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MMORPG.COM News: Kaneva: Developer Journal #1
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Greg Frame, the Chief Gaming Officer and Co-Founder of Kaneva Inc., has take the time to write a developer journal about their product and how they believe it will alter game development.
;) About seven years ago, I, like many of you, had a dream of creating a MMO game. After months of research and investigation, I found that to get into game development I needed to possess one of two things: 1) millions of dollars or 2) talent. Since I didnt have any cash and I had some talent, I decided to create my own engine from scratch. I took a trip to the bookstore and purchased some game programming books and got to work. About one year later I had something that could be played. A few friends and I logged in and shot each other and all in all it was a great personal success for me. Now the question loomed
how can I take this to the next level? I started to dig more into the game design and features that I thought would make my game the next big thing and to be honest, I simply gave up my idea of becoming an uber game developer. There were too many complexities and too many tasks to be completed in my lifetime and I wasnt aware of any free local game programmers that were available to help me. |
To read the entire article click here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Interesting article, I would like to know more about the Kaneva engine, and it's capabilities. I think many of the corporate mmo's are scammers just feeding players cake. I feel there is an underground creative gamingworld that can be tapped into. I think people are realizing that you don't need to play big name corporate mmo's to have fun. If you have a good product people will play and pay, because they feel apart of a community. A bigger community doesn't mean it's better, and it can lose something for the players looking all the same, doing all the same thing. People want to make their mark in a mmo, they want originality. But this is my opinion from my research and experience.
All the power to you guys at Kaneva!
Whoa! This is very inspiring. I am defintiely going to look Kaneva up!
My firsthand experience with the Kaneva engine has been painless and enjoyable. It is capable of an enormous amount of features right now, and with everything they plan on adding to it, it's easy to see, after just a few days of exploring it, how the Kaneva engine will turn the industry upside down. No longer is MMORPG development something that requires $30 million and a five year production schedule, so watch out, industry giants.
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Visit MMO Center today to discover the future of subscription MMORPGs! Brought to you by Rapid Reality.
thats nice ive been looking at these things but never seen any good ones, This one on the other hand doesnt look half bad. from the looks of it its finished, at least enought to market, and if so where would you buy it homepage or somthing. Damn i would love to have a good system like this i got myself a damn 1000 page journal that looks acts an oversized board game does me no good on paper tho.
always my opion when i talk as this is me and my ideas if you disagree with something i dont want flaming plz. thank you. and Dont question a forum posters spelling you think we got spell check on this thing.
If youre asking where to buy Kaneva, you dont. You just create your game, and let them take all your money from you. Not to mention the $10,000 you owe them. If you search up Kanevas first article posted on this site, you will see the "fine print" from their agreement we pulled out. Frankly, if they want to take that much from you, thats fine. But I would rather pay $110 for Realm Crafter (which can do almost as much) and be on my way. I frankly dont have the pocket book for such rediculous, cowardly, business practices.
EDIT: Oh, and towards the article. SOE isnt afraid to do something original, if I may remind you Sony took a huge leap of faith when they made EQ. There wasnt some huge "safe" market to compare against when they decided to make a game such as EQ. Sure, im not a huge fan of SOE myself, but they still have nothing against doing something original. Infantry, EQ, etc.
Ignoring for a moment my opinions on the original statement, I do have a point of history. SOE didn't make EQ. They bought it after the fact.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
You see, this is how crazy rumors get started: One guy conjures up something completely untrue and then tries to pawn it off as fact. Instead of taking the extra five minutes to actually go and read about what's really going on, most people just assume the loud-mouth guy knows what he's talking about and and the misinformation becomes contagious.
If you're genuinely curious as to how the Kaneva game engine is licensed, actually take the five minutes and look at their licensing FAQ page, which explains everything in detail and even shows a few simple examples of their pricing structure. Here's a quick link to further reduce the time it takes for you to find out what's really going on instead of relying on someone's assumptions.
