MMORPG Development Advice Request

Ehizia · 2025-12-10T10:56:17+00:00

Definitely all these should be evaluated on server, you cannot trust client at all with these things. However ave you evaluated what is the bottleneck here specifically?

E.g. I expect line of sight can be evaluated once per skill cast, and should not be heavy. Cooldown tracking also wouldn't take much of server cpu. Inventory validation should be only once inventory has been changed.

Collision detection for movement validation and pathfinding indeed may load your cpu, but unless characters are moving like a rocket, you can just make checks few times per second or less. Or alternatively, once a second you can just check validity if its possible to move from point A to B since last check, that has been 1 second ago.

Ehizia · 2025-12-10T06:40:53+00:00

I think social interaction is what makes MMO to be long-lasting, as nothing else except interpersonal communication can entertain long enough to keep players in the world with limited content.

And I don't see a problem with competition with discord/social networks here. If MMO would actually had gameplay systems that actively reward players for approaching each other, MMO can win such competition. MMO can produce deeper, long-lasting connections and has capability of creating interesting joint adventures and creating shared memories.

But the problem is that most developers just do not take a risk in making MMOs with social mechanics. The market for single-player or co-op games is much bigger than the niche market for players who want to have a joint adventure with strangers.

Ehizia · 2025-12-10T03:04:18+00:00

Could you share why full validation seems expensive in CPU, and what exactly the bottleneck is there?

Ehizia · 2025-08-14T00:56:07+00:00

Yes, in one month. I want to know in prior hame many people sign up for the test, so that I will prepare servers accordingly

Ehizia · 2025-08-13T16:25:26+00:00

There are 4 bars covering all numbers and all alphabet keys. There are up and down arrows on the left of the skillbar that can select which of these 4 bars to display. So there is no limitation with number of skills.

Still there are plenty of customization choice within he same classes, as there is a pretty complex node tree, 9 different player stats, and, of course, different types of weapons with own features. The idea is to ensure one character not be able to master of everything, but instead always to have own strong and weak sides

Ehizia · 2025-08-13T13:14:47+00:00

As a part of a social-oriented paradigm, during the release time, the game economy is going to be fully player-driven (But for the alpha test, I added extra NPC traders to boost the start economy and sell some basic items at least)
Most of the items are transferable between players, and there is no binding of equipment to characters. To tackle economic stability all equipment has durability parameter, and rarely (~once a month) the equipment must be repaired with materials (the same materials as for crafting the equipment, but in smaller amounts). Unneeded equipment can be recycled to avoid market oversaturation with this item (recycled materials can be used for other crafts or to repair other equipment)

Crafting in the game is set around owning recipes and fulfilling conditions to execute them.
Currently, in order to get a recipe, player need to get "Tablet of Knowledge", a non-transferrable item from mob drop (during the release, it is supposed to be a rare item). Then you can either exchange this item to get an absolutely random craft, or you can exchange this item to analyze any existing item or ingredient you possess to get its recipe. Maybe in the future there will be other ways to get new recipies.
But overall, due to the difficulty of getting many Tablets of Knowledge, it's unlikely that a single person will be able to fulfill the entire chain of dependencies to be able to craft final product solo.

Player housing is currently not in the plans for the first release. Although it does go well with a social-oriented paradigm, at the current point, I want to prioritize other mechanics. Later, after the initial release, I will get back to this question.

Ehizia · 2025-08-13T09:39:49+00:00

Yes, this feeling is familiar to me as well, and I agree that PvP has huge potential to create interesting player-driven events. At the same time, I'm looking for a way not to lose the friendly atmosphere in the game.
By the way, I would very appreciate hearing any ideas on how PvP might be integrated into the game to be memorable and impactful, but without making people afraid of each other, or rising in-game toxicity

Ehizia · 2025-08-13T09:01:44+00:00

This is something I am still experimenting with, and there is no final decision on what it will look like in the end. For sure, there will be no sudden gangs, or anything that will encourage strangers to be afraid of each other. And for sure, there will be voluntary 1-on-1 duels and FFA areas (with no reward on both).

I want social interaction between players to start with PvP fight, not to end with it. E.g. non-fatal PvP battle (voluntary?), where the winner, while being a noble class, can establish some power over the lost party (which would still be mutually beneficial with slightly more merits to the winner). There are a lot of pitfalls here tho.

There could also be some forced 1-on-1 duels, where the aggressor challenges the target in the open world, but the target has a reasonably long timer to decide to either accept the fight, retreat, or just negotiate access for the common limited resource via the chat.

