Community-Built COH Style MMORPG

[Aviticus Gladius]

Greetings:

My name is Aaron Victoria, Lead Designer/Programmer of an independent MMORPG entitled Legends of Etherell: Antavia. I'm also the CEO of an independent game development studio, SilverHelm Studios LLC. For the last 3 years our company has been developing Legends of Etherell, unfunded, as a community-driven product. As Lead Designer, I've drawn from massive amounts of inspiration from countless MMORPG experiences from Everquest to Dungeons Siege. However, one of my biggest influences was City of Heroes/City of Villains a game that I played from its early beta release to its final closing. City of Heroes was the first game that ushered in my exposure to team/party based gameplay; my friends and dedicated every other Saturday to it during my days in the military. We never missed a session for almost 5 years (except during deployments with no internet options). It was my inspiration, the supporting structure for our current skill system, and has been the basis of the grouping mechanics in our project.

City of Heroes represents an era that I'm not quite ready to let go of yet, and it's the reason why I'm here. I've spent the last few months researching the demand for City of Heroes and how its closing has affected players. I must say, it has revealed some incredible discoveries. After playing Champions Online, it just didn't have the same feeling. I didn't feel like I was playing a City of Heroes alternative, but more like I was playing another game completely. So I continued my research across various forums on the internet, and found that a lot of players tried Champions Online and felt the same way that I did. After a long meeting with friends and associates that played City of Heroes religiously, I decided they may be right; it may be time to share my idea with a community of like-minded City of Heroes fans.

We started developing Legends of Etherell 3 years ago, with the first 2 years dedicated to story development and the last year to physical content development and programming.  About 2 months ago we met another group of independent MMORPG developers who worked on the technology behind Everquest 1/2 and Asheron's Call 1/2. They happened to have started development opposite of us; starting with programming first using placeholder art. Their game, "Project Gorgon" featured far more advanced server technology than ours had, so we formed a great partnership where we now utilize their outstanding technology to power our project in exchange for our help with art. This has empowered both teams to build a strong network of developers working to deliver games demanded by the players. The Gorgon server technology represents a massive software suite capable of easily creating template based MMORPGs. With a dedicated team of artist, programmers, directors, composers, and the community, I believe we can create the spiritual successor to one of my most favored MMORPGs of all-time, City of Heroes/City of Villains.

As I write this I think about all the cherished weekends partnering with my super group, rushing through zone, and blasting my way though instances (Energy Blaster FTW). I also remember all the friends I've made from the experience. Friends who's kids now call me uncle, that I spend time with; it represents something so much more to me and I thought I'd commune with people that may feel the same way. So I'd like to know, "Who would be interested in helping to see the rebirth of a legendary MMORPG?" For the moment a small team could work with the community to develop a game design document. Once the document reaches a set stage, development would only require a small team of developers to push it to the pre-alpha as it will borrow core code from both the client and server of Gorgon tech in starting. Only minor programming will be required to accomplish City of Heroes style gameplay. Here is a list of specifications:


Gorgon Server Technology:
Development Engine: Unity 3D
Client Language: C#
Server Language: Java
Database System: MongoDB [MySql will be featured soon]


Team Requirement:
1 Lead Designer/Project Lead
1 Project Manager
2 Advanced Network Programmers
2 General Programmers
2 Concept Artists
2 Characters Artists
2 Environment Artists
1 Level Designer
1 Composer


As a commercial programmer with over 19 years on-the-job experience, I'm able to help where I can. However, I also own and operate my own local recording studio, work as Lead Designer and Assistant Lead Programmer for Legends of Etherell, and I'm a single father with 2 children; this leaves me with enough time to enjoy a single MMORPG title (which was City of Heroes) when I'm off. I'm more than willing to offer my composing skills, as well as sound engineering, which is something I can do easily between clients at my studio. To support our independent development efforts my company launched our network SHOGN (SilverHelm's Online Games Network), where we provide indie MMORPGs with free web hosting, a crowd funding component much like Kickstarters, and a full forum. Our company does not retain any of the funds obtained from the crowd funding efforts. All earnings are paid to the project's developers as monthly salaries. Upon release, our network gathers 30% of all final revenue which is then invested into the advancement of the network; including the site, it's database, and other network related funding. SilverHelm Studios does not retain any of that funding; including anything towards the expansion or promotion of our company or our internal products. Our title has its own funding component as will the potential COH spiritual successor. Project Managers are held responsible for the management of these funds, though our Chief Operating Officer (COO) handles the final distribution of payments for legal responsibility reasons. The community is then made aware of where their money is spent before it is spent. This is in no way meant to be a "cash grab", and nothing is secretive with our company. We are a community-funded development (per project) development studio and we're proud of that. It's they way we want to run our studio and how we've been operating since it was founded 3 years ago.

