[2d MMO] Merchant Seas

Merchant Seas is a 2d MMO that I started working on in September, and it's finally come far enough along to showcase:













You can see more screenshots, full-size at MerchantSeas.com.

Some of the Features:

• 17 unique towns (so far)
• A pretty large map - takes several minutes to sail the length of the Mediterranean Sea
• Can buy and sell goods between ports for profit
• Dynamic weather transitions: rain, clouds, day/night
• 3 different countries. Invest in ports to make them ally with your country
• Each town has unique ships for sale in the shipyard. Each ship can hold different amounts of cargo, supplies, and crew.
• Built-in ranking system based on experience earned from trading.

The MySQL Plugin:
The magic that made this all possible is a MySQL plugin created by our very own Joozey. I have a database set up and I simply send queries out about once a second to keep all players up to date. I then smoothly animate the ships' movement based on the info pulled from the database. Because of this little "trick" (if you want to think of it that way), the screen still updates at a nice 60 fps even though the data is only updated once a second.

Joozey is still working on some finishing touches for this plugin, and then plans to release it as open source. Feel free to message him and tell him how great he is.

Graphics Resources:
Since I'm a programmer and not an artist, I've used graphics from several sources:

• I created the world graphics using a tileset from RPG Palace. The tileset is free for non-commercial use.
• The town and icon graphics were created using tilesets from a licensed version of RPG Maker XP.
• The character portraits are from Hero Machine. They kindly gave me permission to use them at no charge. I have over 100 unique character portraits implemented currently.

Still left to do:

• I had to design the panels and GUI layout myself, so it's pretty ugly. I am having a freelance artist create new graphics for me in early January.
• There is a small issue with the MySQL plugin that Joozey is still looking into. It takes around 1/10th of a second for the call to the plugin to execute a query, and during this time, no other functions can execute. This causes a slight stutter in the game, which is a bit annoying.
• In order to publicly distribute libmySQL.dll (which is necessary for the plugin), I have to purchase a license from Sun. The estimated cost of this seems to vary based on the representative I talk to, but it's probably around $500-600. Ouch. The other option is to go entirely Open Source, which I am still considering.

Testing:
I could use about 3 people willing to help me test things out. If you have about 30-40 minutes to test my game over the next few days and let me know if you run into any bugs, that would be awesome - just send me a PM. I can't "publicly" test until I work out the license issue.

Feedback:
I would definitely appreciate any feedback on the screenshots, website, game idea, or anything else.

Yeah I got a spontanious idea
how about that:

there are places all over the maps where you're able to buy some land to built your own houses or shops to get some more money besides.

but that was just a quick idea.

Otherthen I think that this looks really cool from what the screens show though in picture 4 I cant really see that it's sand maybe add some sand-dunes

Regards and well progress

Aztec

Didn´t know, that i can post Rpg-Maker XP Games here o.O

Ok.. prepare for my RmXP-Game ^^

Since he's using the Mysql plugin by joozy, I don't think he's using RmXP

Looks cool, nice work, yea is this made with GS?

Yeah since it uses Joozeys plugin i gues it's GS.(and zelek made another 2d mulitplayer(not mmo) game with GS before. Power something.?)

Yes, the game is made with Gamestudio, not RPG Maker. I am only using graphics resources from RPG Maker.

The other 2d game I made was Powerplay, though that one was 2-6 players and used Gamestudio's built-in multiplayer. Having a MySQL server where all players are "clients" is actually much easier to handle for me.

^^ ok..
but i don´t think Entebrain finds that funny... Because the Graphics are not made to use with other engines than RmXP ( standing in the license agreement of RmXP_RTP ).

Hope you´ll go on with that ^^
Looks promising ^^

I contacted Enterbrain about this very issue. Here is the copy-pasted response from their email.

these tiles are panels or sprites(or are they images instead of tiles?)?

or you are using your own kind of objects?

they look perfect.

In Paint Shop pro, I created the images using 32x32 tiles. The world map is a 6080x2880 image with about 2 dozen layers. To bring it into Gamestudio, I have a PSP script that automatically divides the world map into a bunch of 320x320 images (10 tiles x 10 tiles).

Inside the game, the 320x320 images are created and placed as sprite entities with ent_create. I just have a couple of nested for-loops that line everything up seamlessly.

The town images are simply panels, since I don't need to worry about passable/impassable locations there.

It's coming out great Zelek! Looks well made. I'm curious for your progresses .

You might consider using 256x256 or 512x512 when using sprites/models. The engine makes 512x512 out of 320x320 due to faster rendering. So you waste a lot of video memory.

Yeah, I wondered if that might be the case. I thought having each square be 10 tiles by 10 tiles might be more intuitive while designing things, but it turned out that it didn't really matter.

Once the world map gets bigger and it becomes necessary, I'll just implement something that purges the distant sprites. I'll probably only need around 12-16 loaded at any given time, so it should be pretty efficient even with a gigantic map (hopefully).

I've found one fellow to help me out with testing the game, but I would really appreciate one or two more if anyone would be kind enough to spend 15-20 minutes once or twice a week to try things out. Getting 3-4 people on at once will help uncover bugs that might get overlooked when I test on my own.

Please just send me a PM if you'd be willing to do this. Thanks!

I'd be happy to help test. Just send me a pm and let me know when. I'm on EST time and avaiable early in day until 1:00 and late at night. Currently on vacation so within the next 7 days I'm good whenever.

Quick update - this project is still alive and well, but unfortunately I had to convert things over to XNA for better threading support. Since it's no longer a Gamestudio project, I posted some new screenshots over in Morbius if anyone is interested:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=260561#Post260561 (Screenshots, etc)

This is gonna be a good one to follow. I look forward to your game, and will definitley play it when available.

Will there be pirates who rob the ships?

Great idea!!