
The One Man MMO Project - larksimian
http://onemanmmo.com/
======
crtlaltdel
love it! i spent YEARS playing and coding for MUDs and ran a few games as a
solo admin/coder. imo it is so very satisfying to watch the global chat
channels after a new feature/area/weapon/mob gets rolled out...and what the
community thinks of it. i can recall more than one occasion where a well
planned quest resulted in interesting dynamics after players started
interacting with it. an example; one quest would add an "invisible" token
object to a player's inventory. quest stages would check for and modify the
state of the token when it was "present". in this particular MUD there was
PK...and eventually someone decided to carry the corpse of someone on the
quest into an area where you must have the token to enter...and they "walked"
right in. none of us had thought of that potential "use-case"...and it exposed
a really interesting game play mechanic that we never knew existed...the
equivalent of cutting off the guards finger to pass biometric locks in a spy
story...

...damn...its hard not to want to start another MUD...

EDIT: i know this post is NOT a MUD project...but the solo-MMO dev story just
struck a nostalgia chord in me

~~~
cabaalis
Any suggestions on protecting credential transfer in a MUD? I have been
wanting to build one but honestly I'm used to the convenience of HTTPS and the
passing of credentials over a socket is preventing me from starting.

~~~
TheJoYo
mbedtls is a bit annoying at first but the windows build process is less
painful than openssl.

```powershell New-Item "temp" -ItemType "directory" -Force $client = New-
Object System.Net.WebClient
$client.DownloadFile("[https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/archive/mbedtls-
master.zi...](https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/archive/mbedtls-master.zip"),
"temp\C:\temp\mbedtls-master.zip") Expand-Archive -Path C:\temp\mbedtls-
master.zip -DestinationPath C:\temp\; Move-Item C:\temp\mbedtls-mbedtls-
master\ C:\mbedtls\ MSBuild.exe C:\mbedtls\visualc\VS2010\mbedTLS.sln
/p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64 MSBuild.exe
C:\mbedtls\visualc\VS2010\mbedTLS.sln /p:Configuration=Release
/p:Platform=Win32 ```

~~~
TheJoYo
lets try that again
[https://git.thejoyo.com/JoYo/snippets/src/branch/master/mbed...](https://git.thejoyo.com/JoYo/snippets/src/branch/master/mbedtls_msvc.ps1)

------
DizzyDoo
A number of years ago I completed an MMO project by myself (art, programming,
marketing, etc). It was fun! Real-time server was in Python Twisted, lots of
Cython to speed up the deepest parts of the game loop. Django for the main
website. The client was Flash (this was back in 2013, when it was still kinda
a thing), which meant anyone could jump in really quickly, but technically
that was challenging for a real-time 2D Zelda-style game because you were
limited to TCP rather than UDP and the server has to be 100% authoritative
since opening up Flash swf's or sniffing packets is so very easy. The server
could support 250 people, and I had some fun tooling that let me spin up
virtual players to stress-test it. Fun to remember!

The thing with MMO projects that really gets you is, even after you've got a
mature client and server you still need to put together enough content, which
if you're level designing/writing/painting everything yourself, is an enormous
quantity of work. If you don't want players to run out of quests and whatnot
you've probably got to lean towards a sandbox experience, and this MMORTS is a
particularly interesting way to go.

~~~
jplayer01
Even teams with hundreds of developers aren't able to put out enough content
to keep players satisfied without resorting to artificial limits. Maybe it's a
problem with how these games and the tools are designed, but I've always
believed something like EVE or Second Life is the only real viable paradigm
for MMOs. Give players the tools to build their own experience.

I recently had some time off and ended up burning through nearly all of
Destiny 2's content inside of 2-3 weeks. Hell, I can jump into WoW and be raid
ready inside of a week or two, and just go straight into the latest raid. I
think there's something fundamentally very wrong with how modern MMOS are
designed, but it doesn't seem like anybody is interested in properly exploring
the solution space.