Please voice opinions and share your ideas on this thread. I'd love to hear what everyone thinks about moving forward with this idea. Who would invest? What would you see done with the project that wasn't done with COH?  What would be great rewards for investors? Thanks for your time.

Gorgon Technology In Motion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JF4F5Qpk7TQ#!
[Footage is from October 2012; many visual and technical advancements have been made]

Aaron Victoria
aaronvictoria@legends-of-etherell.com
http://www.shogn.net (beta)
http://loe.shogn.net
http://gorgon.shogn.net

[Rotten Luck]

We already have been working on not one but two Community-Built Projects.   Both fall under the label of Plan Z. 

Plan Z operations is the last hope projects now both have started Virtual Studios.  I'm not involved with the Heroes and Villains project, but am Involved in The Phoenix Project.  Both have websites and Forums operation and have Programmers and members who know nothing about computers but have great minds at story telling. 

Heroes and Villains is being build here... http://www.heroes-and-villains.com/phpb/index.php

Missing Worlds Media is building The Phoenix Project here... http://www.missingworldsmedia.com/

Just in case this is an Unicorn.  Your a few months late!

[Aviticus Gladius]

These both look like awesome projects, so I'll be following both of them. Thanks for sharing!

[Rotten Luck]

I always encourage people to join the project forums.  We could use your, and your team experience to get these going. 

Last I heard The Phoenix Project had over 50 full members and over a Hundred forum members all doing our part to rebuild.  There is always room for more given we all are doing it as part time hobby level at this point.  There are plans for funding in the future, but we need proof of concepts.

[Segev]

This thread certainly caught my eye. Hearing advice from somebody who's building a game of at least the same type (an MMO)  would be welcome. We've settled on CryENGINE 3 as our engine with Multiverse server-side, and we've got a fairly extensive set of Lore built up. One thing I know is a major concern in a supers game that we had to examine in each of the engines we explored: does your Unity engine support flight? (This is mostly me being curious; you'd have to talk to our technical team to get an in-detail discussion of pros and cons of the engines.)

[Aviticus Gladius]

It seems there may be quite a few projects springing up soon. It's great to see that others are inspired to the point of action. We currently have a fully operating engine and all the tools to make a quick pre-alpha MMORPG, so that will be our initial motion. We also own quite a few dedicated server machines, that are covered by a close friend of mine who served in the military with me. He's now the president of a server farm where he works as a security manager. So he has given us quite a few dedicated machines as a show of friendship. This is another strong point for our company, making us more than capable of hosting the game ourselves too. That would prevent a lot of overhead monthly development cost for server expenses. I'm about to get into these site's forum and see what you all have been putting together. Thanks for sharing this information with me; I'm glad we share the same enthusiasm.

[Ironwolf]

I wish you good luck on your efforts!

There is a large void right now on Super hero games and I would love to see it filled by a community effort.

[Aviticus Gladius]

@Segev, CryEngine is an incredible engine, with lots of graphic splender, but from a technical standpoint it's not really a feasible option for an MMORPG. It's core is very CPU intensive, even at lower density which means you're going to be limiting your game's playability to a smaller crowd. A lot of developers often feel, "You can always turn your settings down..." This is true, but it's not always the player's preferred choice. Players will always find a game they can play at maximum or near maximum potential before they play a game that has to be tragically reduced. Look at Archage, it's powered by CryEngine 3 now, and you can see outrageous amounts of LOD pop-ins in the official trailers. It looks terrible, but they have no choice. It's either that or suffer framerate drops at an astonishing rate. My first prototype of Legends of Etherell was done with the original CryEngine, RakNet, and MySql. I got terrible performance on mid-range platforms even on medium graphic levels. That isn't our target market, we want people to be able to play the game on 4-5 year old computer on mid to high detail; not maximum though. Unity supports anything you want to program though it does suffer from the exception of the same floating point issue all engines suffer from; this normally occurs if you're trying to create massive zones or huge open-worlds. This is something I've written a software solution for in Unity even though we won't be using it for sometime. Right now the engine/server technology supports massive zones, just as City of Heroes does. So that would be covered. Unity also has massive third-party support and publishing prowess. You can go to Unity's site and see a massive list of released titles both mobile, PC, and console.

