragged world scene back to that window. Not sure at the moment if i saved project before doing that or not. Either way, if that tiny issue comes up then it's easy to fix.

Edit: Seems after i made new project and imported asset then everything worked as it should be, so the issue with missing layers were just because little bit failed upgrade

By the way, code changes are looking really nice.

 

Thanks, good to hear!

 

When I try to play the uMMORPG, uMMORPG will have an error.

 

What exactly do you do? Can you give a detailed step by step instruction? For example:
1. Open Unity
2. Download uMMORPG from the store
3. ...

 

I reinstalled the unity 5.3.5f1.
uMMORPG is working.
Thanks for your reply.

 

Alright, good to hear.

 

Thanks for the advice above dealing with loading a placeholder character.

I'm now working on stealth / taunting abilities. Any suggestion on how to adjust the aggro on monsters relating to individual players?

 

About CMS: as mentioned before, I am also planning to make my own MMORPG at some point.

uMMORPG works really great, especially with the new state machine. I am very confident that this would be enough for a Kickstarter already.

The patcher is very simple and works, that's great too.

We still need some kind of web portal. A decent forum software would solve almost all problems:

• Account management: part of each forum by default
• Announcements: can use a subforum that only moderators can write to
• Community building: that's what forums are for
• Support: with a support forum or a plugin that lets them submit tickets. Most people are probably fine with a support forum area anyway.
• Tutorials/Guides: can be done with a forum section as well.
• Hosting: a lot of forum developers offer cloud hosting. This is neat because it scales with any amount of users and we don't have to worry about anything.

There is one remaining problem: ecommerce. Players need a way to purchase item mall currency, preferably outsourced with some kind of payment service too. Dealing with receipts, chargebacks, Paypal APIs etc. would be too time consuming for indie developers. The system would be as simple as buying 'currency', which is then increased in the forum database somewhere. The uMMORPG server can query that easily. The currency would have to be decreased if someone charges back or buys something ingame. The item mall itself can be implemented in Unity.

Here is what I tested so far and my impressions:

• Invision power board: great and easy to use forum. Cloud hosting supported too. Support said that there is no easy way to do 'buy currency', it would require some hacks. Would definitely use this forum if I get 'buy currency' working.
• XenForo: the software behind the Unity forum, which is pretty neat. Would have to do more research regarding ecommerce / payment provider integration though.
• Drupal: forum+commerce are somewhat doable, the forum is not very good. Drupal is a maintenance nightmare and very complex. There are a lot of updates that are hard to keep track of. Drupal is cool, but I wouldn't recommend it for an indie MMORPG.
• phpBB: overly complicated. Plugins require source code changes a lot of the time.
• Fastspring: a neat payment provider. No way to do account based purchases though.

If anyone here has some experience with a any CMS/Forum/Payment providers, please share it with us. Perhaps we can figure this all out together and add a step by step setup guide to the documentation.

You are welcome. You can add a check to the Monster.OnAggro function like '!entity.Invisible' etc.

 

For ecommerce, you can look at in-game currency services like Braincloud and Playfab. Although designed primarily for F2P mobile gaming, they handle server-side currency and item sales for indie MMOs.

 

Online backend integration, like with Playfab, would be awesome, but it brings with it a set of technical hurdles, both for vis2k and for customers.

For example, Playfab (and other BaaS's I've looked at) has its own authentication system and database, so I think you'd have to replace the current implementation in uMMORPG to make it work with Playfab. Also, customers will need to setup their own game/title on Playfab's platform and the underlying data fields for tracking things like currency count. Finally, Playfab at least only currently integrates natively with Paypal, although more payment platforms are coming. (I think GameSparks has more integrations, but that BaaS will still have similar setup hurdles.)

These aren't necessarily too difficult to do, but they seem counter to uMMORPG's aim to do things in the simplest way possible to the customer. I'm guessing integrating directly with a payment platform would be more in-line with that philosophy, although even that will likely require quite a bit of work for vis2k.

 

There is also xsolla, who seems has also unity support - https://developers.xsolla.com/index.html?_ga=1.191728874.1962799577.1469033910#xsolla-network .

 

You forgot lithium forums haha

 

Thanks for your input guys.

