Do you think its technically feasible for a MMOG Autoduel?

Let me know if you think this is technically feasible in the next 3 years...say beginning development in the next 6-8 months.

1. MMOG game set in the Autoduel universe
2. Support up to 1500 sim. players in a seamless world
3. Model NorthEast Corridor accurately
4. True First Person FPS engine and Third Person Driving Engine.
5. Maximum 100 vehicles in zone? (contradicts seamless world though but I realize too many vehicles aint gonna ever happen)
6. Multiple Goals.. Autoduel Champion, Smuggler, Merc, Police, Bandit, Trader/Trucker
7. Fully PVP with safe zones in cities
8. No NPC MOBS. You either go hunting for bad/good guys, sign up for a local competition, race, or smuggle good, transport goods, police highways etc..There will be NPC shops, referres, race organizers etc.. just no mobs.
9. Accurate Car Damage Model, Building Damage Model, Person Damage model.
10 Very good physic's model.. No flight...but jumps and all axis would be real.
11. Player housing (garage obviously) Player Stores, Player Gangs

What do you think? Does modeling a real state accuratley make sense? i.e. it would actually take 4-5 hours to drive across Pennsylvania? or smaller chunks?

Do you feel technology is at a point that such a project could actually fly?

I know one company is attempting a similar idea...but not sure on scope of their project.

That sounds like an awesome game to me. Technically, not sure how feasible it is. Are you talking about just modeling the landscape of the northeast corridor with randomly generated background images (since we''re only concerned with roads and shops), or fully modeled down to each building and tree?

When you say no NPC mobs, do you mean no generated traffic? Only players would have vehicles? Having the northeast corridor fully designed for free roaming and running races and stuff would be awfully dull if there''s only a few hundred cars scattered throughout such a large tract of land.

I''m not familiar with Autoduel, unfortunately, which is part of the trouble here; I don''t know what all is being discussed here.

I think that this idea could prove very fun and successful, but am not sure how technically feasible it is. Given the resources, sure, but could it still be profitable?

I have no idea about how technically feasible it is but I agree with Farscry that it sounds like a lot of fun.

I doubt they could or want to do the model to scale but yes I would that is well within the realm of technical feasibility. Remember for scale your are talking about 1500 would be pretty vacant and not a lot of fun. Planet side has already shown that this type of semi simulation is possible in a bare bones way. The real question is would real world physics are end up being any fun :).

Well, I think you could use Planetside as the closest to the technology needed as of yet as far as MMORPG''s are concerned. With Planetside I do not remember exactly how accurate the physics are on the vehicles, but it seems like the physics were good enough that it was fun driving them ;). I don''t believe the damage was realistic on vehicles though, pretty much just a number that as the vehicle took more damage the armor number decreases until the vehicle blows up.

I would definitely look closely at what was done with that game to get an idea of what was feasible when Planetside was developed. I think that what you are describing may be feasible in the next few years, but real-time updates on what every vehicle near you is doing, what their location and speed are, how much damage each component of the vehicle has taken, and other things that I am probably leaving out, add up to alot of information needing to be sent from the server to every single client. I am not sure what kind of hardware and bandwidth that requires, but I would guess that the servers would need to be beefy (and numerous), and the bandwidth required may limit the clients to broadband only.

Of course, I really have no idea what kind of hardware and network Sony uses to keep Planetside going, and I do not know if it was all on their end, but I remember that some of those battles lagged terribly in beta.

I''m just a gamer though, and the game you are describing sounds like fun, so maybe I am being optimistic in hopes that games like this are on the horizon

I loved Autoduel on my Apple IIe, and was always baffled as to why no one picked up the idea again.

Mmorpg idea: Allow folks to watch the arena duels from multiple camera views as if watching a real sport, but they have to buy a ticket (with in-game money, of course). If the announcers were done right, it would be interesting.

How will the cloning system work? Should be similar to Anarchy Online''s insurance system, I think.

NPC cars should be in the game, but indistinguishable from player vehicles, to add a sense of potential pvp danger at every out-of-town encounter.

Solid rubber tires, flamethrowers, spike-droppers and truck stop missions, woo hoo!

A friend of mine is a real gear head and loves to play video games. One of the things I noticed from talking to him about racing games is that there hasn''t ever been a game out there that let you fully customize your car like you could in real life and than go out and take it for a drive or compete with other cars etc.

Motorcity Online was the closest game that there ever was, unfortunately it didn''t offer much in the way of gameplay options once you finished the customization. Not to mention it wasn''t very intuitive for those who knew little about cars either.

I know a dream racing game for my friend would involve the ability to add real world parts to real world cars and than be allowed to cruise on real world streets, enter street races or semi proffesional races. Maybe even become good enough to enter proffesional races if you knew enough to get you that far into the game. No game has offered that much reality yet and I think a game like that could do really well if done properly.

Hmmn, I''m gonna go home and ply sjg''s ""Car Wars!"".

Wait, no I won''t. I''ll go home, look at the rulebook and upon realising it''s unplayable go and play championship manager.

"MikeTheDad" wrote:

I loved Autoduel on my Apple IIe, and was always baffled as to why no one picked up the idea again.

Mmorpg idea: Allow folks to watch the arena duels from multiple camera views as if watching a real sport, but they have to buy a ticket (with in-game money, of course). If the announcers were done right, it would be interesting.

How will the cloning system work? Should be similar to Anarchy Online''s insurance system, I think.

NPC cars should be in the game, but indistinguishable from player vehicles, to add a sense of potential pvp danger at every out-of-town encounter.

Solid rubber tires, flamethrowers, spike-droppers and truck stop missions, woo hoo!

Yes.. a couple people made the comment that the world may feel a bit lonely...

I guess there is that danger.. but the Autoduel Campaign always lead me to believe that there was a significant drop in the population levels and there were many more barren stretches of land.

I wouldnt be opposed to NPC''s...but I think once you added a level of ""camping"" or NPC Mobs to fight over and over again I think you would loose a lot.

Perphaps technology would allow one seamless world just spread over many servers? so you''d have the illusion of more people playing?

Though not sure how you''d overcome the lag though have XX amount of cars/people on screen.

Im sure theyd have to scale down the speed of the autos as well. The faster you go the more intense your collision detection has to be.

But like was said before, some revisions and cosmetic changes to Planetside and you arent far off.

The city needs to be modelled realistically but not to scale. You want people to be able to find each other without scouring the streets for hours/days.

You could LOD the realistic damage model to only the players vehicle on the players machine to save bandwidth.

Autoduel on the Apple kicked some serious ass. I too wondered why no one has picked up the ball and ran with it.

I never got to play any of the Autoduel or Car Wars type games back in the day, but they always fascinated me. There''s no doubt in my mind I''d at least buy the game and play the first month if it ever came to fruition.