Silent_Hippo wrote:
Taiko! wrote:
Huntyre wrote:
Companies don't hear opinions...they hear dollar signs.

Amen to that

I 2nd that.

Thats how business works... They have to listen to the shareholders. And the Shareholders only want one thing: money. It's why they bought the shares, is because they were convinced that they would make a return profit on spending their money on the company.

/discuss

Well I'm not sure if a free MMOFPS would be the most popular online game ever but Id certainly play it.
If you check the free "pay for special items" games not one of those is nearly as popular as WOW or EQ. That is strange but true.

And design-wise it would be nearly impossible to have one. FPS games require a lot more processing power than normal RPGs. There's a lot of technical stuff to consider.

When you play a normal point and click mmo you are only sending a command action and a couple coordinates to the server. Attacks are also calculated by the server so there's not a lot of bandwidth issues there. On a FPS you have to send the player current direction and every change you make with the mouse in direction also. That increases bandwidth a lot. Also you have to send a signal every time you press the mouse to fire your gun, which is also a lot more than clicking on a monster like in normal rpgs. Because of that normal RPGs use less servers than FPS games. In a rpg you can have one server handling a really big area with a lot of people where in FPS you have to limit the amount of players and to a small area because you have to check for player collision more often, check for bullets, etc etc etc.

You really need a lot of very good hardware to run a server like that. That makes it nearly impossible to offer it for free.

The bf series has prooven that a mmofps can work. If you put all the bf servers together there would be enough for a mmo. Also the bf servers are payed for by gamers, if it clans or admins. I think the problems that face mmofps development is that developers have to think of them a a shooter and not a rpgs. This mean no customising character or million of items. These sort of things are what would cause alot of lag.

Well of course mmofps are possible. We´ve played them. I was just giving my opinion on a free mmofps.



And talking about server technology there has been recent developments ( gonna go look for the paper because it is online and open to the public, it´s a microsoft white paper ) that will let normal games to have way more player at the same time without an increase in server bandwidth and/or high impact on processing. The main idea is to update the close/important characters of the player and have less updates on far away objects/players.
Since mmos work with server clusters this tech would also let mmos to have more people online at the same time. Hopefully we will see this technology implemented in games soon.

i've read something about that. It doesn't sound that great to me. What it does is keep the 15 closes people ingame but turns everyone else into AI bots. I can't see how that would work. what happens if you bot just stands in the open and gets sniped while you're taking cover. Does it mean you die because it sounds retarded to me.

It sounds like vaporware and i can't see it working.

Yeah it kinda works like that but this is just for the client part of it. When you are about to snipe someone it should update that someone right away making it appear in the correct position so there won't be a problem there. Also have in mind that the server knows exactly where players and since attacks are calculated on the server it will be the same as it is now. It is only a filter to send the clients just what is important to them and reduce lag.

It's made for like example you are on one end of a map fighting with a couple of of people and on the other end of the map there's a guy just standing there. You will get updates a lot from the guys you are fighting and almost none about that guy on the other side.