Game Idea...

[CPUnltd]

Unsure of how many people here have played Ragnarok Online (google it if you're not aware of it)... I'd prefer an open source implementation, but I was thinking it would be great if the Pandora had an MMORPG that had a similar look and feel. I know it would be crisp and clean on the Pandora screen. But I have no clue if anyone is considering such a project. Not really requesting it so much as noting that I think it would be worth doing. Not sure if anyone has ported WINE to Pandora yet (don't have mine, so haven't had a desire to look through the "app store") but I also know that this game won't play in WINE (at least not in any of my attempts, though they do list it as compatible... from last I remember the compatibility list)... Would like to hear other's thoughts and opinions on this.

 

[jdbye]

PanMMO seems to be what you're looking for, though progress is paused for now.
EDIT:
Linky

and screenie:

Spoiler

 

[Aurekana]

The game itself won't work in WINE on the Pandora unless we have the source code, because the Pandora does not use an x86 processor, and WINE is not an emulator.

If my understanding is correct, unless someone got fancy with the networking and did something ad-hoc or p2p, any MMO would require a backend server centrally located (probably not running on Pandora hardware), which would increase the costs and difficulty of the project.

EDIT: Ninja'd, but I'm not sure whether it covers/invalidates any of my post

 

[jdbye]

The game itself won't work in WINE on the Pandora unless we have the source code, because the Pandora does not use an x86 processor, and WINE is not an emulator.

If my understanding is correct, unless someone got fancy with the networking and did something ad-hoc or p2p, any MMO would require a backend server centrally located (probably not running on Pandora hardware), which would increase the costs and difficulty of the project.

I could host a server on a 100mbit Linux VPS I have, though it has limited RAM and CPU so it wouldn't be able to handle a huge amount of players simultaneously.

 

[Mofokubik]

Wine won't do much good for pandora. Pandora = arm, wine = x86. Even if you could get wine running, you would still have to port the app to work on an arm cpu. It is possible to emulate x86 computer with an arm cpu, but it is too slow and not practical since nobody wants to play games at .00001 frames per second.

Also, i'm not well edjimikatid on mmorpgs, but don't you need tons of people for it to be an mmo? An exclusive mmo game on pandora just cannot work without thousands of people playing it. Best case scenario is if android OS gets an mmorpg that we could possibly play with our pandoras someday.

 

[jdbye]

Wine won't do much good for pandora. Pandora = arm, wine = x86. Even if you could get wine running, you would still have to port the app to work on an arm cpu. It is possible to emulate x86 computer with an arm cpu, but it is too slow and not practical since nobody wants to play games at .00001 frames per second.

Also, i'm not well edjimikatid on mmorpgs, but don't you need tons of people for it to be an mmo? An exclusive mmo game on pandora just cannot work without thousands of people playing it. Best case scenario is if android OS gets an mmorpg that we could possibly play with our pandoras someday.

Well, it depends more on how many people play it simultaneously. Around 100 people playing it simultaneously would be great fun, but you're right, there aren't enough Pandora owners at the moment to really make a MMO fun. Though no one says it can't be made using cross-platform libraries, so people on their PCs could play together with people on their Pandoras

And such a project would need closed beta testing before it was released to the public, which the current Pandora owners could help out with, and by the time it was ready for public release, there would be plenty of Pandora owners willing to help beta test on a larger scale.

EDIT: Unrelated but my 800mhz Android phone runs Windows 95 at about 4 FPS
A Wine + QEMU merge (as has been mentioned before) could possibly make x86 emulation viable on the Pandora.

 

[Mofokubik]

EDIT: Unrelated but my 800mhz Android phone runs Windows 95 at about 4 FPS
A Wine + QEMU merge (as has been mentioned before) could possibly make x86 emulation viable on the Pandora.

Well think about that, if windows95 is already using all of the cpu power to render a small desktop at 4fps, will there be enough power for a game at that point? This isn't taking into consideration that all of the graphics would be handled through software which is slow enough as is.

I would be interested in seeing it run of course, but I have little faith that anything worth playing would be playable.

 

[jdbye]

EDIT: Unrelated but my 800mhz Android phone runs Windows 95 at about 4 FPS
A Wine + QEMU merge (as has been mentioned before) could possibly make x86 emulation viable on the Pandora.

