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3D Game Engine for PC MMO (DX10)

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EricMartello

Senior member
There are many existing engines out there, some are fully-featured including support for physics, networking and AI scripting...while others are just "graphics rendering SDKs". For those of you how have participated in game development projects and have the benefit of hindsight - did your team develop an engine from scratch the right one, or did your team opt to license a third party / open source engine? Would you have done anything differently with what you learned after all was said and done?

Some considerations I have in mind:

- ACTUAL Short-term costs of development vs implementation of existing engine.
- Time - how long would it take to make a quality DX10 engine?
- Networking and Server tools...if available.
- Hardware support - will it run without having excessive system requirements.
- Ease of use: once the engine is in place, how easily can a game can be built around it.
- Long-term costs...more of a concern with licensing due to the royalty payments and potential "support" fees.
 
Unless you have a huge development team use an open source engine or license one.
Development time can literally be years for your own engine.
Ease of use is going to depend on whether you create or if you license a engine.
Long term cost is going to depend on what you decide with the engine, how many players it supports and a ton of other things.

I have been through a ton of open source engines. The one I like best is OGRE. It is only a graphics engine though so you would need to use some other sources for all the extras.
Most of the popular licensed engines are about $750K + when using it for an MMO.

I would probably go with Torque and the addon below to get started. It won't break the bank and you can tell if your team is going to work before spending thousands.
http://www.mmoworkshop.com/trac/mom/wiki/FAQ


Torque:
http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/tgea/

Here is a MMO done with it:
http://minions.prairiegames.com/trac/mom

 
With existing engines you typically run into the problem of trying to get a square peg into a round hole. While it sometime works, you find yourself fiddling with the engine to work around problems, and in the end you probably spend more time trying to get it to work than it is just doing it yourself.

That is the experience I've had in the past.

I had one engine use zlib.dll (some compression library) and 2 different programmers from the same engine used it, but they had different versions. So it never worked for me without compatibility issues. After trying to get my code to compile for 3 months straight I finally just gave up. I couldn't even compile the code, which made development difficult. I filled out x number of bug reports, emails with the developer which always suggested doing this or that (renaming .dll's, etc). I just said screw it after wasting most of my year in 2003 waiting for a 3rd party. It would have been much easier for me to just dig into the code and change it. But I couldn't.

I'll never again use someone's engine. But like I said that was in 2003, so within the last 5 years things could have gotten better.
 
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