~~~
DizzyDoo
It's true, and it's why so many MMO's find themselves leaning into adding that
grind to leveling, or a repetition in the end-game loop. The days of every
developer taking a crack at creating a 'WOW killer' (and all of them failing)
have thankfully past, I'm sure there are a bunch of traditional MMO's that are
still trucking along nicely (Final Fantasy 15, Black Desert Online, the new
Maple Story) but that sort of Quest Content driven game isn't so predominant
nowadays (outside of nostalgia trips like WOW Classic and Runescape Classic).
I can't say I miss them too much?

~~~
mech422
I find Lord of the Rings Online to have some of the best story driven
questing. The story line is interesting, the quests are fairly varied and the
'ohh...' factor when you walk into well known places like Moria is awesome!

~~~
DizzyDoo
I played LOTR Online when it first came out! I think the only MMO I've paid
for. Sadly, I don't think I was as much as fan of it as you were, I bounced
off it by lv25. Probably much has been added in the last 10+ years though!

~~~
Jaruzel
I have just started playing LOTR Online a few days ago after getting
completely burnt out in WoW, and I'm finding it to be much more fun than I was
expecting. The game engine is a bit less slick than WoWs, as it clearly has
not been as updated as often as WoWs has been, but the environments and heavy
story based questing more than make up for it.

~~~
mech422
I thought the Mines of Moria was the most atmospheric zone I've seen in an
MMO. Really captured the creepy, ancient ruins feeling...Oh! Give monster play
a try! Its a rather unique take on PVP where you can actually play as the
heroes or the monsters!

------
blorenz
I really admire the determination of the One Man. Scrolling to the oldest
updates reveals that his has been a passion since at least 2010. What a mark
of constitution and fortitude to keep this passion burning. It is remarkable
what his 2010 self knew and what his 2019 has learned in those years. This is
his opus. Keep up the good fight!

~~~
thrax
Especially all the dev log updates with zero comments. It takes a strong will
to keep pushing in the face of perceived apathy!

~~~
OneManMMO
I always knew I was building a cool thing. And a MMO by one guy is a hard sell
until it is finished and amazing looking. People have always been supportive,
they just don't post on my blog much.

------
jhj
MMOs are happily two orders of magnitude easier to write today. Before game
engines you can license or get for free really existed, it was just you, the
compiler, and a text editor, which rapidly turned into many people, the
compiler, your editors, and pain.

I worked at Turbine off and on from 2001-2012, and was the MMO game engine
tech lead in the time period up to when Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons
& Dragons Online shipped (2003-2005). Both were based on the same game engine
core, which was a more or less complete rewrite of everything in the game
engine (client and server) from the original Asheron's Call. Many of the
concepts carried over, but the implementation was completely different. To
this day, I still think this "G2" engine got many things right in its
internals that many other game engines (MMO or otherwise) didn't really get,
probably because everyone who worked on it was crazy but actually pretty nice
and reasonable to work with. Some friends who ended up working at Unity or
Epic from Turbine that I've talked with think the same. It certainly made many
questionable assumptions as well.

I got quite burned out from the rewrite (well over 1 million lines of C++
redone between 5-6ish people) and went part time/remote in 2006, left in 2007,
came back in 2009 part time/remote again to help port the stuff to PS3 and
Xbox 360 for projects that eventually got cancelled. My last six months (I
stopped giving a shit at this point) was doing nothing but porting much of the
client code to Mac OS X, which consisted of fixing endless compiler errors and
patching up library/API differences in hundreds of thousands of lines of
client code. This was actually kind of therapeutic because much of it was
mindless.

