2D MMORPG

[Nick el]

I've been trying to find out what programming language would be best for
creating a MMORPG game/engine. After some responses elsewhere I've
decided to choose between Java and Ruby.
I recently posted a question asking which is faster. Now I want to know
which would be better for creating a 2D MMORPG game / engine. By 2D I
mean using the arrow keys to walk around and attacking with a certain
key etc... Pretty good graphics for a 2D game (RMXP graphics, if you
know what I mean). Along with the role playing feel with skills and
quests. So I'd like to know whether Ruby could do this or am I better
off using Java? Thanks for any help.

 

[John Joyce]

I've been trying to find out what programming language would be
best for
creating a MMORPG game/engine. After some responses elsewhere I've
decided to choose between Java and Ruby.
I recently posted a question asking which is faster. Now I want to
know
which would be better for creating a 2D MMORPG game / engine. By 2D I
mean using the arrow keys to walk around and attacking with a certain
key etc... Pretty good graphics for a 2D game (RMXP graphics, if you
know what I mean). Along with the role playing feel with skills and
quests. So I'd like to know whether Ruby could do this or am I
better
off using Java? Thanks for any help.

There are libraries like rubygame and gosu. Gosu is probably more
cross-platform, but I think it is designed to run on the local
machine. Still learning to toy with it myself, so don't quote me on
that. Other than that, for multi-player across the web, you might
need to use DRb (distributed ruby library).

You might look further into the Java area if you have Java skills,
since there may be more already available to save you some work. But
if you want to use Ruby on the backend, JRuby is a Java
implementation of a Ruby interpreter.

 

[Bill Kelly]

I've been trying to find out what programming language would be best for
creating a MMORPG game/engine. After some responses elsewhere I've
decided to choose between Java and Ruby.
I recently posted a question asking which is faster. Now I want to know
which would be better for creating a 2D MMORPG game / engine. By 2D I
mean using the arrow keys to walk around and attacking with a certain
key etc... Pretty good graphics for a 2D game (RMXP graphics, if you
know what I mean). Along with the role playing feel with skills and
quests. So I'd like to know whether Ruby could do this or am I better
off using Java? Thanks for any help.

If you've never programmed a game before, I'd recommend grabbing a
2D game library like Gosu[1] and writing a very, very simple single-
player game as your first project.

Something super simple, where you don't care how good the graphics
look yet, and you don't have to worry about any multiplayer networking
code, etc.

For example, something like Ultima from 1986:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ultima1-1.gif

Ruby would be a fine choice for developing a game like that.

Again if you've never programmed a game before, you'll be doing yourself
a tremendous favor by writing a very simple single player game first, before
trying to tackle an MMORPG.


[1] http://code.google.com/p/gosu/
Gosu is a 2D game development library for Ruby and C++. It supports
hardware accelerated graphics.


Hope this helps,

Regards,

Bill

 

[Stefan Rusterholz]

There are libraries like rubygame and gosu. Gosu is probably more
cross-platform, but I think it is designed to run on the local
machine. Still learning to toy with it myself, so don't quote me on
that. Other than that, for multi-player across the web, you might
need to use DRb (distributed ruby library).

Rubygame runs on all three major platforms: Win, OS X and linux. Though
in the past there have been some troubles compiling it on win, mainly
due to no maintainer using it as the main OS.
Personally I favorize rubygame as the maintainer very actively develops
it.

Regards
Stefan

 

[John Joyce]

Rubygame runs on all three major platforms: Win, OS X and linux.
Though
in the past there have been some troubles compiling it on win, mainly
due to no maintainer using it as the main OS.
Personally I favorize rubygame as the maintainer very actively
develops
it.

Regards
Stefan

Well, that's good to hear but their web site must be woefully out of
date!
It isn't very informative.
neither is the RDOC on it.
I'd love to try it out, but it looked pretty tutorial-less.

I will look at it again after I play with gosu more first.

 

[Stefan Rusterholz]

Well, that's good to hear but their web site must be woefully out of
date!
It isn't very informative.
neither is the RDOC on it.
I'd love to try it out, but it looked pretty tutorial-less.

I will look at it again after I play with gosu more first.

