Project 1

[Faille]

I know things haven't been too organised so far, but its great to see some many people with great ideas interested in the project. The good news is that we're starting to formulate a plan on how to proceed and ready to start putting that into action.

The first step is going to be getting people familiar in using the Torque based MMOKIT and running through the tutorials. Look at Fattyfat's post for clearer instructions on how to go through this.

This should take people a week or 2, after which, we should have a better design fleshed out on the next step that people can jump into contributing to.

Forget everything up until this point. We're going to start small, and work on something very simple to start with, and make it. We're not going to worry about innovatice ideas or trying out new things, but instead just focus on people learning what's needed in making a MMO, albeit a small simple one, into a reality.

After that the next step will be, well, let's just cross that bridge when we come to it 8)

[Fattyfat]

Prairie Games' MMOKit Homework Assignment
1-2 Weeks

After talking with Faille at length about the project, our first goal is to create a very small "newbieworld" with many of the mmo basics you are familiar with. As a community, we will work together to create all of the elements required to bring this world to life and make it fully playable from an mmo standpoint. This includes, new models, zones, quests, npcs, classes, races, spells, skills, and more. After doing this, we should have the personel and skills in place to expand the world or create another one.

Before we can work on newbie world, we need to learn how to use the tools available to us. Therefore, allow me to introduce the MMOKit, complete with a juicy set of tutorials. When you have completed this assignment, you will have experience setting up your development environment, hosting and connecting to your own mmo server, spawning npcs, creating zones, linking zones, and creating content including: quests, weapons, loot, spells, and skills.

Step One - Getting Started

First, familiarize yourself with the MMOKit by reading the following pages:
Documentation - MMOWorkshop - Trac

Afterwards, we need to setup our development environment (in Windows). Follow the steps listed here:

DevEnvironmentSetupWindows - MMOWorkshop - Trac

*Note - For Step B1 - After installing TortiseSVN, go into your new directory, right click and select CheckoutSVN. Put your URL in here and hit OK to grab the latest mmokit code.

For part B, you may use option One or Two. I recommend Option One I only recommend Option Two for coders who care about debugging and project management. You will get a full blown IDE with debugging capabilities very similar to Visual Studio.

Verify you can run around in the single player mode after following the steps.

After your environment is setup, follow these steps to create your own version of the game files
NewGame - MMOWorkshop - Trac

After confirming you can again run around in the single player you are ready for the next step.

Step Two - The Tutorials

The listing of tutorials can be found here:
Tutorials - MMOWorkshop - Trac

You will need to enable developer mode to work on these tutorials:

Once in the game client, hit Ctrl-Tilde and type: $pref::developer = 1; Exit the game normally.
*Note: You only have to do this once, the preference will be saved. Ctrl-F10 opens the GUI Editor and Ctrl-F11 opens the realtime Zone Editor.

These are the tutorials you are responsible for doing. Please do them in the order listed here as each one builds on the previous:

1. Creating a New Zone - step 8+ is optional, especially if you have no experience creating Interiors or using Quark.
* Note - in step 7, the SpawnSphere doesn't exist in the default mission. You can Create one in creator mode by looking under "Shapes->Misc". Putting one in the world will get it into your mission.
2. Linking Zones
3. Bindstones
4. NPCs and Monsters - once complete, try creating multiple spawns in your zone and tie them to waypoints.
5. Items and Loot
6. Dialog and Quests
7. Interactive Objects
8. Spells
9. Skills
10. Vendors
11. Factions
12. Points of Interest
*Optional - Epic Battles (large scripted encounter)

[Ssinurn]

Thanks for this Fatty, good idea to give some direction.

[Cascow]

This sounds like a very good idea. Obviously not all of us are going to be coding, but if the interface is as straight-forward as it sounds, everyone should be doing this.

I'd personally put myself into the quest/raid/dungeon design bracket, but this would be a great way to get familiar with the tools and see what they are able to do.

[Vinen]

At work right now... haven't had time to really dig into this or read up heavily. Anyone know offhand what the reqs are as far as servers go to run the dev server env decently?

[Throag]

Too bad the community version doesn't include the C++ engine code. But since I'm quite fluent with Python I guess I can still have some fun with it
I had a question by the way. For people like me, who are more interested in the programming side of the project, I was wondering if it was really interesting to develop all what you suggested (required).
Sure I will play around with the toolkit to see what it's all about, but I'll certainly try to understand the inner working more than anything else.
Dunno if I'm really clear, my English could use some work

Downloading the whole thing right now anyway so gonna check it out first.

[Ssinurn]

Personally I have been working with the MV tools as well as anything else I can get my hands on for now. I'll go through all this even though I don't have interest in making worlds too much and more helping program. I believe understanding at least all the fundamentals in a project like this can help us make better tools and programming decisions.

I also have always been good at art, so this also gives me a chance to dabble.

[Throag]

I definitely agree with that. My problem is that even though I have a lot of time right now, I have stuff to do first and I don't know if I'll be able to commit into the project right now.
I guess I'll have to prioritize what I really want

[Fattyfat]

I learned a lot about how things were put together by going through these tutorials. Even though I consider myself more interested with the programming. Once you get a feel of how to operate the machinery, you can start going in and making gamewide modifications.

For example, once you complete the tutorials, I challenge you to create a Cooldown count for the spells and skills on the macro bar. That is what I am currently working on myself. In doing so, I have learned a shit ton...

[forge]

I have alot of time on my hands and was actually messing with the XNA microsoft tools a bit ago. I have tons of time, but I lack motivation at times when I get stuck on shit and can't figure out how to fix the problem or find resources which would help. Assuming you guys stick with this I'll try as well and lend in my time. I've already started downloading whats needed. Hopefully if it all works (vista) I'll start messing with this. I could help out with creating levels and textures as I've done that in the past. I can code as well, but it would be like walking on sharp rocks so I'd like to stay away from that. Is there a irc channel for this yet?

[Skurd]

I've just completed step 1.

There's just one thing to say: Uninstall MV... NOW.
Fattyfat's instructions coupled with this very powerful tool will make you giggle like a schoolgirl, I promise.
It's easy to work with, relatively stable, barely code oriented and fully documented.
Looking very much forward to working on the other steps this week end !


Irc channel is avaible on irc.uberguilds.org, /join #uberworlds.

[Moskank]

Did anybody else encounter this when attempting to run PyCrypto? The same message keeps me from downloading PyOpenSSL on step A, 4.

Edit: I did a repair on PyCrypto also.

[Vorph]

Unzip this to your \windows\system32 folder and try the installer again.

[Moskank]

Awesome, that did it. Thanks, Vorph.

[Hathe]

Great guide, definitely learning a lot here!