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

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu 
> [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Adam Martin
> 
 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com>
> To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 11:37 AM
 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at verant.com]
>> Sent: 15 May 2001 00:02
 
>>> 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...

Absolutely. :) Nice thing is that this scales up as people improve
their hardware or connection.

> 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.

AC's solution is geographically-based, and still proves inadequate to
handle large flash crowds. They use teleport storms just like UO
does. Basically, whereas EQ has zones of fixed size that can never
change, na dUO had server boundaires on a semaless map that could be
moved with a simple data change, AC moves the "lines int he sand"
based on population of given areas.

The next generation of distributed server tech won't be geographically
bound, I suspect.

-Raph
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