|
|
 |
 |  | | | | |  | |||
 | ||||||
          |  |  | ||||
|
The Birth Of The Mobile MMOG Major Fambrough:
"You wish to see the frontier?" Mobile phones are becoming increasingly powerful computers, complete with operating systems and standard APIs. Although most phones on the market are still useless for anything more than phone calls, we are slowly moving into an era where many people will walk around with a (potential) networked game console in their hand. As mobile phones increasingly resemble networked computers, they become more interesting as platforms for multiplayer games. Yet, as someone who helped develop three MMOGs (including World in War, which was recently released for mobile devices), I can vouch for the fact that application development for mobile phones is still in its infancy. Mobile game development lacks many of the resources that more mature gaming platforms offer. Based on my experience, I will describe what I believe are the essential requirements for making a successful MMOG for mobile devices - a genre that I'll refer to as "3MOG" in this article. The MMOG Market Today According
to MMO Worlds (www.mmoworlds.com),
there are almost 60 MMOGs on the market today (not counting the various
expansion packs for games like EverQuest), and many times that
number of MMOGs under development. The 20 most well known MMOGs on the
market are listed in Table 1.
The MMOG genre has been a powerful buzzword in the game industry for years now. I see five interconnected reasons for this:
To date, not many 3MOGs have been released, but that will change over the next few years. A good example of a 3MOG currently on the market is TibiaME from German developer Cipsoft (see Figure 1). TibiaME is what you might expect a MMOG to look like on a mobile phone; it resembles popular PC-based MMOGs like Ultima Online and Lineage.
My company's first major 3MOG is called Football Manager, which we began developing in 2000. Now on the market, the game has thousands of monthly paying customers and is one of the largest Swedish online games. The premium television channel Canal+ markets it, but it's only available in Sweden and Norway at the moment.
The game is accessible via mobile phone too, allowing players to interact with their team at any given moment (Figure 3).
The Challenge Creating a 3MOG offers many interesting development challenges, some of which I will describe. Note that my experience is based largely upon my experience as a developer in Sweden; some of the factors I describe may vary from region to region. Latency Latency is always an important issue when developing multiplayer games. Most mobile phones run on GPRS networks, which have very high latencies (bad for games). Whereas latency in network calls for PC games is measured in hundreds of milliseconds, for mobile phones latency is typically measured in seconds. Imagine trying to play a game of Battlefield 1942 and always seeing what happened four seconds ago. While
getting the correct packets on a mobile phone can take more time than
on a PC, the speed of sending data is comparatively not so bad. It typically
ranges from 9.6Kbs to (in theory) 172Kbs, compared to a PC's dial-up modem
speed of 56Kbs. Therefore, as long as we can hide the latency in a mobile
game's design, there is actually a pretty good network to work with. Table
2 shows some values that we have seen in our Swedish networks (these are
anecdotal measurements).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Introduction
Resource
Guide 
