- Mmorpg Tycoon 2 For Mac Download
- Mmorpg Tycoon 1
- Mmorpg Tycoon 2 For Mac Emulator
- Mmorpg Tycoon 2 Steam
People often ask about how I'm building MMORPG Tycoon 2. Is it built in Unity,or some other off-the-shelf engine?
Mmorpg Tycoon 2 For Mac Download
Well, no. It's built in a custom engine, one that I've been using for more thana decade. That engine is called VectorStorm, and is open source(You can find it onGithub) It's a classic,old-school style of game engine, written in plain C++. The kind of thing thatI used at multiple companies in the game industry in the 90s and 2000s.
Now that I love somewhere else and my Laptop isn't the best, i'm going to aks you if u know some good tycoon games for this kind of PC. I looked on steam and i saw a lot of nice games but i guess they are too 'hungry' for my PC. So: Intel(R) HD Graphics 620. Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-7020U CPU @ 2.30GHz. 'MMORPG Tycoon 2 has been in development for a long time, and is now to a state where I'm happy for new players to join in and give feedback and help shape the direction of further development! The basic game and core simulation loops are all now present, but at this stage the game needs a lot of tuning and additional content to make it.
I don't recommend custom game engines to most game developers today. So why amI using one? Well, that requires a bit of backstory.
In 2006, I was working for Atari Melbourne House (née Beam Studios). I'd beenwith Melbourne House for almost ten years at that point, and had worked my wayup to the position of Senior Programmer. I was, at the time, working asthe network team lead on the PS2 version of Test DriveUnlimited; a game whichAtari branded as a 'Massively Open Online Racing' game. Basically, an MMObuilt around traditional racing tropes, rather than about traditional RPGtropes.
Toward the end of that project, Melbourne House was sold to another company;Krome Studios.
Shortly after the acquisition (after Test Drive Unlimited had shipped), KromeStudios started me on a new project which would go on to become the Wii versionof Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and sent me off to a Wii developerconference, to help bring me up to speed on the console. They gave me a hugebox of business cards to take with me, to give to people at the conference.
N.B.: none of those contact details reach me any longer.
The important bit of that card is its second line: at Melbourne House, I hadbeen a Senior Programmer, but immediately after the Krome purchase, my newbusiness cards said that I was a Lead Programmer. I only found out about mypromotion from these business cards; no one ever told me it had happened.
Needless to say, there was no pay rise associated with this stealth-promotion.
Also needless to say (at least, for those who know me well), the suddenpromotion made me panic.
Yes, I'd been working at Melbourne House for nearly ten years at that point.Lots of people reach a ‘lead programmer' position a lot more quickly than that,but I still felt like a small fish in the big Melbourne House pond; there werelots of people there who were a lot smarter than me, and who had heaps moreexperience than me. I didn't feel like I knew enough to be a proper lead, inthat company.
A side-note: A lot of people (including me) believed that in the job title'Lead Programmer', 'Programmer' is a noun, and 'Lead' is an adjective.That is, a 'Lead Programmer' is a programmer who also leads. This is notcorrect.
In truth, 'Lead' is the noun, and 'Programmer' is the adjective. As a LeadProgrammer, you are the leader who is in charge of the programmers. Ifyou're doing your job properly, you actually do little or no programming.Instead, the vast majority of your job is just managing the people whoprogram.
Mmorpg Tycoon 1
This misunderstanding of mine, to some degree, explains the big mistake I wasabout to make.
Okay, back to the story.
Since I felt like I didn't know all the details of how every part of a gameworked, I did what almost nobody with any sense would do: I decided that theonly way to make sure I could be an effective Lead Programmer was to build acomplete game engine, from scratch, all by myself, in my spare time.
Yeah.
Now, I wasn't completely insane. I knew that I wasn't going to write acommercial-quality game engine from scratch. Fce vocabulary list cambridge english pdf. And I wasn't making the enginein order to create a game; I was just making the engine as a way to ensurethat I learned the very basics of every field of game development.
I was going to write my own renderer, my own sound code, my own input handlingcode, my own physics, my own memory manager, my own file loading, and so on.