There is a reason why very few indie games are released using UDK or CryEngine. One reason being that the licensing can be a huge nightmare and they present lots of legal woes. Unity just updated their EULA so that publishing developers don't owe royalties as you did before. Instead, after 100,000 dollars in sells you have to sign a special license contract. Indie developers no longer have to be exhausted with legal concerns as we were originally. Unity also has a thriving community of content creators that offer free models, sounds, and music or sell them in the asset store for really cheap. This trims a massive amount of time off your development cycle if you can find something you would normal spend time developing for a decent price. I've programmed commercially for 19 years, working as both Lead Software Engineer and Technical Director for a few different companies. Therefore, I can tell you what I feel are pitfall engines. The first being Hero Engine, because it requires too much effort to import and set up 3d content in the system. Another issue I have with it is that you have no direct access to the server machine. Developing an MMO will always lead to some major crash or server-side error, in which you need to get down to the server's hardware source and probably do some type of mass engineering to get your feature to work. You'd then be stuck, unable to make adjustments without requiring special effort from your provider; this is never good when developing an MMO. The second is UDK, because the network infrastructure is in no way even capable of doing something of that nature. Feel free to look up the Atlas Engine, and see how much it costs to license and you will understand why it's not a great option. CryEngine would be the last that I'd suggest you avoid for the simple fact that it's overly hardware intensive and isn't easy to optimize for a densely populated MMO like CoH. I ran CoH maxed out on an i7 with dual geforce 560i video cards and 8gb of ram and there would be lots of frame drops when clusters of players populated a small area simultaneously. That's just a massive amount of clustering. Eventually you'd have to start working on some nature of advanced culling to start fading out players to keep the gameplay smooth. That's all good, until someone drops out of the game and you see someone fade in while running towards you. It would also look quite odd to have an enemy die and you see nothing there killing it. It kind of takes the immersion out of the world too because you're not seeing someone that is there. You also don't want to be forced to limit the contents of your world just because you chose an engine that didn't work for your design.

I have a feeling efforts will be pooled eventually out of necessity, because having 3+ games in development with all playable will decrease the player base for all other titles including that title.

@Ironwolf, Thanks for you well wishes. The goal is to perfectly replicate the feel of City of Heroes, with slightly updated graphics, and a ton of new or renamed skills sets. The community can then take the reigns and pour their ideas and creativity into the development process once they say the game feels right; the entire time they can be building lore and input at the website level.

[Lily Barclay]

So this will essentially be an attempt to copy City of heroes as much as possible while avoiding copyright issues?

[Aviticus Gladius]

@Lily, involving movement, camera position, skill usage, skill upgrades, and the likes. The story, lore, questing, and all other things content related is going to be developed by the community. Unless of course the community would like to see the gameplay modified. In that event, nothing will be duplicated. I'm under the impression that much like myself, other supporters don't want to play a completely different Super Hero MMORPG.

[Rotten Luck]

I personally feel we need to focus on One game instead of multiple ones myself.  At this point however in my mind is in concept mode.  Seeing what's possible and seeking options. 

As for your group Aviticus I say work with and on the Phoenix Project.  We have developed a good Lore base and have lots of ideas in going forward.  Basically a lot of what you want to ask the community was already asked and being cleaned up.  A third game concept at this stage might not be good.  Someone tried to start a third option Plan Z: Justice, but I think that fizzled.

[Aviticus Gladius]

@Rotten Luck, The conditions of our partnership with the Gorgon team, limits our usage of their server tech to our network. So, we have no real option to use it externally. I wrote the original system for Legends of Etherell in Torque 3D and it took me almost 6 months to get all the features of a standard MMO implemented at a prototype level; this wasn't even detail intensive. So starting from scratch isn't feasible for us. I've been surfing both forums and haven't been able to find any videos or images of gameplay from either project. Has there been any form of rapid prototyping for either?

[Rotten Luck]

As far as I know.  Only some 3D modeling of buildings and such.  For Heroes and Villains some costume/character Models. 

Like I said you seem to have the nuts and bolts, we have the paint and decorators.  Some maps been worked up Ideas of locations.  I'm a part time member of the Lore team in TPP so the tech side is alien to my understanding. 

Segev is that Project lead director. 

