[DGD] DGD/MP 1.0

[Alistair Milne]

Matt Holmes wrote:

> 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"? 


The scale doesn't matter, if there's a point where your virtual world 
game has too many players for the available content, then you haven't 
done enough to address the problem of too many players.  What I would be 
curious to know is if the limitation imposed by Blizzard is due to game 
design issues or server limitations.  If it's simply because of server 
limitations, then Dworkin's argument stands.

> 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.


Two points here. 
1. Text processing is one of the slowest things you can do with a 
computer.  Have you profiled a couple of hundred thousand sscanfs 
recently?  As a professional game programmer I can assure you that we 
try our hardest to eliminate it wherever possible.
2. What 3d calculations are you talking about?  The server doesn't 
display anything.

> <some MMO developer fanboyism leading to...> 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.


Anyone can write that stuff, what's much harder is solving the in-game 
MP problems like Dragon's Dinner, and I can almost guarantee that WoW 
and most other MMOs don't solve this at all, so they will always hit a 
scale limit sooner or later.  How can I be so sure?  Because your 
wonderful super-programmers with their golden-auras have got producers 
in charge of them, producers who need to weigh up the cost-benefit 
between a) going pervasively MP with just one game instance with 
hundreds of thousands of players on it and solving all the concurrency 
nightmare issues that will crop up, or b) sticking to the tried and true 
shards model at a fraction of the time & money development cost.

> But to compare it to a multi-million dollar software development 
> effort like the WoW server core is like comparing apples to oranges. 


http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html



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