At about that time, I read an article about the hardware which ran Atari'sclassic 'Asteroids' coin-op game. Xforce keygen 64 bit autodesk. In those cabinets, there was essentially onecomputer which ran the game, and an entirely separate computer that drew to thescreen. The first computer would figure out what happened in the game, andwould then generate a set of drawing commands ('Move cursor to position (x,y)','Draw a line to position (x,y)'), which got sent to the second computer. Allthe second computer did was to execute those commands; it didn't know anythingabout the Asteroids game at all.
I thought that was a laughably complicated and entirely over-engineered way tohandle rendering, and so I decided to mimick it exactly, in my engine'srenderer. Because it amused me to do something so absurd.
Like in Asteroids, a game written for my engine would construct a set ofrendering commands each frame, which my renderer could then blindly executewithout having to know anything about the game itself. I was greatly amused bythe baroque design of this system.
It would be six years before I noticed that this 'laughably complicatedand over-engineered way to handle rendering' scheme was exactly the same thingbeing done in virtually every proprietary video game engine I had ever usedin my career.
It turns out, it's a standard practice. It's generally acknowledged as beingthe optimal way to architect a game engine's rendering components, in a reallyrobust, high-quality rendering engine.
Unbeknownst to me, I'd implemented a completely viable and thoroughlynon-absurd rendering system. And I'd done it completely by accident.
A few years before this story, I was badly addicted to PopCap's originalBejeweled.
I was mostly a Linux user at the time (as I was a poor games industry personand computers were expensive, and Linux happened to run really well even on myancient laptop). Since Bejeweled was only available on Windows and Maccomputers, I couldn't play it at home. So being a programmer, I built my ownversion of the game for Linux. As the game was about jewels that fell downfrom the top of the screen, I called that game 'GemStorm'. (I had been unawareof the earlier DOS game also called 'GemStorm' presumably for the same reason)
Now that I was creating a real game engine, I went back to my GemStorm game,and took its source code to use as the basis for this new engine. As the newengine was for vector graphic games and the old code was for a game I hadcalled 'GemStorm', I called the new engine 'VectorStorm'. Some of that code isstill there in VectorStorm today; mostly in the vsScene, vsEntity, andvsSprite classes.
Mmorpg Tycoon 2 For Mac Emulator
As the VectorStorm engine progressed, I eventually wanted to prove itsfunctionality to myself by building games that used it.
Mmorpg Tycoon 2 Steam
I was still a full-time employee in the mainstream games industry at the time,and I didn't want my employers to get angry with me, so I decided to justdesign and construct very small games, and to release them for free. And Itold myself that I wasn't competing with my employers because these games werefor the PC, while everything my employers did was for game consoles. (In truth,this was probably still a minor breach of my employment contracts)
To make this process more fun for myself, I challenged myself to design andimplement each of these test games in a single week.
This is a much less surprising concept now than it was back then; these dayswe're all used to game jams and other short-time-limit game developmentchallenges. Back then, this sort of rapid game development was a pretty unusualthing.
The 'Game in a Week' games I made are still freely available on my old blogsite. (I assume they all still work, but haven't actually checked them inyears!)
As time went on, the Game in a Week games encouraged me to add features to theVectorStorm engine. VectorStorm stopped being a 'toy engine', and started tobe capable of making real, modern games. 3D was added, support forprogrammable shaders, and so on, as they were required for Game-in-a-Weekgames. Over the years, VectorStorm slowly began to look less and less like a'toy' game engine.
In 2008, I created a little game called MMORPG Tycoon, as part of agame creation competition. I was feeling a bit disillusioned about the wholeMMORPG genre, after having worked on Test Drive Unlimited, and having playeda number of more classic MMORPGs, and so I wrote a little simulation to try tosort out my thoughts about what made people continue to play these games.
It seemed to me that fundamentally, you were just doing the same thing over andover again; moving from one place to another and grinding combat to make numbersgo up. Why didn't players get bored of that? MMORPG Tycoon was my attempt toexplain the mechanics of what was going on to myself.
The game was fairly simplistic and abstract. And its simulation model wasn'tvery rigorous. The game didn't simulate quests or monsters at all; instead,players just wandered around at random, and the simulation just pretended thatthey encountered monsters sometimes, and would randomly subtract some healthfrom players, to 'simulate' combat.
