Welcome!

[Mircea Popescu]

Hi all, and welcome.

Epothy is a RPG. Not quite, so far it's more like an egg from which an RPG will hatch. But because I'm one of the people hatching it, I have the magical ability to tell you a few things about how it will be the future, even if it's not like that yet.

Epothy will sport all the usual trappings of what people proudly call MMORPGs, like a permanent world, combat, magic, crafting, chatting, an economy, quests and so forth. Unlike all the other games out there, it does not insist to be called a MMO, unless the first M stands for modest. Otherwise no, it doesn't quite believe in being "massive". Massive is not a quality, massive is what malignant tumours and traffic jams are.

Also unlike all the other games out there, it isn't a WOW clone, and very much unlike all the other games, it's not the end result of some haphazard game design made mostly as a last ditch attempt, with the primary goal of showcasing eyecandy. Epothy has the benefit of having a degree of magnitude more competence and effort poured into the game design part than into the technical/development part, something the rest of the publishing community, big or small, American, European or Korean, simply can not afford.

Epothy is a labour of love, made by very idiosyncratic people to be the perfect and definitive answer to the problems of online gaming.

[iOAN]

I like the idea and i hope there will be people interested to help this project, to keep it alive and to make a virtual world like no other.
I'm glad to help if i can , i will keep posting and be here when updates are made.
Good luck!

[Mircea Popescu]

Hehe the first user! Welcome aboard.

Im sure some sort of special items will be available in game for early adopters at some point

[m3ltd0wn]

hello,

first time here on forums, nice to see some romanians do some programming work, specially game developing
i must say it is a ambitious projec, MMORPGs are not easy to programm nor to maintain , trust me i had in mind creating one even started the skeleton of the application but in the end the lack of resources left me programming on other small projects that are doable by a single man
my past is familiar with mmorpgs, most actions were on WoW emulation software, and they worked like a charm the project was called Ludmilla, i don't know the present stages anymore, but i don't think it is a dead project

hope to help here a little bit, as i've seen you are using IRRLicht Engine, and i must say it is a good choice, powerfull, simple and fast! but it is only a rendering engine, so all other parts of the game, like physics, sound, networking must be coded outside
but consider looking into Panda3D engine as it is game and MMO proven, the pirates of carribean is build uppon it, as it is a game engine not a rendering engine , and it is written in python, an we all know that python is a powerfull programming language
just think combining panda3d and twisted python and you'll have a framework as powerfull as eve online has

[Mircea Popescu]

Hehe, luckily Polimedia is flush with good people, and not doing too poorly on other things either (check the nameservers for this forum, for one). Not that it can't take more aboard, but already has a good core in the devteam (even if most of them aren't Romanian :p). But you're absolutely correct, coding a RPG online is the most complex project type there is.

Irrlicht kicks ass from what I've seen, it's had some of the people pulling their hairs a little bit, but hey, that's why they call it a learning curve. But it delivers the FPS, and that's all that matters in the end. Sound you've probably already seen in the demo, based on the irrklang extension. Raknet is a dead lock for networking. The pshysics is still being shopped for, and the game engine itself (the game mechanics part) is being developed fully in-house.

The thing is that Epothy is a very clear and straightforward implementation of an existing design, so all-in-one game engines aren't very good a solution - they either impose limitations that contradict the intended design or include things that aren't in the design. All in all, it makes more sense to build the project on the fundamental blocks. (And imo, Eve has bullshit for a framkework).

Welcome aboard! And see you in game soon

[m3ltd0wn]

trust me eve's online framework is not bullshit at all !, it is more powerfull than any other game server there is for MMO , look it this way wow server is in fact a cluster of many many servers,and many realms, 2 or three servers host a realm or so, yea there are 10 million people or what so ever playing wow, but only a maximum of 5000-10000 people on one realm, and realm to realm pvp is almost impossible as i know (haven't played wow fro 4 years now so i'm not up to date )...now look into eve, one single realm can host 1 milion people... and the universe of eve is astronomically larger than any map developed by blizzard for wow so that is not a bullshit,it has load balancing, if a server is full it transfers you to another (same realm) and you can't even notice, in fact if you take "my warcraft studio" you can actually save a map of wow, then import it into 3d studio, milkshape or blender, and you will see a tiny little map, medium poly

back on topic, using raknet and irrklang won't do so much good on a commercial project
as for physics i recommend irrPhysx, it's a wrapper of nvidia's physx, easy to learn, as easy as irrlicht can be, the community will help you with anything, and you can find lots of examples for it , newton physics has an wrapper for irrlicht too, it integrates perfectly, but i don't know the developement stage of it

i don't recommend ODE and BULLET because their learning curve is way to slow

but for an mmo i've tested following engines: CrystalSpace : hard to learn, code is a mess, once you learn it well maybe it will be straight forward for developing an decent mmo, OGRE: hard to learn but it is very efficient and has lots of potential, license is a crap , Panda3D : not as easy as irrlicht, but it is very powerfull, combined with twisted me and my colleague managed to make a gameserver, a realmserver and some basic movements in the world in a matter of hours , it isn't limited because you can code anything in python from gui to network handlers and so on , and finally Irrlich: nice code, easy to read, easy to learn and easy to code with, community is great, constant upgrades and lots of features, zlib license is great for commercial purposes, lots of tools for it, nice integration with blender via irrb
i've suggested panda3d because it is mmorpg proven and has all the basics you need to start one, of course you'll need lots of python knowledge, c++ programming is possible with it too but it isn't so nice
all in all, i'm still loyal to irrlicht hehe, so hope you bring this world to reality
and a last word on this post, my team back in those days was formed mostly from russian programmers, and let me tell you they're the best programmers i've seen so far

[iOAN]

ludmila ? i know it... i test it 3 years ago. Ludmila, WAD, Ascent, Mangos, Antrix

it's seems the dev team will be great.

[m3ltd0wn]

yea ludmilla, the old lady hehe, i think i still have a cd with sources and decrypted wow packets from those days
iZOTOPE was my nickname on old wow emulation forums

so if help is needed i will gladly give a hand based on my current knowledge of irrlicht

cheers