I do smile a bit when realizing that code I wrote on ~16 years ago is still
plugging along in some datacenter somewhere and on people's PCs, long after
the company and the people who worked on it have scattered to the winds. Many
of the core team that worked on it back in that time period went on to found
some companies (game or otherwise), are working at places like Google and
Facebook, or remained in the industry at Epic Games and Unity and various game
studios.

~~~
vehementi
Thanks for this. You may have heard that some time after AC was shut down, an
AC server build somehow leaked and the community has now got a basically
true/pure emulated server setup now. I can now go back to my first MMO safely
whenever :)

~~~
jhj
The AC1/2 code was a pile of poo to be honest, but it still managed to do many
things light-years ahead of other piles of game code poo at the time. Great
concepts, but questionable execution (many people, many of whom were brilliant
but this was really their first software job of any sort, came and left over
the 90s, leaving their code behind. The AC1 software-only (i.e., pre-
DirectX/OpenGL/GPUs) renderer and physics code were in large part
incomprehensible, but they worked.)

~~~
heyoni
That’s all anyone’s code ever is. Just a pile of poo trying to be better than
someone else’s pile of poo.

~~~
jhj
tru dat

------
skocznymroczny
An interesting story about a one man MMO project (well, he enlisted help of
his wife along the way), is the postmortem for Eternal Lands. It was a popular
read on now defunct Devmaster.net website.

It's available through Web Archive here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110303214710/http://www.devmas...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110303214710/http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-
postmortem/part1.php)

It's an interesting throwback to the era before common availability of
production-grade game engines like Unreal or Unity, back when everyone worked
on their own Direct3D/OpenGL engine.

------
seanwilson
I remember ages ago it was common to see the advice "don't try to create your
own MMO" as they were one of the most complex game dev projects you could do.

Are MMOs any easier to make now given the libraries and cloud services that
exist today?

~~~
jokoon
Realm of the mad god proved it's possible to make a miminalist MMO game

The difficulty is building a MMO that is appealing and fun to play, so you
have to think about multiplayer game design, which can involve a little bit of
game theory, economics, reward systems...

A mmo is not difficult to make by its strict definition, once you have a large
open world, the spatial partitioning to manage network traffic, things work.
What is hard is to populate such a large world with "life", activities, things
to do, and especially rewards in a persistent world.

MMO are amazingly interesting, world building is a vast subject, but building
a quality MMO is also enormously expensive.

~~~
moduspol
Honestly, this is the appeal (to me) of building a private World of Warcraft
server.

This way, the user-facing artsy stuff is mostly done. You just need the
backend stuff, although admittedly some fun is removed since you have to work
with the network protocols the pre-existing clients expect. You'd undoubtedly
learn about how and why various aspects of the game were implemented the way
they were.

And yeah, there's already a project for private WoW servers, but if I ever get
a few months off work, that's something I'd like to look into doing
separately. Maybe after enough time, Blizzard would open source the clients so
we can hack on those, too. Although WoW still brings in good money, so that'll
probably be a while.

------
justusthane
Odd that
[http://theimperialrealm.com/index.html](http://theimperialrealm.com/index.html)
and [http://theimperialrealm.com](http://theimperialrealm.com) are two
different destinations. The former is the home page which contains an intro
video and more information about the game itself, while the latter is the
blog.

He has two index files; index.html and index.php. The server sends index.php
by default, which is where the blog is.

~~~
OneManMMO
It doesn't do that for me...

------
georgeecollins
This is a great example of marketing the dream of game development. You can
make the argument that Star Citizen is a completely different version of the
same thing-- I mean in that it is not the game you love it is the making of
it. This guy is tapping into what we (on this forum) all love about game
design, all the projects people have started or tried in our lives. It is such
a drag to make games with huge teams, with marketing and technical
compromises, design by committee. It drains the joy of developers and it bores
a lot of the audience. This is the dream of one person pursuing their passion.

------
xwdv
How do MMOs maintain and update state for tens of thousands of players and
then push those updates from the server back to clients efficiently?

~~~
Jasper_
In memory. MMO servers store all world state in memory, and each server has a
capacity usually in the 10,000 player range.

You'd be impressed how fast computers actually are -- 10,000 objects isn't
actually that many. Since the server knows where all clients know, the server
knows what the client can see, and the server only has to update the client
with relevant information, like the 100 closest players to it.

~~~
jmnicolas
> 10,000 objects isn't actually that many

Yeah but these 10k objects are containing themselves many more objects (item
inventory, proximity mobs etc).