But with that said, there was something slightly compelling about it. And thecore game concept seemed to intrigue a lot of people. I always said that ofall the games I'd made, this was the one that most seemed to ‘click' withpeople. And it was the one that I most wanted to do a proper sequel to.
I'd always said that if I ever made an MMORPG Tycoon 2, it would run in full 3D;you'd be able to zoom the camera in and actually see the terrain, and see littlecharacter models playing the game and fighting monsters.
When I started building MMORPG Tycoon 2, I had two major concerns:
- In the original game, you could zoom out and see the whole game world all atonce. I wanted to be able to do that in this new, 3D game as well. But there'sa lot more game geometry in a 3D game than in a 2D one. As just one example,there are potentially tens of thousands of trees all visible on screen at thesame time, all of which have to cast shadows, and so on. So I needed anengine which could afford to render a lot of models really quickly.
- I had a whole MMORPG simulation from the original game written in C++ code,and I wanted to be able to reuse most of that simulation. Porting it all toanother language or another framework would have been quite challenging!
A side-note: A lot of people (including me) believed that in the job title'Lead Programmer', 'Programmer' is a noun, and 'Lead' is an adjective.That is, a 'Lead Programmer' is a programmer who also leads. This is notcorrect.
In truth, 'Lead' is the noun, and 'Programmer' is the adjective. As a LeadProgrammer, you are the leader who is in charge of the programmers. Ifyou're doing your job properly, you actually do little or no programming.Instead, the vast majority of your job is just managing the people whoprogram.
Mmorpg Tycoon 1
This misunderstanding of mine, to some degree, explains the big mistake I wasabout to make.
Okay, back to the story.
Since I felt like I didn't know all the details of how every part of a gameworked, I did what almost nobody with any sense would do: I decided that theonly way to make sure I could be an effective Lead Programmer was to build acomplete game engine, from scratch, all by myself, in my spare time.
Yeah.
Now, I wasn't completely insane. I knew that I wasn't going to write acommercial-quality game engine from scratch. Fce vocabulary list cambridge english pdf. And I wasn't making the enginein order to create a game; I was just making the engine as a way to ensurethat I learned the very basics of every field of game development.
I was going to write my own renderer, my own sound code, my own input handlingcode, my own physics, my own memory manager, my own file loading, and so on.
At about that time, I read an article about the hardware which ran Atari'sclassic 'Asteroids' coin-op game. Xforce keygen 64 bit autodesk. In those cabinets, there was essentially onecomputer which ran the game, and an entirely separate computer that drew to thescreen. The first computer would figure out what happened in the game, andwould then generate a set of drawing commands ('Move cursor to position (x,y)','Draw a line to position (x,y)'), which got sent to the second computer. Allthe second computer did was to execute those commands; it didn't know anythingabout the Asteroids game at all.
I thought that was a laughably complicated and entirely over-engineered way tohandle rendering, and so I decided to mimick it exactly, in my engine'srenderer. Because it amused me to do something so absurd.
Like in Asteroids, a game written for my engine would construct a set ofrendering commands each frame, which my renderer could then blindly executewithout having to know anything about the game itself. I was greatly amused bythe baroque design of this system.
It would be six years before I noticed that this 'laughably complicatedand over-engineered way to handle rendering' scheme was exactly the same thingbeing done in virtually every proprietary video game engine I had ever usedin my career.
It turns out, it's a standard practice. It's generally acknowledged as beingthe optimal way to architect a game engine's rendering components, in a reallyrobust, high-quality rendering engine.
Unbeknownst to me, I'd implemented a completely viable and thoroughlynon-absurd rendering system. And I'd done it completely by accident.
A few years before this story, I was badly addicted to PopCap's originalBejeweled.
