Imperial Realms
A science fiction-themed MMOG currently in development.
Imperial Realms began life some time in 2003 although I didn't start coding it until much later. I've played strategy and online games for many years and never quite found them satisfying somehow. For a long time ideas had accumulated and fermented until finally I had the vision and opportunity to build the game I wanted to play; a large-scale online "star empire" strategy game with a heavy community emphasis.
The initial design consisted of a client handler which accepted connections from clients and processed commands, engines for the various game areas and a database system to pass messages and store data. As development proceeded, I added a second database to hold specific data sets and run game management features, as well as separating the web functions and placing them on a separate server.
The code base for Imperial Realms is a mix of C and C++. For efficiency, I coded the database in threaded C using Berkeley DB. Except for a few minor utilities, all other code to date is written in C++ and makes generous use of the STL.
Players see the game through the client, which has proven to be (by far) the single largest body of work in the project. In early prototypes I experimented with different toolkits and graphic methods before settling on using OpenGL with GTk+. This gives the needed mix of 2D controls and 3D displays, and will run on all of Windows, OS/X and Linux. At some future date I may open-source this code to allow other developers to produce parallel clients.
The IR web site runs on a custom content engine called SEBCMS, developed for this and other projects because of a lack of suitable existing packages. Imperial Realms has always been aimed at an international audience, so one of the first requirements for it is that everything must run in the UTF-8 form of Unicode. When combined with security and functional requirements, this made it very hard to find an existing content engine that would fit. SEBCMS is a modern C++ web servlet container optimized for use on Linux systems, offering high speed, strict separation of data and presentation using XHTML & CSS, and (naturally) using UTF-8 throughout.
Other servers in the IR farm also run Linux, gaining the advantages of low cost, good performance and easy maintenance. The internal network currently uses gigabit ethernet and will be co-located in Vancouver.
Game revenue will come almost entirely from game subscriptions, possibly with some minor streams from merchandising or media.