Post edited 22:52 – 24. November 2010 by oxl

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Hello,
I am very interested in the status of this project , too.

As I have read somewhere in the news, they (he?) are working heavily on the client and later on they said, they have no more time to develop it further.

It sounds for me that it's yet another MMO project getting abandoned due to less man power.

I'm pretty sure that many people here are more interested in the server-side framework but to develop another MMO RPG Client that never gets finished. Sorry for sounding rant-ish, but I fear that this is another ambitious project dying.

Why not concentrate on the server side and maybe put the client into another project ?

Please don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed about what you've done so far and I really would like to see this framework growing, even contribute to it.

So please tell us, that you are working on it and there will be progress in the near future. Please ;-)

Regards,

oxl

At least there are new commits to the svn :)

Thats nice !

Keep on the good work,

oxl

Post edited 20:34 – 29. November 2010 by oxl

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Hi Ricky,

I'm glad about your honest answer.

I apologize , if my words above sounded like I'm forcing you to develop further, that was not intended. I really appreciate your work , it's very
much like a project I wanted to start since many years now :)

As I've seen, that you are also the person developing the TXna Game Eninge, I was not too surprised anymore about you having time trouble to commit to the borgserver project lately.

Actually you must be a fast and a very experienced programmer to handle so many projects at the same time :)

I am not , more a Unity3D C# scripter, but I currently looking into your source code understanding more every day.

I have the server with the DB running, compiled the M&M client and was able to connect the server and create a char on it. Sadly the connection was dropped after a few seconds, no errors messages at all.

I'm currently re-downloading the whole svn and will try building it again, if the error still occurs, it's better to open a new thread about it, I think.

While working with Unity3D on the client side planning to create some kind of Space-Sim, I fear I cannot help you developing your client much, but if I will make any improvements to the server side, I will post it here on the forum. Maybe the chat part could be mine, since it is IMHO a basic feature a multi-user environment should have.

It will take some time until I got deeper into the code base, though …

Additionally I'm thinking about a scripting interface for CS-Script to make the server more customizable , even if I'm not sure if it really makes sense … well, seems like I'm obsessed with that :-D

Hopefully you'll find enough spare-time to keep on working on this ambitious project and maybe also more members to contribute to it.

Cheers,
oxl

Hey,

I fixed my problem with the "auto-disconnect problem".
Reason was the client_timeout_seconds field in the world db's settings table set to 4 seconds. I was just not fast enough to create and load the char and start the world :)

After increasing it to 20 seconds I was able to join and walk around the landscape, great ! Runs pretty smooth on my older C2D GF8600.

Regarding other not programming related contributions, if you give me an idea , what kind of sounds (not music) you need, I can take a look , what sounds I can find ( I have a ton , but I'm not sure if they are free … . Anyway I could search the web for some, just give me some infos what kind of do you need.

I recently bought some models, including a small (and very basic) RPG House Kit . I have no usage for it at the moment, maybe it could be useful for your client, at least as a placeholder ? What format do you prefer ?

What I really would like to see is the Basic GameClient getting updated, so that potentially creators of other, non-XNA based clients (eg Unity3d :) , are getting an idea of how to connect (create char) to the server without going through the M&M client code.

If I remember correctly, you are using threading on the client side and I'm not sure, if this is possible on the client inside Unity3D (using Mono). I just have no experience with multi-threading.

I've played a bit with the Basic GameClient you delivered inside the "clients" folder, but I'm getting too much API errors to run it successfully, so I thought it is outdated right now.

The server-side scripting part is just an idea floating around my brain for a long time, I just like the idea of a very open system with some easy-to-use interfaces, where less skilled people eventually can create server-side "mods" or expand the existing logic with new features, properties, events or whatever. As is mentioned before, it's just a weird idea of mine, I'm not convinced for myself, that it makes sense.

Greets,

oxl

Post edited 01:26 – 30. November 2010 by oxl

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GambitRicky said:

I was just mentioning the sounds since i was working something with fmod the other day, what I really meant is that one can contribute in many ways even without coding.

Because I learned sound engineering in the past, I thought it could be a starting point to give something back to the "community". :)

GF8600 is not exactly the target platform and I am surprised that it works at all on such old HW!

