Community Question

[Unknowncmbk]

Is the main idea of the game to be hosted on oort servers, or will the the game extend to community ran servers.

In contrast, Minecraft allows for community mods/servers/etc. and I feel it extends the shelf life of the game itself.

What are the plans for the community, is it going toward an MMORPG experience or something that players can create?

[mink]

well, It seems that if you allowed mods on servers, you could no longer link them together seamlessly through portals. Which I think is supposed to be a big part of the game.

[Havok40k]

One of the videos says that all the players play on the same universe, and each world acts as a server, which can be connected via portals. Frankly, that blew my mind.

[Unknowncmbk]

Actually it’s not that impressive, as many MMOs have regions that are specified servers, and each region connects to each other, therefore going from one region to another is a ‘portal’.

[Havok40k]

That’s true, World of Warcraft uses a similar method. The difference is that in those MMO’s, the world is static and fairly small, rather than a massive sandbox world. It’s the difference between walking from Ogrimmar->Durataur, and Walking from Earth->Mars.

[Rob]

Hi Unkowncmbk. To start with we’re hosting the servers/worlds so that we can keep things a bit smaller and controlled while we test things out.

The intent with Oort Online has always been to allow the players to have their own servers/worlds. Initially we’re planning to still host them but allow players to rent them and give them certain controls within the Oort Online framework.

A much more long term complete mod system for servers/worlds would likely be further down the line. We’ve talked about ways we could allow for this and yet still maintain our connected world experience. However, there’s a lot of other stuff to build first.

But keep telling us what YOU want. If enough people want the same thing then we’ll talk about changing our priorities. You guys are our players, it’s your game.

Rob – Wonderstruck

[Hummel]

@unknowncmbk

Several mods of minecraft are run server-side only. So just the server needs to know what the mod is about. In this case, even with server-side modded servers connected to the Oort Online world, this may be less of a problem (maybe rendering the real-time looking through the portal could be a problem if the modserver uses different graphics mods…and a lot of other things we as users don’t see)

Yet you may want to signal to the player that he is about to join a modded server and what’s different there..maybe a billboard pinned to the portal that also could be used otherwise? (eg. rules or special advices? )

On the other hand, as you may know, some of the more interesting minecraft mods are server & client-side as they are rooted much deeper in the games code. So if you want to join a server with a certain mod you first need to install it…or the server will just drop you (in terms of OO, you can’t pass through the portal or CTD)

As a result, if you want to have no or minimal friction for the “standard player”, you may want to have the server ‘read’ if the client has the mod installed..and then installed it (like ye old counterstike did back in the days). But that would imply that there is enough bandwith on the server-cluster to send all those files to lots and lots of players (traffic costs = game hosting costs). Could be a bit of a problem for player-rented servers, depending on how big those files are and how big your traffic costs are.

I am very excited to see how this will come to live for Oort Online. I think, that’s not me alone 😉

[Unknowncmbk]

@Hummel

I know how client side mods and server side modifications run, as I’ve developed some modifications to major communities. This was simply a discussion on where they want to take the game:
– Community driven content: community abstracts the game and builds on it
– Studio driven content: wonderstruck engineers the game solely

The initial allows creative freedom, much like a sandbox game entails, and would lead to a prolonged interest in the game.

By going off of why @Rob noted above, I conceptualize OO as:
– Each region is its own world located on 1 machine.
– As the world is procedurally generated, new portals appear. When one portal is created, a new world is created, following big O notation as n^2.

It seems Wonderstruck is going in the direction that Mojang realized a few years after the release of Minecraft, with the introduction of Realms. Private small servers rented from the game designer, as a way to fund a project post release.

TL;DR
So as I see it, Wonderstruck is taking a blend of:
– World of Warcraft, where there is a reliable post-release income to fund future projects (selling private servers to players versus monthly membership fee)
– Minecraft, where sandbox and private servers drive user generated content

Thoughts?

[Hummel]

Meh…of course you know about it, but maybe not everyone else that wants to read through here 😉 So either way..as there is no game (i know of) that live-links real servers like OO does, i wanted to show there might be some difficulties in LIVElinking modded and vanilla servers with a realtime portal ‘view’ and how other games handle these. Just my 2 cents.

I understand, that you were asking the devs on how they want to design this aspect, wether they allow modding in general or not.

But the answer to this – for my understanding – will result in a follow up discussion on how modded content is connected with the ‘vanilla world’ as there will arise ‘issues by design’ 😉

Just curious about the answer (as you are)

Let s go on afterwards.

[Author]

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