First of all, no worries, I don't plan to add any of those to uMMORPG, this would make things far too complicated. But if we find a simple solution then I would add something about this to the documentation, so that anyone can setup a simple 'good enough' web portal if needed.

After further research, I found out that there are 'credit systems' for various forums and content management systems. Credits can be rewarded for active users etc., or they can be purchased. That's just about what I am looking for: a simple forum with a simple purchasable credit system. Will try some of them out during the next few months.

Braincloud and Playfab seemed like full of buzz words on the first impression. And loaded with all kinds of features that I personally wouldn't need. Perhaps they work though, just gotta try and see.

Still reading through xsolla to see what that's all about.

Lithium, that's a good one.

 

Update: V1.30 is now on the Asset Store! Changes can be seen in the first post.

 

I have a few architecture questions about how buffs are implemented. I'm using an older version of UMMORPG, but I checked the latest release and buffs still seem to work the same.

Buffs are finished when their BuffTimeRemaining() reaches zero. There doesn't seem to be any way to trigger code when this happens. So in UMMORPG, buffs need to be checked wherever they are used every frame to see if the buff is still active. For example, Health Aura adds 50 maxHP. But instead of just adding 50 maxHP when the buff starts and then subtracting 50 maxHP when the buff finishes, the player's hpMax() is being calculated every tick with this:

Code (CSharp):

1.          
2.   // calculate buff bonus
3.   var buffBonus = (from skill in skills
4.                  where skill.BuffTimeRemaining() > 0
5.                  select skill.buffsHpMax).Sum();
6.  

As more buffs get added to a game, this type of overhead will get added for each one. This doesn't seem efficient to me, but maybe I'm missing something?

I tried to simplify things with my own buffs by setting a start / stop effect. My plan was to use skill.buffTimeEnd = Time.time in the UIRefresh.UpdateBuffs() to end a buff 1/5th of a second early. That would allow me to say "OK, the buff is almost done, so I will end it early and run this other code to remove the effects of the buff". But that doesn't work because the UpdateBuffs() loop has a race condition with the other framework code. There is no way I can figure out how to stop it on a dime.

So to sum up:

• Do you still think checking every frame for each buff is the best way to handle buff effects?
• If not, how could we turn buff effects on/off?
• Did I miss something in recent versions that solves this?

 

That's intended. I considered adding/decreasing from hpmax when buffs are started/stopped. But there are so many things that could go wrong. Any bug in your code might cause a buff to not stop or not decrease the health again, leaving the player with too much/ too little health. Now imagine getting a bug report like 'I still have 110 health even though I should have 100 health'. This is a nightmare to debug.

The big motivation behind this is functional programming. While C# is not a functional language, I am still trying to avoid state as much as possible, and put everything into little functions. Functions are good. If a function only takes some input and returns some output without touching anyone else, then nothing can go wrong. Those functions can just sit there forever. The more state you have in your project, the more complex it becomes.

Of course, the increase/decrease max hp method can work too. If you like it that way, you can play around with it and modify it to your needs.

 

OK, I now understand why you are choosing this method, but there is a performance cost for doing it this way that escalates as a game has more content. It's making me cautious about how many buffs I can add to my game.

Actually, I cannot modify it to my needs. As I stated above, the UpdateBuffs() loop is not a reliable place to get that info.

Could you suggest how I can determine when a buff has ended? I would really appreciate the help.

 

Have you ever see A real MMO without real testing!!!

 

You just reminded me that there was another reason why I used buffEndTime. Simply setting the buffEndTime to Time.time+bufftime means that we don't need an UpdateBuffs loop, which is a big deal if we have thousands of entities. Another benefit is that we don't have to synchronize the remaining buff time to clients all the time. Instead they know the buffEndTime and can calculate the remaining time on their own. This saves lots of bandwidth.
Another side effect of calculating health dynamically is that we don't have to synchronize the health directly. The clients already know the base health, the strength attribute and the buffs, so they can calculate the health on their own without needing another packet.

The effect is similar to our NavMeshAgent, which only synchronizes the destination with the client. The client can figure out the path on its own, hence saving lots of bandwidth too. Movement usually requires a packet like [(x,y,z),(rotation.x,rotation.y,rotation.z),speed] every 500ms, which we don't need at all. These kinds of optimizations will pay off greatly when we get to thousands of entities.