In brief, the Kaneva engine costs nothing up front besides the third party software you use to create your game's artwork (which can be done simply with just 3D Studio Max and Adobe Photoshop). The Kaneva licensing fee is slowly paid out of your royalties, but never reducing your income from the game to $0. It works out that a game with a $10/month subscription cost and only 1,000 subscribers earns you a little over $30,000 the first year and over $50,000 each subsequent year. Folks, games like Runescape and A Tale in the Desert were made by tiny groups of guys in their garages over a few weekends; look at how many subscribers they have. Sure, those are rare examples of small groups producing good games, but even the games most people agree are pieces of crap still somehow manage to attract a few thousand people. Sit down and honestly think about that for a moment.
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Visit MMO Center today to discover the future of subscription MMORPGs! Brought to you by Rapid Reality.
*reads the above response*
Can I say pwned here? ;P
This is just an awesome tool for developers. Nice work guys!
I do see some ofthe points the loud mouthed poster was making, they have quit a few loop holes and money taking rules. witch is concerning i thought it ws jsut another realms crafter type thing, if im not gonna be able to make all the money of it why do all the work, there like a talent agency jsut steal my money. i see there point to but if you gotta make your game you should get the reward and i should jsut pay them for the software. they could jsut charge a few hundred bucks for it im sure most people atualy interested in making a game could get the money to pay the price of software. (if for some reason you cant and that statment pisses you off dotn remark ok). so im end terms this program is great f you dont want to make a living off your game use this, its kinda funny cause its so cheap apealing the poorer comunity but it wount make you any money funny how the world works taking the ideas of us and using it for there own personal gain. haha i just seem to have a proplem with all that for some reason.
o ya like 5 mins after i posted i found there web site and read up about it even downloaded some of ther crap and was messing around.
always my opion when i talk as this is me and my ideas if you disagree with something i dont want flaming plz. thank you. and Dont question a forum posters spelling you think we got spell check on this thing.
If you saw the documentary on G4 Tech TV, it says different. So either you, or they, are lying. The documentary on the History of MMORPGs said that they were approached with the idea, and were hesitant, but decided it could be a step in the right direction, so they went on with it. Then after UO was released, and they saw how well that went, they went full force with EQ until the end.
But once again, either them or you must be wrong
EDIT: And to add to the real topic of discussion, im not just being a loud mouth. Quoted from the original discussion, heres something someone pulled from the Kaneva License agreement.
.....................................
...but time flows like a river...
...and history repeats...
-Leader of "The Fighting Irish" in DAoC on Hib/Kay-
its to bad, cause the system is atually pretty easy to use i was one it or only an hour or 2 and i got a begining to a town, it wouldnt be to bad exept it seem that unless you make a game that makes attracts alot of people you get screwed and if you do make a game that attracks people they still end up taking all your money. so i deleted it,
all this is is a skin any way i would rather spend some time jsut making a skin like ragnorok or, somthing similar with out the hi tech graphics and jsut use all my grand ideas that i think of to make the game fun, And i turn Get all the Money for my self, I love it.
always my opion when i talk as this is me and my ideas if you disagree with something i dont want flaming plz. thank you. and Dont question a forum posters spelling you think we got spell check on this thing.
If you saw the documentary on G4 Tech TV, it says different. So either you, or they, are lying. The documentary on the History of MMORPGs said that they were approached with the idea, and were hesitant, but decided it could be a step in the right direction, so they went on with it. Then after UO was released, and they saw how well that went, they went full force with EQ until the end.
But once again, either them or you must be wrong
http://pc.ign.com/articles/080/080264p1.html
A news article from when the transfer took place...
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
One of the big values behind Kaneva is that Kaneva provides not only the MMO game engine, but all the online game services around it. This includes providing all the necessary hardware, rack mounted servers, routers, bandwidth, security, billing, IT admin, etc. If you ignore the game engine decision, this upfront cost to buy and implement a full MMO game environment would prevent most small game studios from getting off the ground. Kaneva provides all of this as part of the service. This allows the game studio to put their money, time, and energy into creating the best online games. When comparing engines, you should consider this in your business decision. Very few other engines come w/ online MMO game services.
