Alanacial - Help Wanted

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alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

Team Name:
Alanacial

Project name:
Unnamed MMO

Website:
http://www.alanacial.com/

Brief description:
We are recruiting new team members to create two (2) complete zones for a fantasy based MMO. The game client, client patcher, world server, chat server, patcher server have already been in development for 3 years. We are looking for help moving forward with creating content and tools to help with the creation of content and levels.

Business Model:
Free-to-Play eventually, but for the purposes of this posting and recruitment, the project will be distributed as freeware.

Compensation:
There is no compensation for this contract.

Technology:
We are utilizing the following open source technologies: Irrlicht, IrrKlang, Raknet, LUA, MySQL, Bullet and Blender for B3D modeling.

Positions needed:
We are looking to expand the team to support and develop a full blown MMO, and are utilizing this 2 zone contract to evaluate people to bring on for a paid position with the full Free-to-Play version. We are primarily interested in content developers, but are recruiting for all positions:

C++ developers (game client, server, content creation tools)
Web developers
3D Modelers/Artists (Blender strongly preferred)
MySQL DBA (and must be able to manage the C++ socket development/connection class)
And any other position you have strong skills for, like audio engineers, sprite artists, ect.

Contacts:
You can apply for a position on the team by emailing a resume with experience to jobs at alanacial guesswhat com. You can respond to the forums here but this post will be placed on different forums in an effort to recruit many talented people, so email is your best bet.

Additional Info:
The game will be a Fantasy Based Anime style MMO that targets casuals and hard core gamers alike. What will stand out for this game is a unique mixture of traditional targeted based combat system for Base classes, with a transcendent class that focuses exclusively on third person shooter type based skills with no auto attacks. We believe this combination of difficulty and simplicity will create a unique atmosphere for our gamers, and offer a gentle learning curve for those that are overwhelmed or under skilled to play in a FPS exclusive game. Think action adventure Legend of Zelda, God of War, or Dynasty Warriors. Base class has “Z-Targeting” (to borrow a N64 term) and transcendent class skills do not, although attacks and skills are stronger if you use transcendant skills.

The game will strive to keep players questing and away from grinding with a strong central storyline, and a plethora of undocumented side quests that players discover by involving themselves in the game world and its people. The Japanese inspired world envelopes two ideologies that give a general conflict between two beliefs: Those that believe in living passively through the energies of nature, magic and its creatures, and those that believes in technology, its advancement, and taking a more active role in life and conflict. While these beliefs do not divide our game world races or classes, it provides a common conflicting point that characters in the world endure and provide the player with obstacles to overcome as they fight for their personal belief.

The game has been in development for 3 years as a C++ game engine testing ground for several technologies. These have been integrated and utilized to make our project very versatile and easy to work with. The work on this project has been only by programmers, so 90% of the time spent on Alanacial project as a whole has been programming code. There is a multi threaded patcher for your client, a client login to the game server and chat server, and testing bed level that allows multiple people to move on the server world using interpolated movement algorithms, and have all user input server validated from movement to using abilities. Right now the world is loaded dynamically using .irr files and models using B3D animations. We have created a lot of the ground work for a MMO but are left primarily with modeling content assets; something that we did not at the time have a strong skill set to create.

We have a Game Design Document that will be available for review specifically for the scope of this contract. Based on a postmortem of each contract, we will chose to move forward with certain contractors on the future development of this project. Prospects for this contract position will be expected to provide a minimum of ten hours per week for a duration of six months.

About me (and MY qualifications):
My name is Philip and I have a Bachelor of Science in Game and Simulation Programming. Curiosity (2007) was a turn based RPG (named in the same mind set as Final Fantasy with game play similar to Final Fantasy Tactics) developed for and demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco 2007 (http://www.gdconf.com/). I was the project manager and lead programmer of the team of 9 other college student developers pursuing a degree in Game and Simulation Programming.

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My first 3d project was my Senior Project for college. It was a 3d Tetris clone, called PerspectaCubed, and again was a 3d engine created from scratch and DirectX. I was a programmer on this team of 4 and completed it in 6 months.

video of the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XumAbvOmNqE

I’ve held a software engineering job for a vendor (http://www.gpj.com/) used by Oracle, Cisco, and Charles Schwab, and was a database administer for their onsite events. I’ve created ecommerce websites (and accompanying SQL database) for two companies (http://www.digitalstormonline.com/) and (http://vinotheque.com/). Now I work for Comcast as a Network Engineer on a nice shift: 4 days a week for 10 hours.

This offers me a chance to spend my 3 day weekend to again focus on managing and releasing the game to end users. I have a bucket of different skills that allow me to wear different hats and I’m really excited to work with some new programmers and, for the first time, some real artists. I hope to build a team to do a lot more then just one or two levels, and by keeping us on a realistic timeline and providing project goals, we’ll all see it come to fruition and make a little side income. Primarily though, we are looking to have fun and make a game we would enjoy ourselves, and add to your work portfolio a home brewed MMO. I look forward to meeting you new team members over Skype!


p.s.
Temporarily (obviously) most of the game's models/textures are being tested shamelessly using the demo objects included from some open source projects that many IrrLicht users have offered on their forums. I am not an artist or modeler (as you can see from my player model..) and used what I could to test client functions.

