Ice - Internet Communications Engine - is a middleware package designed for object handling across a network, designed by ZeroC. A "replacement" for CORBA, and an improvement upon SOAP and XML-RPC, this package looks very impressive indeed.
Perhaps too impressive.
I'm surprised I haven't heard of Ice before now. It turns out that Ice was used (in fact, one of the articles I read implied it was designed for) the MMORPG game Wish (which I have mentioned before).
Ice handles multiple servers and a multitude of clients. It pretty much handles all of the server-server and client-server communication needed for MMORF.
And that's the problem.
As my very first post said, the point of MMORF is to see if I can do it myself. All of it. Every part of a MMO system, from the database storage, to inter-server communication, to running a multi-million object world. If I use Ice as the foundation for communication, I'm almost cheating myself, aren't I?
And thus I have a quandary.
Luckily(?), I need such a system for a work-related project, so I'm going to continue to read about Ice, and see if, at the very least, it's what that project needs.
After that, the question becomes whether I can write my own (as-good) implementation of Ice for MMORF, or whether I break down and use it.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Monday, June 13, 2005
Scripting
As I've mentioned before, scripting will be a big part of MMORF.
Because MMORF is just a framework, meant to run a world of objects and their movement and their interaction and their attributes, it will have only the basic rules that apply to any implementation of a world that a designer might create.
There will be no concept of ability scores (strength, charisma), or race (human, elf, orc) or even gender on the mobiles; objects will not have a weight, or color, or special attributes (magic powers, laser strength). These are all concepts that belong to the design of a world, but not the physics of the world.
The idea is that someone should be able to take the MMORF engine, slap in a bunch of customized code, and have the world run as they wish. If they want a world of fantasy, then the players are elves, have strength and dexterity and such, pick up magic +5 swords, and cast spells; sci-fi worlds will have aliens, lasers and whatnot.
Designing the core rules of the world should be something major, something that takes some time, and something that doesn't necessarily get changed all too often. These could be rules (scripts/code) that are loaded and applied when the world is started up. Any big changes to this world's universe, and the world might go offline briefly to update these programs.
But just as likely, we would want to add some functionality to the world as it's running. Gamemasters (GMs) might want to add some new behavior to a monster in the world, or create a new item that interacts in a new way with other objects, and would want to do these things without having to shut the world down. Additionally, trusted inhabitants (or players, in a game world) might be allowed to customize a subset of their world, as some MUD systems allow.
Because the customization might not be solely in the hands of the world designer (who, if not a competent programmer, would hopefully have one available), we might want to consider the learning curve for scripting.
Because MMORF will be coded in C# and .NET, the obvious way of adding customization is to allow modules (DLLs) to be written in native C# - it will run fast, and merges seamlessly with the system. The other straightforward alternative is to implement a scripting language (much as the Neverwinter Nights (NWN) game has done), which is then translated by the world as it runs.
The first method is appealing from a programmer's point-of-view, as well for time considerations. C# code will just directly access all the data in the world, which, of course, is both good and bad. Questions I had about C# being interpretable or compilable on-the-fly seem to have been partially answered - the RunUO project, also written in C#/.NET, has their customization done through C#.
The second method, providing a scripting engine, also has its plusses. The scripting language can be (if created from scratch) simple enough for the non-programmers to figure out. The NWN language was very C-like, and many tutorials were written on how to use it. Many, many useful scripts came from the NWN community, but it's not clear if the contributors were already programmers, or if they were regular Joes that could pick up the scripting language and use it effectively. The NWN language was pre-compiled, but only down to a byte-code level (I believe), so it was interpreted by the NWN engine. This kind of system would allow people in-game to type in code and have it happen immediately. Mobiles or objects could be examined in-game and have their code appear in a window, edited, and saved.
Not to say that you can't wing something like this from the "direct code" method. If the .NET framework provides a way to compile code on-the-fly, then the same could be done here. As to loading new versions while the world is "live", I'll have to investigate.