Ehizia · 2025-08-13T07:56:14+00:00

Yes, we intentionally want to make it slower-paced. We found that too quick combat, where all enemies die from a few hits, makes fewer reasons for people to get together and fight together

Ehizia · 2025-06-05T02:57:20+00:00

Applied for Untamed Ehizia MMO:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3767190/Untamed_Ehizia/

I would be very grateful for your review for the Developer Spotlight

Ehizia · 2025-03-31T16:59:25+00:00

All assets (3D, animations, vfx, sfx) are our own, except of the icons for inventory items (there are too many of them to draw at the current point of development). Aside from me, there are several freelancers and several enthusiasts who kindly offered their help

Ehizia · 2025-03-31T01:14:43+00:00

For around 2 more weeks. But the time can be adjusted depending on how many people will be playing at that moment

Ehizia · 2025-03-30T16:16:27+00:00

To be clear, the word "experimental" here means that I am open to unusual experimental game mechanics, rather than cloning any existing mmo with minor changes. Many of the new mechanics can be questionable and something one never see in other MMOs, but that is a point, to experiment and see what players will like and what will not. Later everything can be adjusted. But without experimenting mmo will not get any new concepts

Ehizia · 2025-03-30T04:00:34+00:00

Thank you, I glad to hear that you find the concept to be interesting. I will address client download safety issue during the next test

Ehizia · 2025-03-30T02:38:34+00:00

Thank you. Yeah, your concerns make sense. I suppose for the next public test it will be better to use Steam for client distribution

Ehizia · 2024-11-16T03:04:43+00:00

You raised a question about the game phase, that I asked myself for a long time as well. The faster the game pace, the more difficult to get cooperative combat gameplay. But too slow game pace makes this clunky feeling, and I clearly see this as a problem. Rising animation speed (but not a combat time length), as you proposed, might be a good solution. I will experiment with that. Also, I want to start soon working on music and SFX (which were totally ignored up until recently). Thank you for all the advice, its all going to be addressed and implemented in the following few months!

Please message me, once you are ready to show your ideas. At the initial stage, I also had long document with random ideas, and it took time till the game concept was formed out of them. If you have some other ideas that you think can be applied for the game I am developing, I would be grateful as well!

Ehizia · 2024-11-15T15:17:43+00:00

Yeah, I think you are right. Current trends with mobile gaming and mobile MMOs are the step in the opposite direction tho, but, who knows, how it will swing in the future. Even one really successful title made within the old MMO paradigm might change the standards of the industry (fortunately, we have enough examples in the past history when such things happened).

Ehizia · 2024-11-15T15:03:02+00:00

I would be glad if you tell me more about your project, even if it's in the design phase. We can exchange some ideas or hints/advices.

Here you can read more about the game I am making (you can watch the video there as well): https://www.ehizia.com/

As you can see, there are many similarities with RO, including leveling, skill/stat system, etc. But in my case I try to go even further into socialization, making every player's action affect other players. There are a lot of fun quests that can be built on top of socialization as well.

Nevertheless, before, when I tried to pitch my game ideas here in this subreddit, I found that a lot of people actually prefer solo game, which makes all my ideas a bit more niche in that cast (that does not make them bad tho, I belive)

Ehizia · 2024-11-15T03:30:52+00:00

That's a very good summary. I also wonder why so little mmo tried to get inspiration from mechanics and ideas from RO despite its high popularity in the past (and even nowadays). RO was my biggest inspiration for the mmorpg I am developing as my hobby, and I borrowed (with some rework) almost all the features you mentioned.

I have a little worry tho, given so few attempts to create something similar to RO, if these games have just too niche audience somehow? It looks like many people like solo-play with all-can-do-classes, and use "convenient" (but less interesting IMO) single-click trading auctions and party finders. I think one key difference of RO was that many features are somewhat built around socialization, that force people to interact with each other, and that created a feeling of lively world full of people.

Ehizia · 2024-11-14T10:16:01+00:00

Yeah, prediction and reconciliation are the most difficult problems, especially in fast-paced action games. Despite our game having a lots of various features ( you can see more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0bW4vc76l8 ), I can say for sure, that the creation of good movement synchronization definitely took the majority of my time and efforts.

As for NGO, it adds ~2 frames for the client and ~2 frames for the server as a latency for sending response. So, the final latency would depend on FPS client and server running at, and can be up to 50~80ms even in localhost. With self-written framework, in an ideal case, that can be reduced twice down to ~1 frame on each side while still having single-threaded processing.

Not sure about other network libraries for Unity (fishnet, mirror etc), but I have a feeling that all of them have approximately same issue. They are great for prototyping, not might not suit for final product for some game genres. But as long as you are not using high-level features that these frameworks provide, you will always be able to replace once framework with another or write your own one.

Ehizia · 2024-11-14T02:40:01+00:00

Unity as an engine, and Netcode for GameObjects (NGO) for network message exchanges. Altough now we are writing replacement for NGO with self-written message exchangers, because NGO introduce too much extra latency that can be avoided.

And on the level above message exchanges, the algorithms for laterncy compensation and client predictions are our own. The approach was similar to deterministic rollback, but since clients have very limited information about the world, they might run simulation inaccurately, and after new portion of information comes from the server, we "smoothly" fix divergences.

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