New MMORPG?

[TofuPenguin]

Yoshi did a great job at saving this game. But over time it lost it's magic. I played ARR and came back in ShB and wow, what changes. And so many for the worst. The one that got me and still gets me is the homogenization of jobs. And the story went from feeling like a FF story to some anime tropey crap down the road.

At this point, I'm getting Game of Thrones vibe. Y'know, how it went from great to utter shit? Yea, that kind of feeling. And makes me not really want to try anything Yoshi might have to offer in the future. Same reason why I don't watch House of the Dragon and never will.

[Boblawblah]

And the story went from feeling like a FF story to some anime tropey crap down the road. .

How do you feel about the FFVII Remake story/characters?

[R041]

It's waaaay more than just "good graphics", it literally makes developing major content like an MMO much easier and smoother, allowing the team to be more creative and devote time and energy to innovation in gameplay and new ideas, unlike being limited to the same formula in FF14...

I work in UE5 and the things you mention studios already had solutions for, or other engines did natively. Nanite and Lumen have a very long road before they're usable with 60FPS and smooth camera panning in live games.

Nanite: Extremely large file sizes, you don't want my zbrush file directly in UE. Restricted to static meshes. We've almost always been able to auto-LoD. Shader restrictions. My team is not using this.

Lumen: Beautiful, amazing in theory. Really frustrating, laggy, and slow to update in practice. It relies on hybrid screenspace that creates way too many ghosting effects on the screen when you pan from a bright to a dark area or vice versa. Maybe we'll be ready for this in 5 years.

World Partition: Most engines have this, UE had plugins for this, and Unity has this. (I've worked on 400 chunk worlds before. Not fun)

1 file per actor: Nice in theory, but we usually just prefab different instances out and assign scenes anyway. 2 people working on 1 map is very complicated which is one reason to have partitions. 1 person accidentally touches the splatmap, or something that can't split when they weren't supposed to and it explodes. I'm less worried about the actor placement, when I typically don't want 2 people in the same scene anyway. Also assigning scenes is easier than assigning zones to someone. "Okay, just.. Don't place actors past this river and we'll be fine" this also explodes version control.

Oh, and if it's an MMO - It's going to have a lot of server side instanced data. So that means dev in client will be placing stuff, not in engine. We used a tool that could transfer the coord/properties of prefabs from scene over to the live server, but that's different.

We're already at a place where MMO dev should hypothetically be easy, but 'MMO' is complicated because server zones, data storage/fetch/security is complicated at large scale. Not because it's difficult to sculpt and LoD a rock.

But you are mostly right, that the dev pipeline is getting WAY better. Just don't really expect this team to give us more for less. When they know they can give us more for more, like how the real world works. :/

Yoshi prob looks at new pipelines and goes "Okay, so we can pump out 2x more creatures? Awesome. Split that time between this and this project." not "Okay so let's add 2x more creatures to 1 game for the same price as before"

That's why when people talk about in the graphics overhaul, how we can hypothetically have more objects and density per scene.. Most of us look at it and understand that it really doesn't matter, because that usually just means they can squeeze more out for less in dev. Not give us more overall.

[RyuDragnier]

Yoshi did a great job at saving this game. But over time it lost it's magic. I played ARR and came back in ShB and wow, what changes. And so many for the worst. The one that got me and still gets me is the homogenization of jobs. And the story went from feeling like a FF story to some anime tropey crap down the road.

*Looks at all the anime tropes present in FF for over 30 years*

That's...not exactly an argument you want to make. FF4 alone you win through the power of friendship, there's a ton of fake deaths, and the plot itself feels like it would easily work in a Shounen anime.

[Shinkuno]

Yoshi did a great job at saving this game. But over time it lost it's magic. I played ARR and came back in ShB and wow, what changes. And so many for the worst. The one that got me and still gets me is the homogenization of jobs. And the story went from feeling like a FF story to some anime tropey crap down the road.

At this point, I'm getting Game of Thrones vibe. Y'know, how it went from great to utter shit? Yea, that kind of feeling. And makes me not really want to try anything Yoshi might have to offer in the future. Same reason why I don't watch House of the Dragon and never will.

Yoshi saved the game by telling the team "go play WoW". Thats why, now that they try to do their own thing, the whole game starts to fall apart again. Hot take here: but CBU3 dont have a capable enough team to develop a MMO.

[Fyrebrand]

The thing is, Yoshi-P and team didn't even get to make THIS game. Not really. They salvaged an existing flop of a product that seemingly was not programmed very well and has less than stellar server infrastructure, and they've been wrestling with it to some extent to this very day. I would love to see what they can do if given a truly fresh start, a new engine, modern design ideas and features, etc., and not inherit somebody else's code, story ideas, and game mechanics.

Well, I guess the answer is "Final Fantasy XVI," so I guess we'll soon see how that turns out, but in terms of a new MMO I still want that.