Well think about that, if windows95 is already using all of the cpu power to render a small desktop at 4fps, will there be enough power for a game at that point? This isn't taking into consideration that all of the graphics would be handled through software which is slow enough as is.

I would be interested in seeing it run of course, but I have little faith that anything worth playing would be playable.

Nothing stops games from being hardware rendered, WineD3D already allows that on Windows guest VMs, I believe. I tried it out once, but can't remember clearly what the results were - I only tried one game, and didn't really expect it to work, and as far as I can remember it didn't, but that isn't to say it wouldn't work better on other games. A wine + qemu merge would likely make that a whole lot easier, since it would mean an ARM native version of all the windows libraries. This is getting kind of off topic though, and I doubt it would have the performance required to emulate any MMO - they generally have higher system requirements than a similar single player game.

Let's just hope for the evolution of PanMMO

 

[lulzfish]

EDIT: Unrelated but my 800mhz Android phone runs Windows 95 at about 4 FPS
A Wine + QEMU merge (as has been mentioned before) could possibly make x86 emulation viable on the Pandora.

Well think about that, if windows95 is already using all of the cpu power to render a small desktop at 4fps, will there be enough power for a game at that point? This isn't taking into consideration that all of the graphics would be handled through software which is slow enough as is.

I would be interested in seeing it run of course, but I have little faith that anything worth playing would be playable.

Nothing stops games from being hardware rendered, WineD3D already allows that on Windows guest VMs, I believe. I tried it out once, but can't remember clearly what the results were - I only tried one game, and didn't really expect it to work, and as far as I can remember it didn't, but that isn't to say it wouldn't work better on other games. A wine + qemu merge would likely make that a whole lot easier, since it would mean an ARM native version of all the windows libraries. This is getting kind of off topic though, and I doubt it would have the performance required to emulate any MMO - they generally have higher system requirements than a similar single player game.

Let's just hope for the evolution of PanMMO

MMOs generally have harder requirements than any that would have been made for Windows 95.

 

[Eniko]

Judging by a recent thread in the developer's section, Ogre3D isn't ready yet and until that changes chances of PanMMO are slim. Also there's no DSP utilization yet, though I'm not sure if that's relevant for me or not. As you can see, I'm a pretty high level kind of girl, so until this stuff is in place PanMMO can't become a reality.

The Mana World might be an alternative, until, if and when PanMMO gets anywhere. And let's speak plainly here; MMOs are a huge, huge undertaking. There are indie MMOs out there, but for every single one that makes it to a playable state there's tons that die prematurely. And of the ones that make it, some are "playable" only by the most marginal definition of the word.

Trying to create an indie MMO is almost an act of hubris, and I certainly don't think I'm somehow some magical exception here. It's quite possible it will never get anywhere. Though I'll give it the old college try, and then some.

 

[CPUnltd]

points made here are more than valid (and I'd almost forgotten about The Mana World... which does remind me of planeshift... wonder if it's port-able ) just found out about Tux Ragnarok Online and trying to find out what it's all about.. but initial googling gets me little of nothing at the moment. Will see how that goes, as I am now just plain curious as to what it is, let alone if it can be ported to Pandora.

 

[Orion4874]

Judging by a recent thread in the developer's section, Ogre3D isn't ready yet and until that changes chances of PanMMO are slim. Also there's no DSP utilization yet, though I'm not sure if that's relevant for me or not. As you can see, I'm a pretty high level kind of girl, so until this stuff is in place PanMMO can't become a reality.

The Mana World might be an alternative, until, if and when PanMMO gets anywhere. And let's speak plainly here; MMOs are a huge, huge undertaking. There are indie MMOs out there, but for every single one that makes it to a playable state there's tons that die prematurely. And of the ones that make it, some are "playable" only by the most marginal definition of the word.

Trying to create an indie MMO is almost an act of hubris, and I certainly don't think I'm somehow some magical exception here. It's quite possible it will never get anywhere. Though I'll give it the old college try, and then some.

You should try to put together a team to offset some of the work. Try recruiting from here or maybe people you know personally? An MMO seems like an impossible task for one person IMO. Hopefully everything will fall into place for you at any rate.

 

[Ollonk]

Pandora would be more suited for a single round of a huge map game like MAG for PS3. 128 people on at once could be feasible after a couple more batches. That would be around 1/10 of three batches, and with organization, might be doable.


...Meh. I hate talking about what we could do with the Pandora, I feel like I'll never get one.