Flash Space-based MMO

Hey all,

I've been working on this project for the past 6 months. Right now it's more of an "mMO" (modestly multiplayer) since the "universe" consists of just 3 star systems of 3-4 planets each.

The eventual goal is a large, persistent game with a focus on exploration and tactical combat. Right now, it falls short on most of those goals (lacking enemies or advancement), but the core contains most of the technical pieces required for an mmo:

* Single, zoned universe backed by a mysql database.
* Java game server for realtime interaction (the actual game engine).
* PHP gateway server for non-realtime transactional events.
* Socket based network protocol.
* Player persistence

This version is a technical test of the client and server in a real-world deployment.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about it:

http://lab.wx3.com/nebula/

Thanks for looking!

i harvested some helion and netronium or whatever. i tried to use the jumpdrive and i got blown up. it's a good idea. u got a lot of work to make it good tho! like i was drifting along with the stars on some of the planets when the engines were off. only in one direction. i don't know why. if u keep going u need some gravity fields to help so u could shove off speeding around corners and stuff if u were getting chased. u also need a home base that u could warp to in case it was attacked and needed defending or if u just had a full cargo and u got to dump it without wasting a lot of fuel on getting back home form some planet!

Hey dude,
It all looks good - love the intro animation - I only played it for a few minutes - reminds me heaps of 'Cosmic Jack' which I did a ton of work for a few years ago. Do you land on planets and populate them etc?
Just thought I'd let you know that the IE window it popped up in crashed after a few mins. Not blaming the game - could be my PC, but thought I'd feed it back. I'm on IE8.
EA.

pretty good game, both design and concept-wise. I spent almost 30mins roaming about. Anyway, you should allow creation of warp gates, that is the ship can place a gate at a planet or portion of space it has already visited and warp back to it if need be. This can add a good strategy factor to the game.
Also I would like to see some data on my ping so as to know the lag possibilities when playing with many other players.

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Originally Posted by ExpertAnimators

Hey dude,
It all looks good - love the intro animation - I only played it for a few minutes - reminds me heaps of 'Cosmic Jack' which I did a ton of work for a few years ago. Do you land on planets and populate them etc?
Just thought I'd let you know that the IE window it popped up in crashed after a few mins. Not blaming the game - could be my PC, but thought I'd feed it back. I'm on IE8.
EA.

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Thanks for playing! No, there won't be any landing on planets... all gameplay interaction occurs from the perspective of the player's ship and in starbase (currently not implemented).

Not sure about the IE pop-up, there shouldn't have been any pop-ups. Was it a flash debug player dialog? Was it talking about an exception?

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Originally Posted by navidroplets

i harvested some helion and netronium or whatever. i tried to use the jumpdrive and i got blown up. it's a good idea. u got a lot of work to make it good tho! like i was drifting along with the stars on some of the planets when the engines were off. only in one direction. i don't know why. if u keep going u need some gravity fields to help so u could shove off speeding around corners and stuff if u were getting chased. u also need a home base that u could warp to in case it was attacked and needed defending or if u just had a full cargo and u got to dump it without wasting a lot of fuel on getting back home form some planet!

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Thanks for playing. I'm definitely considering a homeworld/base where players return to. But it probably wouldn't be attackable, because as a multiplayer game, there'd be no guarantee the defender was online when attackers came. On the other hand, there's the possibility of non-homeworld bases that players can establish which are conquerable.

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Originally Posted by bluemagica

pretty good game, both design and concept-wise. I spent almost 30mins roaming about. Anyway, you should allow creation of warp gates, that is the ship can place a gate at a planet or portion of space it has already visited and warp back to it if need be. This can add a good strategy factor to the game.
Also I would like to see some data on my ping so as to know the lag possibilities when playing with many other players.

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Thanks bluemagica! Interesting idea about warp gates. Also, that's a good point on ping-- right now you actually can see ping info in the system dialog. You'll see either "pong" or "slow pong" data. Pong is your ping. Slow pong is your ping plus the delay caused by the server tick. The game is designed to minimize "twitch-based" combat, so it should do pretty well to tolerate high pings.

Very nice, how many people have you had online at once? Also what sorts of things do you mean by non-realtime transactional events?

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PHP gateway server for non-realtime transactional events.

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Originally Posted by .hooligan

Very nice, how many people have you had online at once? Also what sorts of things do you mean by non-realtime transactional events?

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Real people? Almost 4 :)

I've tested the server under a simulated load of 500 users evenly distributed over 10 sectors (so 50 users per sector) and it handled it fine, but simulated users don't behave like real, distributed humans, so I don't know how many people the server can really handle or where the first bottleneck occurs.

Non-realtime transactional events are ones that don't need to happen in real game time, but do need commit a transaction to the database. For example, it doesn't matter if buying a new component for your ship in starbase takes 50 or 500 milliseconds. What matters is that the purchase is recorded and the ship's configuration is correctly altered. So basically any game interaction that doesn't occur in "real space" is handled as a transaction by the gateway.

Almost 4! You'll have to charge them 50 dollar subscriptions each to pay for hosting :)

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Non-realtime transactional events are ones that don't need to happen in real game time, but do need commit a transaction to the database. For example, it doesn't matter if buying a new component for your ship in starbase takes 50 or 500 milliseconds. What matters is that the purchase is recorded and the ship's configuration is correctly altered. So basically any game interaction that doesn't occur in "real space" is handled as a transaction by the gateway.

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Ahh I see, I only ask because I've been working on a MMO for quite some time and it took me a while to decided what would be best. Using the socket server to do my db calls for everything or using php for those sorts of things that time doesn't matter.

I went with socket because the size of the data being sent back is a lot smaller because my socket server uses binary data. Also I store users and game data as persistent objects on the server so I don't have a million db calls when users log in etc.

Good luck with your game. Hope so see a few thousand ship flying around soon.

Good game! I like the atmosphere, though it is a bit simplistic at it's current stage. I'd love to see where this goes, and how it takes off!


ps, .hooligan...can you let me in on this binary data socket server? I've been looking for a non-XML socket server for ages...can't find one :(

Yeah for sure Pazil. I'm using Electroserver 4 at the moment and using its binary transfer protocol rather then its text one. I'm assuming Smartfox Server would offer the same but I haven't really used that one for a long time and would only be guessing.

justkevin are you hosting the socket server yourself?

Thanks mate! (I'm looking for free servers, since I don't know if I'll be able to finish a MMO game even, but I'll look into it!)
EDIT: Sorry for temporary thread hijack!

Ahh understood, there are a fair few free ones out there to check out. eg. Red5, Colin Moocks Union server which I'd bet would have binary, Oregano Server ad many more.

Also the ES and Smartfox servers both offer a free amount of users before you need to buy a license. You wont be able to go over I think 25 users until you get a license.

Red5 seems like just the thing! Thanks!

@hooligan:
Yes, I'm hosting both the web server and the game server on a server I lease (it has other stuff on it as well).

The game socket server is written in Java using Netty for the networking.