While 3dsMax is currently required for Kaneva, an upcoming Kaneva release will enable support for more 3d modeling tools to import/export from. This should open the door for more indies who can't afford the 3dsmax license or prefer other 3d modeling tools.
What would be a really great idea is if Kaneva got in touch with Autodesk (the makers of 3dsmax) and worked out some kind of package deal where not just the Kaneva Engline license is paid off in royalties, but the seats of 3dsmax are paid at the same time. In effect, you would get both the Kaneva Engine and 3dsmax for $0 upfront, but your royalties would have to pay off the licenses of both before you earned any substantial profit. You never know, the people at Autodesk might jump at the chance to attach their development software to the wide-reaching media appeal of Kaneva...
Of course this would require a slightly modified version of 3dsmax that only worked with Kaneva, but that's not terribly difficult to setup.
Who knows, maybe the good folks at Adobe would want a piece of that action too, offering a special version of Photoshop as part of a complete Kaneva/3dsmax/Photoshop game design package. If you could get all of that for $0 upfront and pay it all off with backend royalties, there's nothing left to stop anyone and everyone from making games using the Kaneva platform...
_____ ____ ___ __ _
Visit MMO Center today to discover the future of subscription MMORPGs! Brought to you by Rapid Reality.
The added support for Maya, Blender, and Lightwave you guys added today is great! I know here at the Art Institute of Atlanta they almost cram maya down your throat. I've had to learn 3dsMax on my own to create assets. Hope to get a chance to talk with you soon CKlaus (I briefly talked with you back in June at AiA). Take care.
-Sentientv2
In my opinion, pushing a software tool like the $5000 3DMax in your documentation seems very contrary to your intent, which you stated is trying to enable the independent developer. Blender is a free yet professional-level 3D modeling tool, exports in a ton of formats, but none are directly supported by your product, creating a bit of a hiccup in the tools pipeline. Writing an exporter for either end of the chain would certainly enable more developers to jump on board!
Nice necro skillz.
Heheh, no kiddin'. 2 year old post about a POS piece of software.
Heheh, no kiddin'. 2 year old post about a POS piece of software.
The thing is when someone is researching the endless number of game engines (including graphics, physics, audio, etc.) and something looks like it might have merit, they are going to research all of that information. Based on the interesting comments here, I downloaded and researched the product, and to this day it remains 3DSMax-centric, thus making it of very little use to the low-budget developers.
Looks like we're still stuck integrating the hard way with Ogre or Irrlicht and a bunch of separate packages to get all the pieces together. Everything else that looks good is in beta.
If that's the issue then why don't you look into Multiverse.
They have a better business model. They don't make money til you do then its only a percentage fee 10%.
Billing etc is handled by them an additional 6% (from last I read)
They also do not support the hosting at this time, but hosting isn't that substantial at the small spectrum for those learning and wanting to start their own. You can host on your own server if its just for personal use. (Keep in mind item 1 above if you make money they do).
They are also using a newer version of the axiom engine then what Kaneva is.
They offer support at all rates (check site) and current closed beta developers are happy to assist others.
They support Maya, Max, Blender and any number of other free modeling programs, including sketch-up (google). They provide with the client and server free tools for exporting models and converting them, the meshes, textures, skeletons and animation into a collada file to be read by the game engine.
They provide speetree for use in Non-Commercial games for free (a modest package but still there). You have to pay speedtree for the full blown if you go commercial.
It's a much better deal, which is why we went with them over Kaneva and believe me we almost signed with Kaneva. I was even ready to go visit the data facility on the north siide of Atlanta. However, Multiverse remains in open beta at this time and is expected to go gold by year end.
http://www.forceofarms.com/index.php