Interesting thing at Realm Crafter

[Jackolantern]

Check out the Realm Crafter main page. I know a lot of the old-timers around here have a pretty bad taste in their mouths from RC, but this has at least piqued my interest enough for me to keep an eye on it, just to see what is going on.

[OldRod]

Count me as one of the ones who has the aforementioned bad taste

Wonder what is up...

[Jackolantern]

I am guessing that the core of the engine became too dated to stay competitive. Back when RC came out, there were really no other options. But now there are several high-end choices, and I think RC was left in the dust. It seems maybe they are going back to the drawing board and starting over.

Even though I am not in the market for a 3D MMO engine anymore, I am still interested to see what they come up with.

[hallsofvallhalla]

They took the forums down and everything. Basically sh%^ all over the customers. They have a trail of lies and deceit several years long. Bad taste does not even begin to describe what they have done to people.

No doubt this will be an absolute failure. I hate to be negative but think about it. When we were all into 3d MMORPGS it was a BIG thing. That time was a special time that will never come back like that. Those of us that got to ride that ride was a part of something special but it is gone. Us lucky ones seen the writing on the wall and jumped on the future(the web) before the crash. The days of cheap 3d MMORPGS are truly gone. Go on to OnRPG or steam and look at the list of quality free 3d MMORPGS. You can never compete.

i can pay $100 a year the best MMORPG on the market. Why pay a company that has a HORRIBLE track record and no real games to show for itself? I see no point. They should move on. Abyssal was anotehr one of their failures that has a long line of disapointment. Karma is a b%^ch.

[Verahta]

What did they do? I never even heard of them before.

[Jackolantern]

What did they do? I never even heard of them before.

They grew out of a small engine created around 2001/2002 called "MMORPGce" (MMORPG Creator Engine). It amassed a small community but never got to a complete state. Then a company named "Solstar" bought MMORPGce and gave a job to its creator, Amunra. They unexpectedly got a lot of attention early on, and at the same time decided to completely throw out the MMORPGce code and start from scratch with Blitz3D (not a wise choice, but the same language that MMORPGce was made with). Very sadly around this time, the creator of MMORPGce, Amunra, died in a car accident. He was a great guy, and I wonder if his continued work on the project could have set a more positive direction.

The real crap started when they opened up pre-orders and said the engine should go gold within 6 months. I was one of the people who bought it on day 1 of pre-orders, probably around late 2003. Six months came and went. Then a year came and went. Then two years. Three years. Then they finally "went gold" with a release that was an absolute buggy mess. It was pretty much unusable. It was an alpha at best, not a gold release. Over the next two years they started in on a bug fixing cycle. But before they had a usable product, they decided to create a new product called "Realm Crafter Pro" which would see both the client and server re-written in C++ (what it should have been in the first place since they threw-out the entire MMORPGce source). So that was another 2 years to create RC Pro, which then released as an absolute buggy mess. They then started on another big bug-squishing cycle.

So at that point I tapped-out. It was probably around 6 years since I had spent my money to pre-order a product that I was supposed to have in 6 months. I would have easily given them a year, or even 18 months to have something usable. We all know how software development goes. But the majority of a decade? No, not at all. There was a vocal segment of the community who didn't even want development to change gears to RC Pro, because we knew how long it would be to get something usable and it was like starting the clock all over again. Of course a Blitz3D engine wouldn't have been AAA quality, but the C++ engine wasn't either. We just wanted something for our money.

They got a pretty bad name in the hobbyist developer community and I think it really hurt their bottom line. Several things were tried to make RC work a while after I and many others had left, such as selling it on the DarkBASIC Pro website, but nothing seemed to work. I do know that by about 2010 or 2011, RC Standard (the original Blitz3D engine) was usable and one or two games were actually made with it by the same team, such as Ancients of Fasaria, even though I believe the team had to do a ton of custom work to it. I have no idea if RC Pro was ever stable and usable. Pretty much all of the original RC community had either given up game development or had moved on to much more tangible goals elsewhere in game development (such as myself).

So I am interested in what they are doing over there, but really just for curiosity. I would never hand over another dollar to them unless it was a well-confirmed, completely-finished and usable product. And I really have no interest in 3D MMORPG development anyway. The fiasco with RC and the reality of how difficult it is to compete in that sector turned me off from it.

[hallsofvallhalla]

yep basically sums it up with leaving a million bad experiences out of it I knew the creator and still have his wife on messenger that I use check up on here and there. Solstar did not do a very good job with that whole situation but I am not touching that with a 10,000ft pole.

So much bad I just do not see anything good coming from it. I would change the company name completely.

[Sim]

WoW, interesting stories.

[Jackolantern]

Yes, as Halls alluded to, there were dozens of bad experiences just with the mods/devs on the forum. After a year or two, they would start to snap at people who even alluded to wondering where the release was.

Everything pretty much stems from them taking pre-orders far too soon. I think they needed the money to pay for the actual development, which is just not the way it should be done. Even if Kickstarter had been around back then and they went that route, I think backers would have been getting pretty angry by that time.

[Verahta]

Sounds like an amateur operation to say the least.