No RDOC? http://rubygame.sourceforge.net/doc/2_0_0/ - I think there it
is. Linked from the frontpage ( http://rubygame.sourceforge.net ) too
(the old http://rubygame.seul.org/ links to that page for quite some
time now). But agreed, the website isn't very informative. But since IRC
is more my medium of choice and he's there regularly that was never much
of a concern to me
Btw., I didn't mean to say gosu wasn't well maintained. It's just that
rubygame seemed to me to make more progress and overall looked more
promising. I hope I didn't cause any hard feelings. If so, my sincere
apologies, it was unintended.

Regards
Stefan

 

[Bill Kelly]

Btw., I didn't mean to say gosu wasn't well maintained. It's just that
rubygame seemed to me to make more progress and overall looked more
promising. I hope I didn't cause any hard feelings. If so, my sincere
apologies, it was unintended.

I have not yet used either RubyGame or Gosu. The reason Gosu looked
attractive to me is that it uses 3D hardware acceleration to render its 2D
graphics. My experience with SDL based libraries is that they seem to
primarily be software-rendered.

Hardware acceleration is very important to me; but it might not be for
everyone.


Regards,

Bill

 

[Stefan Rusterholz]

I have not yet used either RubyGame or Gosu. The reason Gosu looked
attractive to me is that it uses 3D hardware acceleration to render its
2D
graphics. My experience with SDL based libraries is that they seem to
primarily be software-rendered.

Hardware acceleration is very important to me; but it might not be for
everyone.


Regards,

Bill

SDL is supposed to use the OSes libs to render the stuff. But Rubygame3
moves away from SDL actually. It goes towards OpenGL and OpenALSA. It
has other interesting developments in it too, e.g. a collision framework
for the primitive shapes.

Regards
Stefan

 

[zuzu]

sorry if this is bad juju on the Ruby list, but if you're going to
program something heavily concurrent (e.g. MMORPG, IRC server, etc.),
did you give Erlang a look? Joe Armstrong's new book published by the
Pragmatic Programmers is extremely approachable.

you could still use Ruby for a client, especially if you want to
leverage Ruby 2D graphics APIs (as opposed to pure ASCII / tty ala
NetHack / Rogue / Cave Adventure).

 

[Bill Kelly]

SDL is supposed to use the OSes libs to render the stuff.

Yeah. It's always been relatively slow for me, though, at least on Windows.

But Rubygame3
moves away from SDL actually. It goes towards OpenGL and OpenALSA. It
has other interesting developments in it too, e.g. a collision framework
for the primitive shapes.

Oh, that's good to know! I had been looking at the "version 2" docs and they only
mentioned SDL.


Thanks,

Bill

 

[John Joyce]

No RDOC? http://rubygame.sourceforge.net/doc/2_0_0/ - I think there it
is. Linked from the frontpage ( http://rubygame.sourceforge.net ) too
(the old http://rubygame.seul.org/ links to that page for quite some
time now). But agreed, the website isn't very informative. But
since IRC
is more my medium of choice and he's there regularly that was never
much
of a concern to me
Btw., I didn't mean to say gosu wasn't well maintained. It's just that
rubygame seemed to me to make more progress and overall looked more
promising. I hope I didn't cause any hard feelings. If so, my sincere
apologies, it was unintended.

Regards
Stefan

perhaps a slight misunderstanding. My post could be read to mean 'no
RDOC' but what I meant was that the RDOCs were not too informative
either. Unfortunately, I've never much liked IRC, but I am eager to
get to rubygame after I toy around a bit more with gosu. So far so
good. I finished the Gosu tutorial for Ruby and in the process
changed a lot of things to fit my own visual design, while keeping
with the tutorial's main game structure. gosu's use of hardware
acceleration is pretty good.
If rubygame is using opengl, then it should also take advantage of
hardware accelleration (at least on OS X, no idea about windows) But
gosu stayed responsive thus far with only the occasional flicker of a
sprite. Now it's just the messy matter of designing something
manageable for one person and building it without too much spaghetti.

No hard feelings about anything! I'm new to any kind of game
development, so I have no idea what would be more or less promising!
In my case, however, I'm aiming to just create something nostalgic of
the 80's era of games in order to focus on the game itself, rather
than graphics. I can do graphics well, but that's a distraction from
actual game design.

 

[Marc Heiler]

"But Rubygame3 moves away from SDL actually. It goes towards OpenGL and
OpenALSA"

Isn't this a bad thing given that pygame is running strong using
SDL and SDL's popularity increases until today?