[PEANUT]

Oh, and if it's an MMO - It's going to have a lot of server side instanced data. So that means dev in client will be placing stuff, not in engine. We used a tool that could transfer the coord/properties of prefabs from scene over to the live server, but that's different.[/INDENT]

We're already at a place where MMO dev should hypothetically be easy, but 'MMO' is complicated because server zones, data storage/fetch/security is complicated at large scale. Not because it's difficult to sculpt and LoD a rock.

But you are mostly right, that the dev pipeline is getting WAY better. Just don't really expect this team to give us more for less. When they know they can give us more for more, like how the real world works. :/

Yoshi prob looks at new pipelines and goes "Okay, so we can pump out 2x more creatures? Awesome. Split that time between this and this project." not "Okay so let's add 2x more creatures to 1 game for the same price as before"

That's why when people talk about in the graphics overhaul, how we can hypothetically have more objects and density per scene.. Most of us look at it and understand that it really doesn't matter, because that usually just means they can squeeze more out for less in dev. Not give us more overall.

Thanks for all the input, sorry I had to cut out some of your post or it wouldn't let me reply. UE5 is at 5.2 and they keep improving upon it which is very nice knowing it's going to get better and more optimized. I'm curious what you think can be improved when it comes to servers and such? I know for MMO's server data utilization is very important, does that also have anything to do with playing online games in any capacity on mere 15 mbps? I feel like 1 gig internet is mainstream now and was wondering if they bumped up the minimum internet specs if that would drastically change the way we play online gaming at all? That's something I'm still reading up on and learning...

[Renalt]

[R041]

...

5.2 is great, and UE is my favorite engine by far.

It's complicated with MMOs, because the packet ramp isn't linear per additional character, it's multiplied when the server is authority. For every new player, that player needs to now send their own data, but receive data for all other players.

They have to do a lot of tricks to trim costs when you're not directly interacting with that object or character. With high engagement areas, you'd remove almost all non-essential packets to the player. Then they also reduce how active the actual world is too, the only active entities sending and receiving data are ones that have an observer of some kind. A player camera would be an observer as an example. Less density means less CPU and less packets. So we'd typically have to design things around 2-3 creatures per observable area. Also because each instance can at times only be 1-2 CPU threads.. I wouldn't be surprised if XIV is run off of a single thread per instance.

I think WoW might be using smaller seamless instances so they can get away with faster cpu ticks in open world, and more high density events in the same large map. But that's just speculation, I don't have actual info.

Unreal Engine is phenomenal with network data, but it's not really MMO without heavy engine changes. It's designed with the idea that data is exchanged all within the same session and doesn't require constant interaction with a larger database. But it does have Server/Host Authority. Most studios will implement that data layer separately if they need to. Some don't at all and just keep to a max 32-64 players per instance and do data checks on session refresh/begin/end intervals or something.

The biggest upgrade for MMOs would be multi-core instances, cost of CPU, and data transfer cost.

I don't really think it's much of an issue for household internet anymore, games like League of Legends are only about 25mb per hour with a lot going on and extremely high tick rate compared to MMOs. And it's mostly download, not much upload. Especially when you consider that you don't need ALL data from the 100 players next to you in an MMO. That's already not a huge deal because the data we receive is pretty basic anyway.

Our bottlenecks are definitely the hardware and instance systems being used today. They're archaic, and we're in dire need of an advance in multicore technology.

When we're working on the server infra, I never really have to think about how much data the individual player is receiving. It's always how much data the server needs to send, and how many things can potentially happen within a single tick. But we deal with single thread instances, so it's also way more painful. Also have to think about how jarring it is for players to see other players pop in/out when creating zones on the same single map, so we kinda fake it sometimes with bridges or walls.

Also, the large world systems you're looking at from UE don't directly benefit 'MMO', just larger maps as a whole, because it helps seamless client side loading of a lot of assets. Otherwise you have to ask the client to load EVERYTHING - Which, even if you're not actively rendering it, it's still in memory. So systems like those say "Hey, I'm coming up on zone limits, let's start loading data from disk into memory and dump the old stuff that we haven't seen a mile ago."

Idk if I actually answered your question, 'cause I think I babbled a little. lol

[PEANUT]

5.2 is great, and UE is my favorite engine by far.

Idk if I actually answered your question, 'cause I think I babbled a little. lol

No you didn't babble, it was good info Do you think the CPU cores and threads in the PS5/XSX are much more qualified for something like this? Do you think the way hardware is changing/advancing is in the right direction say from AMD concerning video gaming achieving better results for say an MMORPG? I'm fascinated by video game technology and hardware and how quickly it advances, it's really cool! My hope one day is to get a breathing living MMO world with thousands of players and dynamic gameplay, maybe even see it in VR! I know there are other MMORPG's coming out developed on UE5 and wonder if they suffer with these limitations you spoke of as well? I believe Chrono Odyssey is it's name?