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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
by nihilocrat 16y ago
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.
- feral 16y agoI 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.