I'm leaning to the C# scripting solution. Its feasibility as a live scripting language will have to be checked. Additionally, because of the learning curve on C#, it might be desirable to have a beginner scripting language that can just be translated to C# (and then compiled); this scripting language could be used directly by the non-programmer world designer, or in-game for simple tasks. If the language is kept simple enough, mapping it to C# should be easy, and then that can be passed on and compiled with the scripter none-the-wiser that they just "wrote" C# code.
As for an API to the MMORF internals that the scripting language might use? That's for another time...
Because MMORF is just a framework, meant to run a world of objects and their movement and their interaction and their attributes, it will have only the basic rules that apply to any implementation of a world that a designer might create.
There will be no concept of ability scores (strength, charisma), or race (human, elf, orc) or even gender on the mobiles; objects will not have a weight, or color, or special attributes (magic powers, laser strength). These are all concepts that belong to the design of a world, but not the physics of the world.
The idea is that someone should be able to take the MMORF engine, slap in a bunch of customized code, and have the world run as they wish. If they want a world of fantasy, then the players are elves, have strength and dexterity and such, pick up magic +5 swords, and cast spells; sci-fi worlds will have aliens, lasers and whatnot.
Designing the core rules of the world should be something major, something that takes some time, and something that doesn't necessarily get changed all too often. These could be rules (scripts/code) that are loaded and applied when the world is started up. Any big changes to this world's universe, and the world might go offline briefly to update these programs.
But just as likely, we would want to add some functionality to the world as it's running. Gamemasters (GMs) might want to add some new behavior to a monster in the world, or create a new item that interacts in a new way with other objects, and would want to do these things without having to shut the world down. Additionally, trusted inhabitants (or players, in a game world) might be allowed to customize a subset of their world, as some MUD systems allow.
Because the customization might not be solely in the hands of the world designer (who, if not a competent programmer, would hopefully have one available), we might want to consider the learning curve for scripting.
Because MMORF will be coded in C# and .NET, the obvious way of adding customization is to allow modules (DLLs) to be written in native C# - it will run fast, and merges seamlessly with the system. The other straightforward alternative is to implement a scripting language (much as the Neverwinter Nights (NWN) game has done), which is then translated by the world as it runs.
The first method is appealing from a programmer's point-of-view, as well for time considerations. C# code will just directly access all the data in the world, which, of course, is both good and bad. Questions I had about C# being interpretable or compilable on-the-fly seem to have been partially answered - the RunUO project, also written in C#/.NET, has their customization done through C#.
The second method, providing a scripting engine, also has its plusses. The scripting language can be (if created from scratch) simple enough for the non-programmers to figure out. The NWN language was very C-like, and many tutorials were written on how to use it. Many, many useful scripts came from the NWN community, but it's not clear if the contributors were already programmers, or if they were regular Joes that could pick up the scripting language and use it effectively. The NWN language was pre-compiled, but only down to a byte-code level (I believe), so it was interpreted by the NWN engine. This kind of system would allow people in-game to type in code and have it happen immediately. Mobiles or objects could be examined in-game and have their code appear in a window, edited, and saved.
Not to say that you can't wing something like this from the "direct code" method. If the .NET framework provides a way to compile code on-the-fly, then the same could be done here. As to loading new versions while the world is "live", I'll have to investigate.
I'm leaning to the C# scripting solution. Its feasibility as a live scripting language will have to be checked. Additionally, because of the learning curve on C#, it might be desirable to have a beginner scripting language that can just be translated to C# (and then compiled); this scripting language could be used directly by the non-programmer world designer, or in-game for simple tasks. If the language is kept simple enough, mapping it to C# should be easy, and then that can be passed on and compiled with the scripter none-the-wiser that they just "wrote" C# code.
As for an API to the MMORF internals that the scripting language might use? That's for another time...
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