"Realms of Generica" mmorpg techdemo - stresstest

Realms of Generica

is a techdemo game I developed together with what I call my "MMORPG TUSC", a framework that was supposed to be flexible enough to develop basic MMORPGs without writing code. After 2 years of development (with many pauses inbetween), I felt like it was time to release a demo to test the stability of the basic system.


Download (53 MB)
stresstest has ended, thanks to everyone who participated!

Some screenshots so you know what you are downloading:






How to play
The game plays like a Diablo-style hack-and-slay game. Leftclick to move and attack. Some parts are not easy, so make sure you always have the best weapon equipped and use your skills often. To do that, you have to move the skills to the skill shortcut bar and then use keys 1-9 to use them. Also be fast to drink health potions.
If you have time, please do all the 5 quests available.

Known issues
- The client sometimes crashes on zone change.
- If the game hangs on loading, one of the servers crashed. This shouldn't happen, but if it does please write me a PM.
- Resolution and audio level can't be changed yet, sorry.
- No group/party system, no PvP, XP and gold isn't shared between players.
Newly found bugs:
- Level up sound and message is also displayed if other players near you level up.

Tech talk
Game is completely written in C++. The game logic is fully independent of Gamestudio. That's necessary because the server runs on linux. Everything is highly optimized for low resource use (CPU, network etc).


So, please test the game, and report bugs that you find. Keep in mind that the game itself only serves as a testing platform, to don't expect too much gameplay from it.

Thank you for you help!

hi, tried to register, but on shift, alt-gr or the arrow-keys it writes an "E" in the email-field - so I can't register


ps: the knight reminds me on a game, which was made with 3dgs, too. Arwenia? I dont know the name anymore

Thanks for reporting, other players had the same problem. Never experienced this on any of my machines, but the funny thing is that everyone else had this issue. The joy of the Windows API .
Thanks to MasterQ32, I'm currently uploading a new version that uses a different key input method. It'll be online in 5 minutes.

EDIT: Its up now!

The good news is that the servers seem to be very stable, which is main goal this test.

Looks great for a 3DGS game.

I understand your C++ programming ,this way you have full liberty and structures and classes that is top for reusabilty,
and management of code.
How are made the levels ? is this 3D tiles ?

If your system would be enought visual for 3D artists to use , believe me, even for 3D artists it would be some amazing package Im' sure you would be very successfull selling such system, caus RPG is one type of game many people try to make one (RPG Maker stuff and others ...)

there is some template system for 3DGS that shows the C Script and how to manage things , that great help indeed
But having some ready to use RPG system for 3DGS as polished as yours , i'm sure it would be successfull.

-------------
What techniques do you use ? LOD ? or not because the view helps to reduce objesct at screen ?
no shaders ?
Anyway, even here , your textures matches well, the level seems homogenous, and lightening indoor is great !
What lightening system do you use for indoor dungeon ? (simple lights , shaders with lights ?)
How do you make indoor levels ? (modeling app , or 3D tiles ?)


Keep it up !
I'll try your demo !

Demo tried so impressions :


Good :
- versy solid base
- even the GUI interface are great
- For an indie game the 3D art is solid expect players but they must be just to test.
- The radar map discovery on the upper screen is great also !

Bad :
- a crash when entering teh dungeon for rats ?
- The player walks TOO SLOW : i wnat to fight and discover towns and NPC, not waste my time walking so SLOW !
(Old RPG where you wasted your time walking instead of playing are finished : Just try Skyrim or Guild Wars 2 and teleport systems, and the characters don't run slowly !!)
- The monsters don't respawn ? even afetr quit and re enter on some area !

And we have to click each time to attack ??
Well perhaps it's my taste , but i would prefer to have to click only one time for my character to attack the ennemy alone without having to click each time !
That's better gameplay whe nyou have some bar with powers to manage :
You click the ennemy one time , then you can let it attack alone and then manage the powers of your character

TorchLight need also like your game lot of clicks to attack each time, so that point is more some personnal taste !

@ratched:
have you read the description?
this is a techdemo, not a game demo!
it's about his MMO framework

so this is not a usual RPG, Mobs need their time to respawn, it doesn't matter if you close the game or not, it depends on his server!

Ok , i didn't see anything respaw, that's why i talked about that.
Anyway i know it's some tech demo, but it's really complete system already
I would want to see more about the game ? some visual tools ?


@SchokoKeks :
What system do you use for 3D tiles ? sprites with panels ?
squarre 3D models ? don't you found some lightening problem ro seems visible woth 3D tiles ?
(it's some big probelm i have with 3DGS , i can't make some level without visible lighetning problem on 3D tiles : two adjacent 3D tiles never have same lighetning on "glued" vertex)
And you seem that you don't have that problem on your level !
So if you have some bit of code or little demo i would want indeed !

@ratched: just split up the model into separate faces (if you use cubes create 6 planes and stick them together to a cube but don't merge the vertices^^)

Thank for your feedback ratchet. I'll start with the issues:

- Enemy respawning works, but it takes about 4 minutes. I can't make it lower, because then people would have to fight the same monsters again when they leave the dungeon.
- Crashes are very frequent, sadly. The problem here is that I hardly ever have any of those crashes on my own computers, so this makes it very hard to debug. I could not yet find any pattern in which they happen.
- About player walking too slow: Thats true, also the "Grassland" area is too large. I'll probably make the player a bit faster and increase the distance of the camera so you can see more of the level.
- Clicking to attack: I'll leave it like this, but I will add the possibility to hold the mouse key to walk and attack.

On the technical side:
The levels use a custom file format, I have written my own editor for it:


The game is tile-based, which makes pathfinding and collision easy. remember, the server has to run without any gamestudio function.
I'm not doing anything specific with the tiles, they are not connected. Just simple mdl files. I'm using the standard shadow and lightning system, and it works okay.
Shadows often go through walls and change their orientation rapidly, causing quite a lot of visible errors.
Decals and decal shadows don't work with tiles.

Also, I've developed a custom level loading system, which only loads the part of the level that is visible into the gamestudio engine. With this, I don't need a LOD system. The network code is also optimized that you only get updates on things that are very near.

All the game data and the GUI is read from XML files, if you are interested you can find them in the "data/be" directory. With this, the editor and the server application you can create your own MMO game (as long as it uses the same game mechanic as this).

Thanks to everyone who played to far, already found quite a few bugs The server still seems to be stable!

Congratulations again, nice work! The game sadly crashed for me, too, after I killed the monsters in the cave, collected their loot, closed the inventory and when I tried to open it again, acknex.exe stopped working.

I got 8-s, not E-s in the email area but registered with invalid email.
I went down to basement twice, second time I found a dagger in the box, and later when I did the quest for the dagger I got no another.
it was funny to run away from monsters, after a time I had about 20 followers
finally I had a crash on a level load (after about 3 level loads without problem).

mmo_cl stops working... and happens often... but i had fun for 5 min great doing!

Thank you all for your comments. I know that crashes are a major issue at this time.

I've found one evil heap corruption - credit goes to the function _chkheap! lite-C should have something like this There are probably more corruptions to be found, but lets see how stable this new version is for everyone, I'm uploading it right now. Apart from several bugfixes there are also a few

New features in 0.110
- The camera is now a bit further away from the player, giving you a better overview of the scene
- Player movement speed increased from 5 to 7.
- Space key closes all open dialogues on the screen
- The chat now informs you when someone enters or leaves your region
- You can now change the screen resolution with F5 and go to full screen with F6, BUT only do this directly after you started the game, otherwise it will crash.

For the download link, please check the first post.

1999 Gold, no more quests open. Runs very stable now, no more crashes.
But there are some bugs to report:
- "Force of Will" gives no experience when killing enemies
- Sometimes enemies just disappear
- The looting is annoying, if you are in a battle with about 5-10 enemies and your inventory just pops up because you clicked a lootable enemy

I just played with MasterQ32 and it was enjoyable. Reminded me of the old Ragnarök Online times.

Bugs:
Stable to me, as long as you don't minimize.
Attacking while chatting sends the text.
This version lagged a few times. I was "jumping" on the field. Not so in the previous version. Probably just the network.
You can't add health and mana pots to the action bar.

Comments:
A way to party up would be nice, as I was kill-stealing the goblins while doing quests together.
The global loot is an interesting element. Pvp would even enhance that. =)
Walking "between" the tiles is probably coming someday later?
Automatic closing of an empty loot window would be better than a "close everything" button. And I would not open the inventory when looting, as long as it has space left. Shift+Click could be quick-loot.

Overall really nice game.

just tested the last version :
Lot better for the speed of characte rrun , but i think some little more speed would be perfect like speed in mmos !

Clicking on the ground is not visible enought, some lot more visible effect click on ground would be better !

We can see if you put attention, some seams on 3D tiles on the floor when the camera moves. Well i htink is 3DGS engine problem compared to Unity 3D where 3D tiles matches perfectly even with lightening !
But that's not really visible

Again i would prefer select one time for character to attack continuously , and manage object, powers, placement.
(FF12 style and mmos style)

Can you make bigger 3D tiles, and not only plane 3D tiles, but with deformation like terrain ?
System very used in Dungeon siege 1 & 2 on PC !

Dungeon Siege 2 : 3D tiles

Perhaps you could adopt such system for exteriors ?
bigger 3D tiles having a terrain look ?

Anyway, great finished working game
Not all people reach to achieve such goal !

Keep it up

Thank you all for testing!


Going to look into that, thanks for finding that. I think I may already know what causes the enemies to disappear.

I thought about having my loot drop on the ground like in diablo and torchlight, but I decided to go for a more MMO-like loot inventory because it uses way less traffic. The game should prefer attacking over looting, but since lying bodies have a different shape a misclick is easy.. I'll think about that



Minimizing should not crash the game, but it seems to crash when the d3d-device is lost, like when an "admin access rights" UAC panel pops up or you press CTRL+ALT+DEL.



I think this is because of the faster running, I'll have to tweak a few values on the networking part.


These features are a must if I'll ever make a real game out of this. We'll see when I find the time to implement this.



Yes, I've been greatly influenced by this game I have also forgotten the name, but it had better effects and graphics than RoG


Thanks to your help the game seems to be very stable right now. None of the 5 server applications had a single crash.

What's about attack: left mouse, loot and talk right mouse?

Hi Schokokeks,

Just a small help for you if you have problems with memory allocations / heap corruptions:

1) Use _CRTDBG_CHECK_ALWAYS_DF in Function _CrtSetDbgFlag ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z8h19c37(v=vs.71).aspx ). This will check the integrity of the Heap after EVERY malloc / new / free / delete. Of course this will dramatically decrease the performance (actually you can not "play" anymore), but you are able to detect the exact position of an error very easily.

2) Use Visual Leak Detector to detect possible memory leaks ( http://vld.codeplex.com/ )

I just checked the registration. This works (also the login process), but i got an error message in the registration dialog (some acknex error message, on the "OK" Button. So the button-label probably should be "OK" and instead there was an error message).

regards,
Timo

k, not sure if it was because I ran it in virtualbox or because you actually did, but did I see the black console screen say that this uses ogl??? what part did acknex play in this. in other response, in a VM on win7 it only ran at like 5fps, so i didnt do much will try it at home on host win 7 tonight.

@TechMuc: Thanks a lot for these function, didn't know them. I couldn't find another memory leak using them. Also, after a restart of my computer resolution switching now works for me without a crash... very strange
Anyway, the memory corruption that caused a crash before was within the engine (not necessarily the engines fault though), so the CRT debug settings wouldn't affect it afaik.

Also, I can't reproduce any problem with the registration. What exactly happend? You clicked the OK button and got an error message? Can you reproduce that?

@lostclimate:
The game doesn't use OpenGL, I don't see any console output that says otherwise. It uses Acknex as engine, only the game logic and networking system are custom written and independent of acknex. The dynamic shadows eat a lot of performance, so it probably can't run well on a virtual graphics card.
Thank you for testing it though!

I just played a round while the following error message popped up, when I pressed the space key to close all windows:

Malfunction W1527
ERROR in interface_inv::get_owner_inv: owner nonexistant

followed by this one:

Malfunction W1527
ERROR in class button_item: Inventory missing

k, not sure if it was because I ran it in virtualbox or because you actually did, but did I see the black console screen say that this uses ogl??? what part did acknex play in this

How to know when a game is done or is using really 3DGS ? is there a way ?
In the case it was not , 3DGS people would be a very kind community to play Beta testers for a non 3DGS game

no problem

@ratchet, you could look for acknex related files probably. seems the debug key is turned off.

yeah even if it wasnt, I'm sure we'd just move it to morbius.