~~~
RussianCow
Not just that, but you have to do physics and other calculations on each
object and even between objects _many times per second_. So if your server
handles 20 ticks per second, you only have a budget of 50ms per tick. Even on
a beefy, many-core server, that's a lot to do in not a lot of time, and you
can't afford to have any inconsistencies with performance (like GC stalling
for several ticks).

------
bullen
I also made not one, but two "almost" OMMMOs (One Coder MMO?):

2001!
[http://www.rupy.se/raywalk/magequest.html](http://www.rupy.se/raywalk/magequest.html)
(the graphics/sounds are "borrowed")

2011\. [http://aeonalpha.com](http://aeonalpha.com) (my neighbor made the
music/sounds in exchange of a 960Ti for his Hackintosh)

Both use Java, the first one is a mix of Applet/Application that you can try
by running this file:

[http://www.rupy.se/raywalk/client.jar](http://www.rupy.se/raywalk/client.jar)

The second is Application only so you download it here:

[http://aeonalpha.com/aeon.zip](http://aeonalpha.com/aeon.zip)

I'm working on my third OCMMO:

2021? [http://ahoy.rupy.se](http://ahoy.rupy.se)

~~~
ThalesX
I like the intro water texture, is it procedurally generated or artistic?

~~~
bullen
Ah, that's artistic and "stolen", so I guess it's not going to be a One Coder
MMO: [https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-
analysis-a0...](https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-
analysis-a0b575a31127)

Actually it won't for sure because the skin mesh animation code was also
"stolen" from a former colleague (they will all get mentions though) but I'm a
bit ashamed to discover that I'm not good enough to do anything from
scratch... at least not the first time around, is this what they call impostor
syndrome?

~~~
__s
Also make sure to implement your own programming language & OS for the game to
run on. While you're at it you should figure out how best to craft transistors
to create your own CPU. But don't make use of anyone else's ideas, you should
figure this all out on your own. In fact, don't read this comment, it might
give you ideas

~~~
bullen
Haha, way ahead of you on that one, bought a C64 and learning
assembly/soldering and looking at how to make my own computer on FPGA (async.
CPU) with my own OS/programming language and in parallel to that my own P2P
radio internet: [http://radiomesh.org](http://radiomesh.org)

Even looked at making my own gerber editor and print my own PCBs with my
AxiDraw plotter.

On the subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw)

I looked at your github but nothing is playable out-of-the-box, you could make
something presentable?

------
OneManMMO
Hello Hacker News, I wondered why my traffic went all bonkers today. To answer
some of your questions:

Yes, it is difficult to keep up with modern game tech, but I have lots of
friends in the AAA industry who let me know what's going on at the bleeding
edge, and I pick my battles.

No, you couldn't make a game like Miranda with any off-the-shelf game tech I
have seen. Game engines usually only allow one avatar per player, Miranda can
have hundreds, theoretically thousands. Miranda is also seamless and single-
sharded.

The renderer does have soft shadows, but you're right they don't always show
up really well. I'll take a look at that.

The next update is coming pretty soon with a whole lot of gameplay additions,
I just started the playtesting and debugging phase today.

Thanks for visiting.

------
BryantD
This is very cool. In the same vein, I recommend Project Gorgon from Eric
Heimburg and Sandra Powers -- a two person MMO, but still pretty cool. Check
it out here: [https://projectgorgon.com](https://projectgorgon.com)

~~~
OneManMMO
Their game is cool, but their old blog had a lot of great stuff on it,
although it's now only available from the wayback machine.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160311212030/http://www.elderg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160311212030/http://www.eldergame.com/)

~~~
BryantD
Thank you for finding that! I was looking but failed. It's great stuff.
(Disclaimer: I used to work with Eric and Sandra.)

------
Iv
Looks nice! MMO RTS nonetheless!

A word of advice: if you want to make an easy immense graphical update, add
shadows to your vehicles. Even just a dumb, circular flat alpha gradient under
each vehicle. You would not believe the amount of immersion this adds.

