[DGD] DGD/MP 1.0

[Par Winzell]

Matt,

> The scale does matter. I love how all of you assumed I don't know 
> anything about large multi-tiered servers. Hint, I write multi-million 
> dollar credit card process software for a living. My software runs on 
> large clusters that process millions of credit card transactions per 
> second. The session concurrency involved is insane, as credit card 
> processing is not a one step process. I would dare say our software has 
> to be significantly more robust and able to handle faults than any game 
> server. We aren't dealing with someones entertainment, we are dealing 
> with millions of dollars changing hands every hour.

I think you've been taking offense where none was meant. If anybody has 
been aggressive, I think it's you. Dworkin meant no offense to WoW in 
his initial posting -- in fact he went out of his way to mention that 
there are content- and game-design reasons to go for shards -- and you 
seemed to feel that WoW had been slighted where it had not.

At this point, most of the people on this list are senior professionals 
in some IT industry or other. We can all let go of the urge or need to 
brag about how many million customers our software serves. Nobody here 
is arguing that WoW is not technologically competent, but it is also 
fairly obvious that Blizzard has been extremely pragmatic in their 
design decisions.

The shards work very well for WoW because of the kind of game it is. All 
their design decisions harmonize well. That doesn't mean it's the only 
way to build a MMO, nor does it mean there isn't significant wonder and 
awe to be derived from a truly massive world -- with a hundred thousand 
simultaneous players rather than seven thousand. I don't understand why 
you go out of your way to defend WoW when they are not being attacked.

At the end of the day, I can't help but feel that you categorize DGD/MP 
as a cute text game engine with pretentions, incomparable to 
professional corporate-strength middle-ware. This is the part where you 
lose me completely, because not only are you simply wrong, but you are 
the face of evil! :)  I encounter this mistaken assumption about the 
world every day at work and it's the source of much anguish. There are 
plenty of software projects in the world that are every bit as competent 
as any multi-million-dollar corporate product. Sleepy Cat's BerkeleyDB 
software is a good example -- we have to fight every time we want to use 
it rather than yet another bloated Oracle DB -- and DGD is another.

Zell