[MUD-Dev] Locations vs Social Spaces (was: I Want to Forge Sw ords)

[Adam Martin]

----- Original Message -----
From: <Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 11:37 AM
Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Locations vs Social Spaces (was: I Want to Forge Sw
ords)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at verant.com]
> Sent: 15 May 2001 00:02
> To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu'
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Locations vs Social Spaces (was: I Want to Forge
> Sw ords)

>> The slowdowns on the server side caused by large congregations are
>> very soon to be a thing of the past (eg, no cause for teleport
>> storms and the like) as server architectures move away from
>> single-server models pasted together to make multiserver
>> models. More difficult are concerns like the bandwidth involved in
>> sending you the updates for that many people and having it still
>> look good. What'll really be harder is client-side scalability for
>> the display of all those people. ;)

> I can just see it now, the latest 3rd generation game comes out,
> lots of people congregate, and the client is forced to render
> everyone as a beige cube...

> I will be intrigued to see how well these dynamic systems work as
> they still seem very hard to write from my perspective. If you end
> up having such a congregation that they have to cross a server
> boundry, I'd imagine you'd have a serious problem however good your
> architecture is (i.e. too many people in an area for one server to
> handle). It would be interesting to know how people plan to
> architect this, but I imagine its a little too close to state of the
> art for people to talk freely about.

(Having just been reading an article, and being freshly disappointed
by quite how good AC is technically ):

AC's servers are distributed load-balancing by default - the design
lead implied in a recent Gamasutra article that they could handle
everyone standing together, because the world would get rebalanced so
that the one small area got split between all the servers
dynamically. With each server stress-tested to guarantee a quoted
lower limit of 3,000 simultaneous players on that server alone, I
don't think they're expecting problems any time soon.

Not that load-balancing is itself particularly innovative, but I
hadn't realised that anyone was already using it aggressively among
the major MMORPGs at the moment.

Adam M

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