------
foxhop
This reminds me of Shattered Galaxy
[http://www.sgalaxy.com/](http://www.sgalaxy.com/) which is a game I played 20
years or so ago which was way ahead of it's time.

------
craze3
Looks awesome! I actually created a MMO prototype before, just by myself. A
lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly
easy.

I used Babylon.js for the 3D game/controls, and I imported free 3D assets from
various asset stores for the content. The backend was a simple socket server
written in Node.js with socket.io connected to the web frontend via JS using
the standard WebSockets API. I got realtime character movement, turning, &
jumping implemented pretty quickly. Content became a bottleneck so I stopped
developing, but I hope to finish it up sometime in the near future.

Good luck!

~~~
glouwbug
content is almost always the bottleneck in any form of gamedev

~~~
grogenaut
Well until you hire an army, then it's quality, and tooling to manage content,
then it's back to creative direction as the blocker.

------
dpedu
Wow, looks like he's been at it for a decade. I'm curious how much game
development technology has changed over this time and if it outpaces
development.

~~~
Dude2029
Probably some Unity3D starter pack and something like Improbable will get you
there in few evenings.

~~~
RussianCow
You vastly underestimate the amount of work it takes to build a game, even
with all the excellent tooling out there.

------
Animats
The toolkits are getting complete enough to allow individuals or very small
teams to roll out an MMO, if you're willing to pay the bills for Spatial OS.
Full VR support, even. Big-world support. Powered by Expensive Google Cloud.

One of the first: Community Garden.[1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2XEbJOWkxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2XEbJOWkxc)

------
timwaagh
I think a mmorts is pretty unique. If you manage to spice up those menus a
little bit and get the balance right (some) people will buy it for sure

~~~
hombre_fatal
I used to play a now-defunct MMORTS back in the day with Warcraft3-looking
graphics: Ballerium
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgIk8HQPnP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgIk8HQPnP4)).

Shattered Galaxy is also MMORTS and is still alive:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBY-
WGFQk98](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBY-WGFQk98)

Really hard game concept to get right, though. Something that was cool about
Ballerium was that it was one big open world. I think Shattered Galaxy was a
lot more instanced, but I didn't play it much.

Definitely room for more exploration in the space.

~~~
zaphar
I played in the Shattered Galaxy beta and it was a fantastic game. I haven't
thought about that game in a long time. Glad to see it's still running.

------
Pmop
Back in the day, I used to play a MMO called Faldon, which was developed
mostly by one developer. I'm still astonished by such projects being done by
one person, since game development requires so many skills; MMOs takes this to
the next level.

------
serf
for those interested in 'one-person' MMO projects, check out Xenimus.

It's a long-running MMO (from around the Ultima Online era of games) that is
developed and ran by a single person.

The amount of effort involved in such an ordeal is mind-boggling, personally.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
I was just about to mention Xenimus. I used to play it after high school every
day, the game has been around for over a decade (maybe 2 decades at this
point?). It's amazing EJ Thayer has kept it going all this time while going
back and forth with having a day job. The graphics may not be AAA but the game
play was always pretty fun and the networking code, especially for a single
person, ran pretty well.

I kinda miss my old character that got de-leveled well over a decade ago. I
let the account expire and when I tried returning some years later I couldn't
get back into it.

RIP Mythical Mage III

------
wuliwong
Super cool, I've had plans for games I want to build out over a long period of
iterations percolating for a while now. I will keep following this project for
sure.

------
cptaj
This guy remembers the old gamefaqs boards and probably luelinks

~~~
chillaxtian
hunter2

------
Topgamer7
Lovely to see Blender in a screenshot for the top link :)

------
umen
krunker io Is good example of one man building mmo game

~~~
Eiriksmal
My favorite one-man (I think?) MMO was Cursors.io:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477124)

The genius of that game cannot be overstated. Its ludicrously simple mechanics
somehow resulted in emergent gameplay that was deeply affecting.

~~~
umen
Great thread , looking for more threads like this one