Like I said we started with a list of what people wanted to see in a spiritual heir to COH.  Then we started seeking engine that could handle the requests.  An argument over direction and vision came about so Plan Z was split in two.  Me I have no idea what those arguments were nor do I care.   

Both are doing what we can with what we have.  A set of desires and ideas and trying to get them to work. 

I know Heroes and Villains are trying the Hero Engine and The Phoenix Project as you been told is working on the Cry engine.  I don't think any real Prototyping really been done as we all are learning as we go.

Hence why I said Join up you know the Nuts and Bolts of a MMO style game, and that's what we need.  There are Programmers with some background working on the project but as far as I know none with the requirements for a CoX 2 game. 

The diffrence in the two projects come down to this.

Heroes and Villains want to copy as much game play and mechanics of CoX as they can with out crossing the IP boundary.

TPP seeking to make what has the spirit of CoX but new mechanics and game play.  A City of Heroes 2 feel instead of replacing City of Heroes.

[Lily Barclay]

@Lily, involving movement, camera position, skill usage, skill upgrades, and the likes. The story, lore, questing, and all other things content related is going to be developed by the community. Unless of course the community would like to see the gameplay modified. In that event, nothing will be duplicated. I'm under the impression that much like myself, other supporters don't want to play a completely different Super Hero MMORPG.

You mentioned "new or renamed skill sets" above. I guess it was the renamed bit that tripped me up.I'm not looking for, or to work on, anything that outright copies CoH. A similar feel and playstyle, yes, but a clone? No. The game was old, and the newer content in it was the better content. I'm leery of anything that seeks to replicate it. I would be looking for a game that had the feel of CoH in that you have to click powers and the content is highly instanced and the team sizes are large. Nothing else should be the same (other than playing supers, that is).

[Segev]

Aviticus Gladius, please feel free to register on our forums at http://missingworldsmedia.com/forums/index.php

Our technical lead is downix on Titan Networks and Doctor Tyche on our forums. If you'd like to open any lines of discussion, please PM him and include me as a CC on the PM, in either forum. I had a lot of the same reservations over CryENGINE, initially, that you do, but the plan to use CryENGINE is factoring in the time it would take to develop the MMO; by the time it's published and released, we expect current CryENGINE 3 tech to be runable on by-then mid-range or even somewhat low-range computers. However, he can give you the specifics and reasons why we made the choice we did, as well as discuss the ups and downs of your system, more directly than can I.

There may be room to discuss things with you and your people, or there may not, but I think it's at least worth exploring. See what options are available to all of us.

Business-side, Terwyn is our lead, so you can also talk to him on either forum. If there's opportunity here for both our organizations, we should avail ourselves of it. If not, it costs nothing but some time and due diligence to find that out.

[Perfidus]

Really hope some of these projects and teams can condense into one. Though, realistically, three teams working increases the likelihood that at least one will see some form of release, which is good.

I dunno, I'm not involved in any of it. Just a vagrant looking for a home, and the sooner the better.

[Lightslinger]

Really hope some of these projects and teams can condense into one. Though, realistically, three teams working increases the likelihood that at least one will see some form of release, which is good.

I dunno, I'm not involved in any of it. Just a vagrant looking for a home, and the sooner the better.

Agreed, as community it would be a HUGE feat to get a game to market, the chances of splitting up and getting 3 games to market is completely outside the realm of reality however.

I support every effort but coalescing around one "successor" project would definitely be ideal. It might not be possible at this point, but it would be ideal.

[downix]

I was reading about you guys while doing the research for TPP. Surprised to see you.

@Segev, CryEngine is an incredible engine, with lots of graphic splender, but from a technical standpoint it's not really a feasible option for an MMORPG. It's core is very CPU intensive, even at lower density which means you're going to be limiting your game's playability to a smaller crowd. A lot of developers often feel, "You can always turn your settings down..." This is true, but it's not always the player's preferred choice. Players will always find a game they can play at maximum or near maximum potential before they play a game that has to be tragically reduced. Look at Archage, it's powered by CryEngine 3 now, and you can see outrageous amounts of LOD pop-ins in the official trailers. It looks terrible, but they have no choice. It's either that or suffer framerate drops at an astonishing rate.
My first prototype of Legends of Etherell was done with the original CryEngine, RakNet, and MySql. I got terrible performance on mid-range platforms even on medium graphic levels. That isn't our target market, we want people to be able to play the game on 4-5 year old computer on mid to high detail; not maximum though.