 

[Richard Conroy]

I've been trying to find out what programming language would be best for
creating a MMORPG game/engine. After some responses elsewhere I've
decided to choose between Java and Ruby.

I am curious as to why you selected those 2, or why you are restricting
yourself to one language only.

I recently posted a question asking which is faster. Now I want to know
which would be better for creating a 2D MMORPG game / engine. By 2D I
mean using the arrow keys to walk around and attacking with a certain
key etc... Pretty good graphics for a 2D game (RMXP graphics, if you
know what I mean). Along with the role playing feel with skills and
quests. So I'd like to know whether Ruby could do this or am I better
off using Java? Thanks for any help.

In a MMORPG (or any MMOG for that matter), your main problem is
co-ordinating game world state with sufficient latency across hundreds
or thousands of players.

If you could somehow make this DB driven, it would play to Ruby/Rails
strengths. You need this to be easy and cheap to do. Java's processing
power and good threading would also be good here, but to be honest,
if I was developing a massively concurrent system, I don't think that I
would be choosing either of these except as a prototyping tool. This
is the kind of project that would make me learn Erlang for instance.

I would do more research on this, like what the MMOG dev community
normally uses to power their servers. I know that many game development
forums have rules against asking for MMOG design advice (standard
answer: You don't have the resources, quit now.).

As for the client end, you have lots of options. I wouldn't rule out Flash
for instance. Also Lua tends to be the dominant scripting language in
games development. Mostly though you want to go with something
that has good support ecology (tooling, books, proven in the game space).

 

[Jeremy Woertink]

I've been trying to find out what programming language would be best for
creating a MMORPG game/engine. After some responses elsewhere I've
decided to choose between Java and Ruby.
I recently posted a question asking which is faster. Now I want to know
which would be better for creating a 2D MMORPG game / engine. By 2D I
mean using the arrow keys to walk around and attacking with a certain
key etc... Pretty good graphics for a 2D game (RMXP graphics, if you
know what I mean). Along with the role playing feel with skills and
quests. So I'd like to know whether Ruby could do this or am I better
off using Java? Thanks for any help.

Don't know if you knew this or not, but RPG Maker XP was written in Ruby
and has a Ruby editor. Just download that and make an RPG. Then, when
you get gangster, you can add some extensions and what not to make your
game an MMO.

 

[Nick Sch]

Don't know if you knew this or not, but RPG Maker XP was written in Ruby

and has a Ruby editor. Just download that and make an RPG. Then, when
you get gangster, you can add some extensions and what not to make your
game an MMO.

Too bad RPG Maker XP isn't open-source. Otherwise I'd immensely modify
it and make it multiplayer.

 

[Suraj Kurapati]

I've been trying to find out what programming language would be best for
creating a MMORPG game/engine. After some responses elsewhere I've
decided to choose between Java and Ruby.
I recently posted a question asking which is faster.

If you want the *fastest*, coolest 2D game physics for Ruby, be sure to
look at Chipmunk:

http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk

Just watch the sample videos on that site; it's amazing!

Now I want to know which would be better for creating a 2D MMORPG game / engine.

The same author is also developing a 2D game engine for Ruby called
Aerosol:

http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Aerosol

 

[Robert McGovern]

Don't know if you knew this or not, but RPG Maker XP was written in Ruby

and has a Ruby editor. Just download that and make an RPG. Then, when
you get gangster, you can add some extensions and what not to make your
game an MMO.

Thanks for posting that Jeremy, I had never heard of it. Looks
interesting and nice to see Matz and Neil Hodgson (Scintilla & Scite)
listed in the footer of every page.

Rob

 

[Robert McGovern]

If you want the *fastest*, coolest 2D game physics for Ruby, be sure to

look at Chipmunk:

http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk

Just watch the sample videos on that site; it's amazing!

Mmm, the Sketch video is stunning. Now that is the sort of software I
would want my son to play with.

http://files.slembcke.net/chipmunk/movies/sketch.mov

 

[Bill Kelly]

Mmm, the Sketch video is stunning. Now that is the sort of software I
would want my son to play with.

http://files.slembcke.net/chipmunk/movies/sketch.mov

No kidding, that is *awesome*.

Wow.


Thanks for the links,

Bill

 

[Suraj Kurapati]

Rubygame3 [...] has other interesting developments in it too, e.g. a
collision framework for the primitive shapes.

IMHO, instead of writing their own collision framework, they should
seriously consider using Chipmunk:

http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk