It’s been a fair while since my last post (at least, it has by my standards); I just wanted to assure people that yes, I’m still here, and yes, I’m still working on MMORPG Tycoon 2. I’ve had a little break from coding over the past week, and have instead been playing some Tales of Vesperia and Battlefield 1943 (which has twice now had me start playing in the early evening, and then suddenly realise that it was 2am when my hands started to cramp up).
I’ve now returned to poking with MMORPG Tycoon 2 again, but have been working on bits that aren’t very friendly to screen captures. Right now, I’m converting the old 2D MMORPG Tycoon subscriber AI code over into the new 3D MMORPG Tycoon 2 world and codebase. It’s actually not being too difficult, but enough things have moved around and had their names changed that it does require some extensive modification to make it fit in its new home. Plus, of course, the whole “extending a 2D game into 3D” thing, which is always a bit of a bear to do. My goal is to have the whole MMORPG Tycoon 1 game functioning inside MMORPG Tycoon 2 by the end of Wednesday. We’ll see whether I make it! :)
A couple little notes about changes in game design between MMORPG Tycoon 1 and 2. In both versions, “graveyards” function as doorways between the computer world and the MMORPG world. That is, buildings and other things are manufactured by your employees in the computer world, and then are imported into and exported out from the MMORPG world through the nearest graveyard. This also allows graveyards to function as a teleportation network for you and for your game designers. In MMORPG Tycoon 1, you were required to place at least one graveyard in your world, so that you could then import other buildings into the world. In 2, you’re now required to place one graveyard in each region you want to have active; all further buildings inside the region will come from that in-region graveyard, rather than being imported from graveyards in neighboring regions. This will make things an awful lot simpler and faster, in the vastly larger worlds of MMORPG Tycoon 2!
Anyone who built a really big and complicated MMORPG in MMORPG Tycoon 1 knows how badly it scaled once the world started to become really complicated; these design changes are intended to simplify the work that the computer has to do to simulate the MMORPG, without trading off too much in terms of the ways that people might wish to set up their worlds.
Finally, one more little note. I recently hooked up the old “random region name generation” code from MMORPG Tycoon 1 into MMORPG Tycoon 2, so in my current testbed, I now have areas labelled “The Bleak Cliffs”, “The Ravine of Despair”, and “Grove of the Ancients”. Of course, all of them by default look like exactly the same blue-sky green-grass terrain I’ve already shown; I’m going to have to hook in a little bit of smarts to link the terrain generation and the naming scheme, I suspect!
