Slick Forums

Hi there everyone, I have rewritten this post from scratch as of 15/12/2012 as the game has came a long way since the initial post and I'd like to share the most recent information with everyone

What is Mirage Realms?

Put simply it is an ambitious 2D retro MMORPG project being developed in Java using a combination of Slick and TWL. It was originally written in Visual Basic 6 and saw great success in the late 90's / early 2000's but later died out due to Microsoft's lack of support for the language (and to be honest, it was a simple game and times moved on). After a long hiatus my ambition is to develop a sequel superior in every aspect, combining modern gameplay mechanics with a retro style to produce something that is fun to play for the casual gamer, but also caters to more hardcore RPG users.

Cool I guess... so how far along in development are you?

I estimate it is going to take me around another 6 months before the 'super fun' stuff starts to really take shape. At the time of writing all of the core networking, rendering, input handling, zone management, map editor, AI and database persistence are finished to a good standard and I have started implementing the first interactive mechanics. At the time of writing, this is the most recent screenshot I have demonstrating the lighting, interactive entity system, and general look and feel.



So what, it's fully multiplayer?

Certainly is! An silly amount of time has been put into designing and implementing the architecture of this thing and the entire concept from the very beginning is to be first and foremost a mini MMORPG. All of the core boring behind the scenes stuff has now been written so this is really the point in the project where things start moving visually at fast pace.

Image linked as it is quite large
http://www.mirage-realms.com/devblog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/testing.png

When can I play? How do I keep track of updates?

A community test server will be going up towards the end of January 2013 and it will be open to all members of the community forums over at www.mirage-realms.com. Incidentally, that's where you will find the development blog where I regularly post progress updates and information regarding the project, there is also a facebook group you can join where I let everyone know there has been a new blog post and more recently a live development tracker using Trello that you can find here!

I have a question / want to support the project

I'm around here often so feel free to ask me anything you like in this thread, if you think it's a question other people following the project might benefit from head over to the Mirage Realms Forums and ask me there. At the time of writing this is a completely solo project and I have been working with it on and off for the past 12 months (most of the work has been done in the last 3 or 4), I am not currently looking for any development help however I am desperately looking for a decent, affordable graphics artist(s) to start going over my blatantly 'borrowed' tiles. If you fancy donating to the project, there is a paypal donate button hiding somewhere over on the forums. All proceeds go in a 'pot' I plan to use to help towards Server hardware closer to the release date.

I'm not very good at these 'tell us about your project' things Here's an early picture of me running away from some trolls to distract you.



I hope you find the project interesting and I look forward to seeing you in game some day soon
Liam

Edit: This project is going Open Source on the 27th of March 2013

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

I prefer to work on gameplay first usually as it goes quicker for me when I network the whole game. So like I would get to a point where you need some friends and then I would port it to server sided too. Anyways, that looks nice! Is that custom outline of the window done in Java? Because I really like that. Would you mind, if you did it in Java, how you did it?

Whoa, that looks really good so far. I'm really want to see how this turns out!

Well as the concept of the game is to be effectively a micro MMO (an mmmo? lol) the gameplay I am looking to implement inherently relies on the backbone of the networking. "Oh you took a step to the left? The server will just check that for you, mkay ".

Which custom outline are you talking about? The black windows border around the game? That's just a windows xp theme ^.^

There has been significant progress over the last week, I'm this close to having the player movement fully networked up, hoping to finish that today! I will likely be putting the first test server online next Friday so I hope to see some of you online . Keep an eye on the website for news updates!

Cheers everyone,
Liam

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

That looks amazing. I might get on and try it for you on Friday.

I'd like to know your general concept being client/server communication. That's something I've never been able to figure out in my head. And what kind of server OS are you running?

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My indie games: http://cmagames.webs.com

Hit a milestone this weekend, after getting the map system working everyone can now run around and see everyone else running around like headless chickens ^.^



Turned out to be a significant amount of effort lol, and there's no server side 'walking speed' enforcement at the moment so the first thing my mate did was turn himself into Usain Bolt


Basically Server side each connection gets its own thread which waits to read an int on the datastream, this int tells the server what kind of packet it is recieving and a handler for that particular type of packet is instantiated and passed a reference to the stream, the handler then reads the information it expects and is then passed to a central thread pool to have its logic processed so the connection thread can get back to reading incoming packets.

Client side works pretty much the same, only there is obviously only one connection When you start talking about networking to programmers everyone has their own way of doing it and people experienced in the area all have different 'YOU MUST DO IT THIS VERY SPECIFIC WAY!!!' arguments, but in the end I have found this to be a very neat Object Oriented system and it more than meets the requirements of the game. In the future if 60 thousand players decide to log on at once I may have to revisit it lol, but I can't see this having issues with the few hundred I'd like to get first.

Oh, and I'll be running the server on a linux machine as and when its time for the game to go online.

Hope that's what you were looking for!
Liam

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

Ah. Thanks for the explanation. By coincidence, I woke up with an email from someone asking me to do some client/server programming today, so your explanation helped me out

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My indie games: http://cmagames.webs.com

When will testing be happening? Also, what will I and anyone else need to do to help you do testing?

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My indie games: http://cmagames.webs.com

I am hoping to bring a test server online towards the end of today to run over the weekend. All you will need is yourself! I will be providing Client downloads for each OS on http://www.mirage-realms.com so I would check the site at the end of the day.

Last night I did a huge rewrite of how the Server handles the map logic (entities running around and such) so this weekend will basically be testing everything so far... creating accounts, heros, logging in, chatting, running around, bumping into each other, chat commands, disconnecting / logging out...

Thanks for your interest in the project!

Liam

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

Hey Liam,

I registered on your site but never received a confirmation email. Could you check please?
Nick is same as here, Biki.

Thanks!

Hi there Biki, sorry to hear that... unsure why that occured o.0

Your account should now be activated

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

Sorry to double post,

I'm having internet issues at my end so I have had to delay the test server. This is kind of cool in a way though, as I have had the time to start work on my mapeditor



First actual test map ingame:



Need to find myself a graphics artist at some stage but for now these lovingly crafted tiles will do hehe. Next week a test server is going up if it kills me, there is definitely going to be a fair amount to test! ^^

Cheers,
Liam

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

Hi again, sorry to double post but I figured I'd give everyone an update on how I'm getting on.

Lots of progress, the maps all stitch together nicely now and I've done quite a bit of work on the server logic and such... it's starting to look like... a game? o.0



I'm having a bit of difficulty getting the server-side NPC movement speed figured out in my head, at present the player movement speed is handled client side and there aren't any movement speed server side checks in place (I'll work on that at a later date) so I can't simply use that methodology. I guess I am going to need to implement a server side game-logic loop for the NPC AI and such... getting consistent speeds handled correctly and the loop running at the correct rate is something I'm unsure about at the moment, if anyone has experience in this area and would like to help out please drop me a message.

Also been working on the mapeditor which you can download and play with on the website if your into that kind of thing ^^





Onwards!
Liam

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

t-t-t-t-t-t-triple post!

I've just put the new website online which you can catch at http://www.mirage-realms.com/devblog... I'm still in two minds about the layout but if you are interested in the project that's the place to lurk

Liam

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Mirage Realms - A free, retro, 2D MMORPG being developed using Slick2D and TWL

Have I mentioned it looks cool?

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"Artificial intelligence will never be a match for human stupidity" - "Jamos Kennedynos"