I am approaching college and, being the obsessive-impulsive person that I am, I had an interesting idea. What if I took my little multiplayer engine and turned it into a P2P, PVP/instanced mmorpg?

That is, I would expand the game structure to keep a persistent record of your vehicle's stats and weapons; enable more than two people on a server, and add a persistent gameworld. To circumvent the possible slowdowns due to AIs, I would limit combat to two forms:

* PVP (player versus player) would be available at any time.

* PVE (player versus enemy, or player versus AI) would only be available in special, one-player "instanced" areas. That would mean the program wouldn't have to keep track of every AI enemy's position etc.; but instead, people could go off to gain score (money) alone after being killed in PVP.

I think this would solve some of the main problems with GM mmorpgs, including networking. If it's a peer-to-peer mmo - that is, every client gets player data from a persistent database located on all clients, and no computer is acting as a server - this could work.

Questions? Comments? Want to help?

If I get enough support for this, you may see it sometime early next year. I should then have about five years to develop it - from then until I graduate and get a real job.