The Player Demo – V2 Update

Last week I released an update to “The Player Demo” on the Ogre3D forums. If you’ve never heard of it, the demo is essentially an example of the basic concepts behind creating an online, multiplayer game with Ogre3D and RakNet. In the demo, you can login with a nickname, run around the terrain, and chat with other players.

My motivation for creating the demo is to get more people interested in creating their own online games and to provide them with a well-documented example that’s easy to hack and modify. I personally learned the most by reverse-engineering other people’s code (I grew up writing server emulators for most of the popular MMORPGs) and so I thought this might be helpful way to teach others.

Eventually, I would like to expand the demo a little bit more with an additional scripting layer (I’m thinking Lua or Javascript via V8) and back-end database (possibly MySQL or SQLite) as well as implement basic NPCs, fighting, death/respawning, player stats (HP/Exp./Level), and user accounts/registration. The trick will be trying to exemplify some of the most common features of today’s MMORPGs without getting too specific (which would limit applicability of the demo) or too complex (which would impact the project’s size and ease of understanding the codebase).

Anyways, here’s a few screenshots from the latest update to “The Player Demo”:

You can download the precompiled binaries and source for the demo here.