Not sure if you are being sarcastic here, but regarding to the hardware (web)player stats on the unity3d website a GF8600 isn't that much distributed. Most of their users are still using GFX hardware like the INTEL GMA 950 (sic!) or something like GF7300, which isn't very capable at all, too.

3D models and animations are always welcome, format doesn't really matter unless it's something uncommon (3ds, fbx, X, anything will do).

.FBX is the common format in Unity, so maybe I can help you out here. ( I'm a bad modeller and so I'm always searching (buying) models for my own stuff, too.

Regarding the 'GameClient', well this is so old that and forgotten that by now it is completely useless. Honestly, I forgot to delete this folder at least a year ago :-)

haha , no worries :)

Setting up a connection to Borg is actually very simple since we wrapped that up in the LoginConnection class. Note however that M&M is using a temporary backdoor and connects directly to the world server so we don't have to run the Login Server and Login Server DB during development.

The process is as follows:
I. LOGIN SERVER

–snip

Thanks for the detailed information , I really appreciate it.
I will try to follow your instructions step by step, hopefully there will be a way to make this run inside the Unity3d environment. I'll keep you informed anyway.

The above is all you have to do!
Take a look at the M&M WorldState.HandleStateChanged() and HandleMessageReceived() to see how this is handled.

That's the point where I am right now and, yeah, that was kind of self-explaining due to your good summary comments inside your code , thanks !

I also have the impression that you are missing one most important detail: Borg is a Server platform and framework, like the IIS server is a platform for developing web sites and web applications. This is meant to be a utility for programmers developing MMO's.

–snip

Seems like I sounded too noob-ish ;-) (being a _hobby_ coder for 30+ years, but coming from Delphi via Truevision3D, where I first touched C#, and finally happily landed at Unity3D for years now :). Also , I do networking as my daytime job for 15 years now ). But that's another story.

Actually I understand the underlying concept, putting the specific game.logic into a .dll. Thats exactly the part where I was thinking about the scripting interface, outsourcing the whole game logic to the script engine, as you did it with the .dll approach.

Another library I tried out recently ( Exitgame's Photon) does a similar approach to yours.

Regards
Riki

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Well, we'll see , it's late now :p

Thanks so far,

Regards,
oxl

GambitRicky said:

And yes I thought you where a modeler or level designer just starting to write some scripts

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8-o

Post edited 09:40 – 1. December 2010 by GambitRicky

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Hell I wouldn't remember my first program not even with a gun at my head but its for sure also more than 2 decades away :-)

I just checked out your site and I like the "The Kingdom" project since this is somewhat in the Mages & Mercenaries direction. Too bad there is no real description or video just the images.

Regarding Borg, you should start with the diagrams on the Design section of this site. The code base is by now grown so huge that it is hard to get the grasp by just looking at the code. There are also some documents in the SVN which are a bit outdated but still a very good starting point.

The core server parts are heavily multithreaded and the more cores you have the better. But – as always there is a but – the key part of any MMO is the game logic which in the Borg world is implemented as a WSE (World Server Extension). The game developer has to implement the WSE while Borg provides "only" the framework, shared libraries, messaging infrastructure, user housekeeping & authentication.
The performance of your server will be mostly completely dependent on the WSE implementation. I spent a rather long time designing and thinking about a slick WSE design but it always comes out that the client messages have to be serialized at some point or another. e.g You cant execute user actions in parallel if they are interacting with each other (combat, item pickups etc). The best I came up with is to serialize the user actions and do the rest (AI, Mob manager, Spawn point manager, Quest manager) on separate threads.
Anyway IMHO the Borg message throughput is much larger than a WSE would ever be able to handle.

I don't have much time to work on Borg (which is funny since I am unemployed) or other projects of mine but I hope this will change soon.

I also hate the current forum layout its functionality and the often SF slowdowns/outages so I will have some serious thoughts about moving this somewhere else. Maybe your hosting could be the solution.
We will definitively need a real host for the demo M&M game but at this stage that's just too early.

Regards
Riki

Hi there,
I suggest you send a join request via SF – but only if you are really interested in committing source and can spare a few hours per week working on the projects.
The best Borg starting place is still this website and some docs in SVN. For TXna there exists a whole series of tutorials which teach you how to use the engine and build scenes.
Would be nice to have someone with XNA background working on the Mages & Mercenaries client/TXna engine.

Regards
Riki