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Last edited by alanacial on Thu Aug 03, 2017 3:41 am, edited 16 times in total.
REDDemon
Developer
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Location: Genova (Italy)

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by REDDemon »

link is broken I can't see your website :-/
Junior Irrlicht Developer.
Real value in social networks is not about "increasing" number of followers, but about getting in touch with Amazing people.
- by Me
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

I removed the Website link, as it is misleading. I was having it there so people could view the website when it was ready, but the web server and game servers are not left on unless im actively developing on the project. I do have a Phenom ii x6 3.0Ghz core server computer for all the servers/database to run on though when I am, and that is generally sun-tue.
kazymjir
Posts: 727
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:05 pm
Location: Munich, Bayern

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by kazymjir »

Interesting, but this is only plain text. No screenshots, no binaries, no code.

Btw, you have a server that works only a few days a week? How people can develop this project?
How people can get info about the project, when the website is online only sometimes?
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

I'll be updating with screen shots this weekend, perhaps tonight. *edit Screen Shots added* Not very impressive though, im not an artist o.O

There has been not much effort put into the website/webserver, it was created for the purpose of allowing some 20ish testers to download my "alpha" to load test the server with several users connected. All I did was create the website/webserver, and configure my router to port forward to the server, and make sure it was visible from the alanacial.dyndns.org url.

The same machine hosts the game servers, and is on when we need it to be. Our source control is handled using Ankh svn using a dropbox repository (cloud server). It offers us redundancy and doesn't require a server to be run on my part.

The people that have worked on Alanacial have always been close friends, and I had trusted them to run a local version of the server. One developer moved on and now works for Namco, another has his own business doing web development. Moving forward and inviting new people to the project, they will be given access to certain branches of the repository relevant to the part of the engine they wish to work with. They will commit their changes, review it with me over skype, and we'll add it to the full project. This way I can build a relationship with the developers and feel comfortable giving them more of the source.

As this is my first time going public with the project, the website was never prepared to be used to advertise its features yet, although it has become apparent from this forum thread, it will likely become its new homepage (add that to the todo list this weekend). I am as nervous about validating myself to you as you may be to me. Its one thing to ask close friends to look at your code, a whole other to ask complete strangers. I'll try to make any arrangements the team needs to accommodate any changes required from the new developers.
Virion
Competition winner
Posts: 2148
Joined: Mon Dec 18, 2006 5:04 am

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by Virion »

good start. one thing you need to take care of is the latency. to prevent laggy movements when the connection is poor, MMO developers usually implement movement prediction in their games to reduce the awkward effect.
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

Well you should be able to see in the second image of code there, I dont actually update another players location on the local client but every 100 milliseconds. After that amount of time I interpolate the current location and the new location and begin moving the other character model frame by frame. While every time you see a chacter you are looking a bit in the past, its removed the jitterness you were refering to. Its 100 milliseconds the player will never know existed tho, as the intire world they see is handled the same way. As an added bonus, this takes load off the server as it is updated only by the user request to move forward on the server, and not just the actual location the client says it wants to be. The client obviously moves the character like the user thinks, but the server just updates its world with the request to move, moves it in the direction the player is facing indeffintely (til told otherwise from the client or it detects collision with an object), and just updates all the other clients that the player has the active input of moving forward. In this way the clients can predict the other player movements, and is only sent an update if the player releases the movement button, or changes its rotation (affecting forward movement).

The movement/latency class has had alot of work, more work that I think new programmers would think when thinking about creating an MMO, but that is part of the idea I am trying to sell here; I've put alot of that time in with the 3 years previous work on the engine. I just want to do the fun stuff of adding content :)
randomMesh
Posts: 1186
Joined: Fri Dec 29, 2006 12:04 am

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by randomMesh »

alanacial wrote:Image
Why the hell did you censor the image? That's disturbing. Is it due to a weird law in your country?
"Whoops..."
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

I dunno.. didn't want to burn the little one's eyes? I dont know the forum rules and if they care about nudity, was just being safe.

I added a zipped copy of a more or less previously completed project, Perspectacubed. Updated first post, and putting it here:

https://rapidshare.com/files/1612962013 ... aCubed.rar

You move using a combination of Arrow Keys and WASD, and can control music with function keys (f1, f2, ect) I forget the hold key off the top of my head but it was an interesting game to play. Difficult, mind you.
pera
Posts: 460
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Contact:

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by pera »

HAHAHAHA! You forgot to censor the lower part :) Not to mention the wired one!

Project looks very good! Good luck!
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

randomMesh wrote:Why the hell did you censor the image? That's disturbing. Is it due to a weird law in your country?
Funny you said that, because just today I got banned from the Photoshop forums using the same post to start this thread. Guess I needed more censoring. Here I thought the art forums would be even more forgiving then here, and that was just showing the topology!

:oops:
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial - Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

We got some interest in the game and have made a few changes.

The development team's name was changed to have a little more meaning and the game's development name is going to be reconsidered to be more then just two different forum user names.

With the descion on a team name, the company website domain was purchased and more development has begun on it.

Most recently we included Bullet (irrBullet interface) for some more advanced collision detection for use with the trancedant class spells. We also added some base animations to the test character and animated the base armor meshes to start the large project of creating dynamic armor by having different textures and sets of base meshes. We will probably move forward with this concept and expand it to different face meshes and hair meshes to have dynamically created character models. Who doesn't love a personally customized character? :)

We have two new modelers on the team, still looking for some programmers!
Last edited by alanacial on Thu Aug 03, 2017 3:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
alanacial
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2011 6:32 pm
Location: USA

Re: Alanacial- Help Wanted

Post by alanacial »

Bumping for interest.
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