hi robert, hi guys,
I'm involved in mmo business from ~2 years and I'm currently
developing a flash based mmo (www.wazzamba.com).
I ran lots of tests on 3D engines since the start of the project I
think none of them is ready for that purpose (mmo I mean).
Actually lots of flash based mmos have fake 3d (2.5d isometric worlds)
or precalculated\prerendered 3d and the reason is that 3d rendering in
flash is too expensive in cpu cost.
I saw good attempts to do something in mmo direction from alternativa (http://tankionline.com/
) and yogurt(http://www.yogurt3d.com/demos/OdaDemo/room_demo.php)
teams, howeve if you try to push the limits and try to put 30-50
avatars on the same room you see performances going down and down and
your fans spin madly.
The solution we adopted here is building our own 2.5d engine and I
think it's still the much scalable solution for a flash based mmo
purpose.
I hope to have been helpful :)
Piergiorgio Niero
TheFlashMind AUG - Italy
On 15/dic/09, at 05:04, valeriuscrowe wrote:
Thanks Cauê, for the insights and the compliment.
The communication is already all in Flash, using RTMP with a Wowza
server and some web services. Shockwave3D wraps Flash, so it's easy
to develop pieces in Flash (like the Youtube component for example)
and then include them in Shockwave3D.
My main concerns with Away3D are performance and coding headaches.
Shockwave3D leverages DirectX9, so rendering is fairly quick and we're
using low-poly models and very limited texturing for everything. We
currently limit rooms to 20 people. I forget how many polygons the
characters are, I think around 1,500 or so. From a coding standpoint
Shockwave3D works like Unity or any 3D development environment does in
terms of Z ordering, lighting, etc., although it's missing more
advanced things like cast shadows and reflections. I'm seeing
discussions of weird techniques in Away3D to do things like Z ordering
and it's making me wonder how difficult it will be to do the basics of
rendering the world.
The only reason we're looking at Away3D is to move to an all-Flash
application, and start to leverage Flex and Flash 10. (Flash support
in Shockwave3D is still limited to Flash 8 and AS2). If Away3D can
come close to matching the performance of Shockwave3D, and if we don't
have to write arcane stuff for basic rendering, then it could be a
winner!
Robert
On Dec 14, 7:39 pm, Cauê Waneck <[email protected]> wrote:
Hey, nice app you've got there! : )
Could you be a bit more specific? Is there a limit of connections
in each
room? How many tris are there in each character? Is there more
processing
involved in each game? I would configure a stub client to access
youtube,
and handle the basic server communications you've got there (mic
broadcasting & receiving, chat, facebook connection...) and see how
much
overhead will they bring. Does the server handle some kind of
mixing right
now? If you haven't got much control of how many people will be in
a room
simultaneously, you run the risk of having a cpu-killer at some
point...
Well, but with some smart coding, and keeping some secure limits in
mind,
you shouldn't have much problem with running your application on
away3d/lite. The 3D part looks quite simple, but you will probably
need to
restructure your server-side handling mostly because you will need
to use
RTMP as the protocol to handle the audio+data exchange on flash.
2009/12/14 valeriuscrowe <[email protected]>
We're currently doing an MMO in Shockwave3D (http://apps.facebook.com/
digparty) and we're considering porting it to Flash. Away3D looks
like the best candidate to me, especially Away3D Lite if it can do
it.
<b>My question is, is Away3D up to the task of running an MMO?</
b> Is
the performance good enough? Are we going to pull our hair out
trying
to write convoluted code to get the equivalent of what we can
already
do in Shockwave3D? Has anyone done this already?
thanks,
Robert
