Runescape HD and procedurally generated MMO

I read this article in Worlds In Motion today:



http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2008/08/wait_interview_henrique_olifie.php



It talks about Runescape's success due to it's 1.2mb browser based thin client and procedurally generated content. Also on how Jagex's research resulted in greater scalability and graphical improvement in their latest Runescape HD.



But surely procedural generation is nothing new, jMonkey is capable of doing the same if not better right? From what I saw, Hevee's ORPG from the showcase section is alot nicer looking than was still quite a small download.



Is anyone interested in or working on a browser based, free to play MMORPG that will give Jagex a run for their money?

Is anyone interested in or working on a browser based, free to play MMORPG that will give Jagex a run for their money?


I think the whole world is interested in doing that at the moment :)

Would be nice to see how small you could get a game running on jme down to, with some shrinking and procedural data...

Mr. Coder : Well, there actually is at least one. It was made during the TIGSource demake compo



http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=2529.0

at least one what?

ACardboardRobot… I think there has been a mistake here. The forum you linked is about a J2ME game (Java 2 Micro Edition).



MrCoder, on the other hand, was talking about how small a JME (jMonkeyEngine) game can get.


The LWJGL jar and dll are about 1 MB together, the jME libs also total to about that amount. If all data is located online or procedurally generated, you can get your game client to fit in about 4-5 MB.

Geometry can be optimized alot of ways, the real bandwith hog are the textures. Presumably they use fractal and perlin generators. But, Runescape still isn't that great visually. Graphics is kinda cute, so you can see what is what, but its far from being able to call it good.

But great things can be done with generated content.



On that topic, I think this demo is a must see for those who still don’t know it (it is 8 years old now):



http://www.theproduct.de/idea.html



A lot of information about their strategies and tools is available on their site.

removing the textures from the jme source and doing a heavy proguard pass on it should shrink it alot (depending on how much your client uses offcourse). same goes with lwjgl…