http://www.vbgore.com/Main_Page

OpenSMUS is a powerful server-side solution for deploying Director-based multiuser games: http://opensmus.sourceforge.net/

I would caution anyone considering RPGMaster to realize that the Alpha based version of this engine is not even close to being ready for production use. Wait until Release Candidate 1 at the earliest before planning your big online game project with RPGMaster. You need a stable, easy to use, and decently mature engine if you want to make a quality indie game, and you’re never going to find that in an engine that’s in it’s Alpha or early Beta phases. The only reason to buy now would be for the $100 discount, the lifetime of free plugins, to learn about the product early and/or to help fund the final legs of our development cycle.

@Dave: I’ve actually been doing javascript stuff for ages and have extensive knowledge on that. Yeh, debugging is a beast but not something that’s impossible to do.

Different browsers are a real mess (I know), but not necessarily anything that couldn’t be solved. jQuery is definitely the one I’d use.

Another alternative what I was thinking would be to simply use something like BlitzMax and do http calls for the server every now and then. Not sure what kind of issues that could cause, and it sounds bit dangerous path :)

The engine is called RPGMaster:
http://www.skybox3d.com/store/products/rpgmaster/

Like I said, it’s still early in the development, and it won’t solve your MMORPG engine needs until early 2011 when the MMORPG plugin will be nearing gold status. We’ve got the Social Plugin in the works which will provide some multiplayer experiences this June (player vs player battles, giving away items, etc) but is still not a true MMORPG.

Also count additional time for debugging. Just because your code is W3C compliant it doesn’t mean it will go through every browsers without problems. If you concentrate on getting it to work on Firefox at first than Safari, Opera and Chrome shouldn’t be too much problems. IE on the other hand … Safari also has some weird issues involving frames and redirection but it usually is less trouble than IE.

Of course keeping an eye on all browsers as you go is better but can take you off course if you’re not careful how your time is spent.

As for Javascript library I’d recommend jQuery simply because the community is quite active and if you don’t want to waste time reinventing the wheel on each small bit of code you need than it might save you a couple of minutes. I used Prototype for Golemizer and did struggle a couple of times to find the piece of code I needed so I had to do it myself while the same was already available for jQuery. Great to experiment and learn but not that great to get things done in a timely manner.

But if you like to go Ajax way, there is tons of solutions to deal with that kind of need, would be helpful to know what kind of interactions you want. It can go from memcache based solutions (tried that), to cloud DB solutions (great for scaling but far more complicated to deal with).

Don’t hesitate to hit me up, that is kind of my area of expertise, would be a pleasure to help out (considering how much i learn on your blog)

I plan to use SFML in the future:

http://www.sfml-dev.org/features.php