Multiverse is a platform for MMOG and also open source!

If you play at least some games and follow the development of this promising industry in terms of coverage of users and revenues (or art, who they think so), then you probably know or heard about the diversity of virtual worlds (or MMORPG , although the more correct MMOG term is massively multiplayer games, not necessarily RPG). The most popular of them are now World of Warcraft and EverQuest, as well as a representative from the world of fantastic (sci-fi) - space EVE-online. They are played by millions of users, the audience of the same warcraft 9 million players, but the laurels of the winner do not give peace of mind to other developers, of lower rank. Therefore, it is observed, and in the future there will be an increasing and greater increase in the number and, God forbid, the quality and diversity of various online games. I will not hide the fact that the author of this blog itself is working on one of the projects for creating an online game.



But the budgets of today's games are in the millions and even tens of millions of dollars. Of course, such costs are beyond the power of small independent developers. At the same time, a niche for modest projects that do not pretend to international recognition and millions of player users is present and quite large. Actually, even more than we can initially imagine, because, as you know, there can be one market leader, well, in this case, several, but the rest of the “long tail” of players who, for various reasons, are not interested in leaders, remain out of work.

A big barrier to entry into this market was the fact that it was very difficult to create and maintain the entire infrastructure for the game — the engine and utilities, that is, the entire server platform, which is responsible for all interactions between the world and users (and between users in the world) completely beyond the power of ordinary small studios and publishers.
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But now, thanks to the efforts of the not so young, but very interesting Multiverse start-up, such a platform, equipped with all the necessary subsystems to maintain the virtual world, is available quite legally and for free, in the form of an open-source package for the main Win32 and Linux platforms.

The platform consists of several parts:

• A client working on the player’s computer and using all the hardware features (DirectX, OpenGL, etc.)
• The server “holding” the world, realizing (with the help of plug-ins) logging, authorization and registration of users, artificial intelligence, physics of the world and, in fact, the construction of the world itself in a fully three-dimensional form.
• Plug-ins to the server realize all the possibilities, including an advanced combat system, a trading system, bots, support for player skills, an economic system, and other features.
• The toolkit allows you to fill and control the world according to the developer’s plan, import models and other data from third-party packages, including 3D Studio Max, Maya.
• Infrastructure services that provide a lower core layer for deploying and maintaining a game server.

Of course, the platform takes full advantage of clustering to ensure the smooth play of tens and hundreds of thousands of players. The server part is based on open source software, in particular, you can even use MySQL DBMS for small projects, or any other DBMS available through the JDBC driver.

The system is quite specific, written in Java and Python (as well as C # .NET for development on the client side), makes extensive use of XML, but is quite simple (if you can say so with respect to this kind of software), so if you wish, and a real project, A small team of programmers may well use this engine to build their own world. It should be noted that the platform does not solve the issue with the graphic part, the sound and the game logic itself (gameplay and script) - it's over, you have to do it all yourself, think up, balance, turning the idea into a playable world. The platform provides only a technological opportunity without any problems to expand it into a full-fledged project.

Financial situation is also acceptable. As long as you use Multiverse as a non-commercial project, you can easily take everything under open-source conditions, without restrictions. But when implementing a real commercial project, developers receive royalties of 10%.

By the way, the company has now concluded an agreement with Google that from now on it will be possible to use models from 3D Warehouse in games. What does this mean, especially in light of the latest rumors that the online giant is also planning to enter the market of virtual worlds? I think we will see it soon.

Some useful links:

• The official site of Multiverse Network, Inc.
• The list of games developed on this platform (in varying degrees of readiness, while 26 games have been announced)
• Multiverse Platform Architecture
• Multiverse Platform Tutorial
• Server side documentation
• Two demo world

The article is posted on the author's personal blog - abrdev.com