Archage is not the only MMO powered by CryENGINE, however. Aion and Cabal 2 also use it. I've seen the LOD pop-ins for ArcheAge, and with the CryENGINE itself, and it's not difficult to avoid. As for its core being very CPU intensive, it's CPU requirements are below the bottom-end desktop CPU produced today off-the-shelf at your big box store today. Recall that a 4-5 year old system when we release will be very different from one today, or one two years ago. A 5 year old system upon the planned upon release of TPP will have dual core, integrated DX11 GPU in the processor, 64-bit with at least 4GB of RAM.

Unity supports anything you want to program though it does suffer from the exception of the same floating point issue all engines suffer from; this normally occurs if you're trying to create massive zones or huge open-worlds. This is something I've written a software solution for in Unity even though we won't be using it for sometime. Right now the engine/server technology supports massive zones, just as City of Heroes does. So that would be covered. Unity also has massive third-party support and publishing prowess. You can go to Unity's site and see a massive list of released titles both mobile, PC, and console.

We studied Unity, and while a solid engine, it did not fit the needs, and while the new update would lift it up to that point, that is in beta, and still pending revisions. The amount of work we found needed to bring it in-line to expectations was considerable. However, you say you have a solution, which may change that evaluation, which I would be interested in talking to you about.

There is a reason why very few indie games are released using UDK or CryEngine. One reason being that the licensing can be a huge nightmare and they present lots of legal woes. Unity just updated their EULA so that publishing developers don't owe royalties as you did before. Instead, after 100,000 dollars in sells you have to sign a special license contract. Indie developers no longer have to be exhausted with legal concerns as we were originally. Unity also has a thriving community of content creators that offer free models, sounds, and music or sell them in the asset store for really cheap. This trims a massive amount of time off your development cycle if you can find something you would normal spend time developing for a decent price. I've programmed commercially for 19 years, working as both Lead Software Engineer and Technical Director for a few different companies. Therefore, I can tell you what I feel are pitfall engines. The first being Hero Engine, because it requires too much effort to import and set up 3d content in the system. Another issue I have with it is that you have no direct access to the server machine. Developing an MMO will always lead to some major crash or server-side error, in which you need to get down to the server's hardware source and probably do some type of mass engineering to get your feature to work. You'd then be stuck, unable to make adjustments without requiring special effort from your provider; this is never good when developing an MMO. The second is UDK, because the network infrastructure is in no way even capable of doing something of that nature. Feel free to look up the Atlas Engine, and see how much it costs to license and you will understand why it's not a great option. CryEngine would be the last that I'd suggest you avoid for the simple fact that it's overly hardware intensive and isn't easy to optimize for a densely populated MMO like CoH. I ran CoH maxed out on an i7 with dual geforce 560i video cards and 8gb of ram and there would be lots of frame drops when clusters of players populated a small area simultaneously. That's just a massive amount of clustering.

CoH's engine was also not very optimized. DX9 support for audio and inputs was literally bolted on, not part of the underlying system. It was a 9 year old engine, with the quirks one would expect as such. There is a reason why the plans for CoH2 involved effectively starting from scratch, engine-wise. As for optimization, Aion successfully handles it with a slightly older version of the CryENGINE, and is one of the largest MMO's on the market.

Eventually you'd have to start working on some nature of advanced culling to start fading out players to keep the gameplay smooth. That's all good, until someone drops out of the game and you see someone fade in while running towards you. It would also look quite odd to have an enemy die and you see nothing there killing it. It kind of takes the immersion out of the world too because you're not seeing someone that is there. You also don't want to be forced to limit the contents of your world just because you chose an engine that didn't work for your design.

Already have been examining this and have solutions lined up.

I have a feeling efforts will be pooled eventually out of necessity, because having 3+ games in development with all playable will decrease the player base for all other titles including that title.

@Ironwolf, Thanks for you well wishes. The goal is to perfectly replicate the feel of City of Heroes, with slightly updated graphics, and a ton of new or renamed skills sets. The community can then take the reigns and pour their ideas and creativity into the development process once they say the game feels right; the entire time they can be building lore and input at the website level.

The Plan Z section would be the right place to recruit, I'd suggest. Or you could talk to one of the existing projects as well.  I know I'd love to talk with you.

[FatherXmas]

CoH didn't use Dx9 in it's graphics, only audio, input and network support.

[downix]

CoH didn't use Dx9 in it's graphics, only audio, input and network support.

Did not say it used it for graphics, only that it was bolted-on. Modified my reply to make that more clear. Sorry for the confusion.