Something else to consider is that UNET isn't known for it's exhaustive stress testing. We should try to send around as few packets as necessary, and do as less networking as possible. The UNET bugs listed in the first post should get you an idea why I try to be careful.

As for determining when a buff has ended: you could add some kind of 'buffEndEventFired' flag to each skill. Set it to true by default, set it to false when the buff starts. Then in Player.Update check if there are any buffs that ended, but still have their buffEndEventFired set to false. Then fire your OnBuffEnd event and set the flag to true.
By the way, you mentioned stopping a buff in UIRefresh.UpdateBuffs. UIRefresh is only for drawing the UI. There is no server sided logic in there, and it could potentially be disabled for dedicated servers as well.
Note: if you only need this because of performance concerns, then I recommend to avoid that completely for the performance + synchronization reason explained above.

What do you mean?

 

What character packs have folks purchased that work well with uMMORPG. I'm still having issues with the characters I have chosen, such as sinking into the ground etc. I have checked the everything suggested to me by vis2K Thank you!

 

Hi @vis2k,

Currently I'm testing the 1.30 with 5.3.5f1 and I'm receiving the following warning everytime I start the game.

NetworkManager detected a script reload in the editor. This has caused the network to be shut down.
UnityEngine.Networking.NetworkIdentity:UNetStaticUpdate()

I don't remember if it was happening in the old release. I did just a fresh import from the store.

 

Tested the headless linux server with websockets enabled in a remote machine and running a WebGL client connected to the server in another remote machine, but I'm experiencing some issues

1) Lost the Player textures, whatever class -(
2) If I use WASD I lost the connection; but not it happens clicking the floor, who works pretty fine imho.
4) Hitting a mob, it lost the connection.

Awesome work! Keep it up! Thanks for your support.

EDIT: Fixed

 

I've seen an inventory system like that, is your name Austin?

 

Good news! Your solution works brilliantly. I'm kicking myself for not thinking about that way. I used a quick rewrite of your StartOffender() method.

Code (CSharp):

1.   void checkEndBuff()
2.   {
3.   for (int i = 0; i < skills.Count; ++i)
4.   if (!skills[i].buffEndEventFired && skills[i].BuffTimeRemaining() == 0)
5.   {
6.   var skill = skills[i];
7.   skill.buffEndEventFired = true;
8.   Debug.Log("checkEndBuff Success");
9.   // Dispatch End Buff events here
10.   skills[i] = skill;
11.   }
12.   }

It is called in Player.UpdateClient() and the buffEndEventFired is set to false in Entity.CastSkill under the skill.category == "Buff" section. Even seems to work with a player quitting and resuming after a server shutdown. Looks great.

I would like to continue discussing the architecture of UMMORPG and some ideas I have for improving performance. Although I'm not as experienced a programmer as you, I hope I can contribute.

 

Sinking into the ground sounds like a wrong NavMeshAgent or collider placement.

That's a UNET bug / useless warning. They said that we should ignore it.

The WebGL black textures are a Unity bug, I already listed this under Unity bugs on the first page. They happen for me on every 5th build or so, more often on Linux than on Mac / Windows.
Close Unity, delete the Library folder from your project, try again. If it still happens afterwards, then please report a bug with the Unity bug reporter and let us know about the case number.

About your other two bugs: do they also happen when you run the server in the Unity editor and connect with a WebGL client?

Do you mean the icons or the code? I wrote the code from scratch and my name is not Austin.

Good to hear that it works!

 

Thanks for your support!

I was testing with a webgl client uploaded to my webserver, connecting a remote headless linux server via websockets.

By the way, I hadn't any problem with a Windows desktop client connecting a headless server. Seems its working fine.

 

I'm looking at possible ways to integrate UMA into the character creation process (Players only), but I'm running into a hurdle. I'm trying to figure out how to get a player's UMA stored server-side. Does anyone here know of a relatively painless and network gentle way to get the UMA DNA for a given player to be stored within the XML database on the server, either within the normal player xml file or as a second file? I keep thinking that if you can save a UMA recipe as a .txt, you should be able to use that data to save to the server within xml fields, but I'm pretty xml dumb. Any ideas?

 

Sounds like a WebGL/UNET bug then. That's a difficult combination, since both WebGL and UNET are rather new.

You can take a look at the Database script, there are lots of examples on how to save and load XML data.