1st, allow me to introduce myself. My name is David and I
you will need about 50 highly motivated people to do this
Indeed, sounds like a lot of work.
To answer your questions:
- Swaying trees using physics? Forget it mate, you'll need to animate these swayings yourself. The smoke is simply a particle system. Water is also a build-in into jme. If you want to develop a mmo, you should consider taking a look at JGN. It can synchronize scenes for you.
- Have a simple int tracking which side a player is on. Next you'll need something like this (pseudo code)
if(thisQuestIsCompletedBySide == 1) {
// do stuff if side 1 completed it
} else {
// do stuff if side 2 completed it
}
"Stuff" means adding, removing, or transforming spatials. (You'll have to synchronize the scene afterward).
3) That's more simple game logic than jME. Add, remove, transform spatials and syncronize them with all clients.
only things that affect the gameplay needs to "look the same" on every computer. things that are only there as visual enhancement doesnt…(like smoke from chimneys etc)
Thank you all for the replys. But unfortunately this arose more questions then it answered.
The original plan for the scenery was to use 3D clouds (particle generated if possible) instead of a skyboxes to make things look and feel more realistic. And about the swaying trees. Is there a reason why I cannot make the trees, grass and water react to wind? 
or is it just a limitation of the engine?
The clouds is an example of one of the things that may need to look the same (or similar) on every computer.
Nevertheless, I'm here to stay, thats for sure 
PS: I'm not alone on the project. A couple of my friends have volunteered to do the artwork, this shouldn't be too hard since the concept art has already been made. One of them is working on the terrain, and the other on the characters and animation on blender. As for the coding, im not very fluent with it (possibly due to experience) but I can understand everything (or nearly) on the examples.
ur design concept sounds interesting but it seems u r planning too much for ur limited resources. but thats just my opinion, i do hope u guys can complete this project.
to answer ur questions.
as mrcode has already said, theres no reason to synchronize all the scenary effects. in fact u only need to synchronize all the interaction parts of the game. theres no reason to spend time on synchronizing the clouds if they r not going to be interacted by the players.
second, doing animations with graphic tools is alot easier and more efficient than doing them with the engine. by saying this i dont mean the engine is not powerful enough to do so, its just not neccessary to waste tons of code on something u can achieve in maya in less than 10 mins~ besides heavy physics calculation also increases cpu requirement which is not a good thing compare to ram requirement.
all the other questions regarding ur gameplay is not a question for the engine. just like building a car, wether or not having a leather seat is not a question for the engine but rather a question for the designers. all those questions can be done and have been done. its just a question if u have a good enough logic to pull it off.
good luck~
Even with hardware accelerated physics (e.g. PhysX hardware) you won't have enough cpu/ppu resources to compute the physics for hundreds or even thousands (or more if we speak of mmo servers) of trees. That's why the other guys told you not to do so.
I think physics controlled trees isn't such a crazy idea (depending on the level of detail you're looking at), but synchronising the exact position of them across all users machines is. It would probably be enough to have them behaving in the same manor. It seems like putting a lot of strain on the hardware for very little gain, though. If you want dynamic weather it would make more sense to just have a parametrised animation which allows you to change the apparent wide speed and direction of a tree. If you then wanted to use a particle system (or something) to calculate the wind at different points in your terrain, you could probably do this on the server side and send it to the user as required, and this might give you the added realism you seem to be after.
Note: What I just suggested might actually be horrendously difficult, I'm just thinking out loud here…
HarveyNick said:
If you then wanted to use a particle system (or something) to calculate the wind at different points in your terrain, you could probably do this on the server side and send it to the user as required, and this might give you the added realism you seem to be after.
Hu, now this sounds interesting. You can actually get a particle on a specific world coordinate and then get speed and direction from that particle?
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desertrunner said:
Hu, now this sounds interesting. You can actually get a particle on a specific world coordinate and then get speed and direction from that particle?
Like I said: just thinking aloud. But I was thinking you could just have your particles blowing around (and potentially reacting to) the terrain, then update any nodes which are affected by weather (like trees) when a particle passes close enough to them. So a wall might stop the particles and shield a tree from the wind. If you did it server side, running a couple of seconds into the future, you could then interpolate the value for "now" on the client side and have smooth changes in wind speed/direction with too much of a performance hit, since all you'd really be doing is changes the parameters of an animation...
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desertrunner said:
And for desctrucable terrain: If you're done with that (based on voxel calculations? marching cubes again?), send me a PM - I'd like to copy it then. ;)
Destructable terrain is probably one of the big aspects of the game as it allows players to do things which are curently not done in any other MMO I have seen to date (except for Wurm online). I was thinking of using half dynamic terrain and half static terrain to do this, since not all terrain is meant to be destructable, only the battlefields (which are, im afraid to say, very big in design
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HarveyNick said:
Like I said: just thinking aloud. But I was thinking you could just have your particles blowing around (and potentially reacting to) the terrain, then update any nodes which are affected by weather (like trees) when a particle passes close enough to them. So a wall might stop the particles and shield a tree from the wind.
Wow, I really have to put more time into the particle effects. I just created my first effect with the particle factory and applied the Influences BasicGravity and ~Wind to it and that looked so good! I really want more of that. I have to figure out how to create some nice effects around Nodes. And maybe I learn more about doing such things then... :)
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