I was mostly a Linux user at the time (as I was a poor games industry personand computers were expensive, and Linux happened to run really well even on myancient laptop). Since Bejeweled was only available on Windows and Maccomputers, I couldn't play it at home. So being a programmer, I built my ownversion of the game for Linux. As the game was about jewels that fell downfrom the top of the screen, I called that game 'GemStorm'. (I had been unawareof the earlier DOS game also called 'GemStorm' presumably for the same reason)
Now that I was creating a real game engine, I went back to my GemStorm game,and took its source code to use as the basis for this new engine. As the newengine was for vector graphic games and the old code was for a game I hadcalled 'GemStorm', I called the new engine 'VectorStorm'. Some of that code isstill there in VectorStorm today; mostly in the vsScene, vsEntity, andvsSprite classes.
Mmorpg Tycoon 2 For Mac Emulator
As the VectorStorm engine progressed, I eventually wanted to prove itsfunctionality to myself by building games that used it.
Mmorpg Tycoon 2 Steam
I was still a full-time employee in the mainstream games industry at the time,and I didn't want my employers to get angry with me, so I decided to justdesign and construct very small games, and to release them for free. And Itold myself that I wasn't competing with my employers because these games werefor the PC, while everything my employers did was for game consoles. (In truth,this was probably still a minor breach of my employment contracts)
To make this process more fun for myself, I challenged myself to design andimplement each of these test games in a single week.
This is a much less surprising concept now than it was back then; these dayswe're all used to game jams and other short-time-limit game developmentchallenges. Back then, this sort of rapid game development was a pretty unusualthing.
The 'Game in a Week' games I made are still freely available on my old blogsite. (I assume they all still work, but haven't actually checked them inyears!)
As time went on, the Game in a Week games encouraged me to add features to theVectorStorm engine. VectorStorm stopped being a 'toy engine', and started tobe capable of making real, modern games. 3D was added, support forprogrammable shaders, and so on, as they were required for Game-in-a-Weekgames. Over the years, VectorStorm slowly began to look less and less like a'toy' game engine.
In 2008, I created a little game called MMORPG Tycoon, as part of agame creation competition. I was feeling a bit disillusioned about the wholeMMORPG genre, after having worked on Test Drive Unlimited, and having playeda number of more classic MMORPGs, and so I wrote a little simulation to try tosort out my thoughts about what made people continue to play these games.
It seemed to me that fundamentally, you were just doing the same thing over andover again; moving from one place to another and grinding combat to make numbersgo up. Why didn't players get bored of that? MMORPG Tycoon was my attempt toexplain the mechanics of what was going on to myself.
The game was fairly simplistic and abstract. And its simulation model wasn'tvery rigorous. The game didn't simulate quests or monsters at all; instead,players just wandered around at random, and the simulation just pretended thatthey encountered monsters sometimes, and would randomly subtract some healthfrom players, to 'simulate' combat.
But with that said, there was something slightly compelling about it. And thecore game concept seemed to intrigue a lot of people. I always said that ofall the games I'd made, this was the one that most seemed to ‘click' withpeople. And it was the one that I most wanted to do a proper sequel to.
I'd always said that if I ever made an MMORPG Tycoon 2, it would run in full 3D;you'd be able to zoom the camera in and actually see the terrain, and see littlecharacter models playing the game and fighting monsters.
When I started building MMORPG Tycoon 2, I had two major concerns:
- In the original game, you could zoom out and see the whole game world all atonce. I wanted to be able to do that in this new, 3D game as well. But there'sa lot more game geometry in a 3D game than in a 2D one. As just one example,there are potentially tens of thousands of trees all visible on screen at thesame time, all of which have to cast shadows, and so on. So I needed anengine which could afford to render a lot of models really quickly.
- I had a whole MMORPG simulation from the original game written in C++ code,and I wanted to be able to reuse most of that simulation. Porting it all toanother language or another framework would have been quite challenging!
At the time I began, Unity had just begun to be a thing, but it wasn't nearlyadvanced enough yet to use the sort of hardware rendering features that I knewI was going to need. Unreal 4 wasn't available yet, so it also wasn't anoption.
In the end, I went with my own, existing engine for MMORPG Tycoon 2 because Ihad it, I knew it, it worked, and the original game had been written using it.If I was starting from scratch today, I would likely go with Unreal or Unity.
But I'm pretty pleased with how it's all been coming out! VectorStorm has donea pretty awesome job for me, thus far.
