[DGD] DGD/MP 1.0

[Matt Holmes]

Felix A. Croes wrote:

>"Christopher Allen" <ChristopherA at skotos.net> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Congratulations! I know that this has been a goal of yours for a long time.
>>
>>I don't think that many in broader game development community appreciates
>>the potential power that MP will offer.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, the current trend seems to be in a very different direction.  World
>of Warcraft has a mind-boggling number of "shards":
>
>    http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/serverstatus/
>
>and that listing comprises <only> the servers in the US.  There are
>now so many that they have trouble coming up with distinguishing names:
>Blackhand, Blackrock, Bloodhoof, Bloodscalp, Frostname, Frostwolf,
>Stormrage, Stormreaver, Stormscale...  or perhaps that's just a comment
>on the poverty of the Fantasy RPG imagination :)
>
>Additionally WoW has instanced dungeons.  There are other reasons for
>having shards and instances (duplication of content and privacy,
>respectively) but nonetheless its makers have made a determined effort
>not to tackle the "many players in the same world" problem.
>
>Regards,
>Dworkin
>__________________________________________
>http://mail.dworkin.nl/mailman/listinfo/dgd
>
>  
>
I would disagree with this entirely. Being an avid WoW player, I can 
tell you that a single WoW 'shard' (or server) can contain upwards of 
5-7K players at any given time. How is this not "many players in the 
same world"? In fact, it's far more then I think most MUDs ever had or 
will have, especially given the intense backend needed to support that 
many players. Instanced dungeons have very little to do with player 
thresholds. They are there because 5,000 people don't want to compete 
for the same content, having to camp at it for hours on end to get a 
chance to fight a single mobile. EverQuest had this problem and it more 
then frustrated the player base. Also take in to account that an MMO 
server does FAR more than process text to and from the user. The mobile 
daemons alone in an MMO must be astounding pieces of software. They are 
required to manage hundreds of thousands of mobile <-> player 
interactions per second in any given world. I believe WoW's mobile to 
player ratio is somewhere in the neighborhood of 250:1 (someone actually 
calculated this at one time). This isn't including instanced dungeons.

The reason WoW has so many servers is because its player base is 
massive. In less than a year, they have accumilated 950K+ active 
subscriptions in the US alone. This doesn't count the other 900K+ in the 
world at large. The day any MUD can throw those kind of numbers around, 
we can start talking about MUD's properly supporting tens of thousands 
of concurrent player sessions. Again, even if a MUD could support that 
many player sessions, you are still dealing with only text. Except in 
the most extreme cases, MUD's don't process and calculate millions of 3D 
calculations per game session. MMO's like WoW do.

Now, please note, I am still an avid MUD evangelist. I feel they still 
offer something that MMO's cannot offer. Much more player driven 
content, more dynamic environments, more imagination, a more tight 
community, etc. I also surely don't think WoW is perfect, by any stretch 
of the imagination. To say that Blizzard simply chose not to tackle the 
'large player base' problem, to me, is inaccurate. I am sure that DGD MP 
will be an awsome tool for building larger, more scalable MUD's in the 
future. I myself plan to use it as it becomes available for regular 
mudlib development. But I think to compare DGD MP to the server software 
that WoW, or any other large MMO for that matter, employs is unfair and 
misleading. MMO server software isn't just MP, it's highly clustered. 
The hardware employs fiber channel networks to connect multiple MP 
systems in to a single 'server cluster'. Years of man hours from 
extremely talented programmers go in to writing server software on that 
scale.

I guess what I am saying is: DGD MP is an awsome achievment. In my mind 
it's a HUGE step forward for MUD development. But to compare it to a 
multi-million dollar software development effort like the WoW server 
core is like comparing apples to oranges. They aren't meant to do the 
same thing or even remotely the same thing. Sure, you can water it down 
to "They are both online platforms", but I think you and I both know 
that is misleading. A Porsche 911 and a Ford Mustang are both cars too, 
but they barely compare beyond that level.

Matt Holmes
- Kerion