The article is called "Let's Code... an MMO" - but it is just a simple Octree tutorial.
I don't mean to be negative, like the guys friends that laughed at the project - but coding an MMO is several orders of magnitude more complex than putting together an Octree renderer.
Best of luck with it, but, so far, nothing to see here.
Writing an octree is definitely part of coding an MMO. It's a piece of software, of which an octree or something similar is a fundamental part, thus it totally fits. If this is too slow-paced or ground-level for your tastes ... avoid game development, it just gets worse; more complicated, more pedantic, more detailed, more time spent not actually creating game logic.
However, I'm also cheesed at the misuse of the term MMO, Minecraft is pretty close but the lack of a centralized game world in any way makes it unlike most MMOs, and by extension doesn't really fit the term. It is merely a persistent multiplayer construction set. N8 (Neverdaunt) or Wurm Online (which notch had formerly worked on), for example, are similar construction-oriented games that definitely fit the MMO moniker because there /is/ a centralized persistent game world. Dealing with the side effects of such a architecture does make things an order of magnitude more complicated.
I disagree where you say 'an octree is definitely part of coding an MMO.'
An Octree is just one technique to reduce the size of the Potentially Visible Set of geometry that is sent to the rendering pipeline. While its a quite a natural fit for a voxel-style world, such as minecraft, there are many techniques to achieve this; an octree just being one.
If the Octree was the core technical challenge and data structure used to create every MMO, then I'd have no issue with the article.
But its really not - its a simple technique, graphics 101, used to speed up rendering (or collision detection).
Further, just having an octree is not nearly sufficient for handling MMO scale issues - a lot more needs to go into structuring the world - when those larger challenges are solved, I'd like to read his article on it.
Its clear that its the first part of a series of articles. Are you saying he shouldn't have blogged about it until 6 months down the line when he has all the subsystems in place?
No - I'm just saying that the submission to hackernews shouldn't be called 'Lets code... an MMO', because that makes it sound like its about coding an MMO, when its about coding an Octree.
If I see an article about coding an MMO I expect to read about the complexities of scale and persistence, and supporting a consistent gameworld for a lot of players - these are the main challenges unique to an MMO.
I have to agree.
When I read the first paragraph, it seemed promising, but then he just talks about development of the world and nothing more on the aspect of MMO. If he had an outline of what he'll be looking at to code an MMO, then it would have been better.
For some more in-depth game engine development blogging, check out BitSquid[0] - an engine being developed by ex-lead developers of GRIN (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Bionic Command Rearmed).
I agree with you, and honestly there are already tons of graphic tutorial sites out there. IMHO, an interesting series about MMOs would deal with the server side, communication protocols, cheat prevention, client management, data storage, etc... Those are the things that take a desktop graphical client and turn it into an MMO.
I don't mean to be negative, like the guys friends that laughed at the project - but coding an MMO is several orders of magnitude more complex than putting together an Octree renderer.
Best of luck with it, but, so far, nothing to see here.