[MUD-Dev] MMORPG/MMOG Server design

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Thomas Tomiczek [mailto:t.tomiczek at thona-consulting.com] 

> Work with frontend proxies - users log in into a "communication
> proxy" that handles them then (even when they change servers in
> the backend).  This can hold a lot of logic, validating user input
> etc., handles encryption of traffic and all the other stuff.
 
> On the backend I would go for muktiple tiers - a database
> persistence tier, and logic servers in front of them, which are
> handling "action zones" - these CAN be "geographical zones", but
> also "functional zones", like a chat server, maybe an economy
> server etc.
 
> The important think is that the comm. Proxy in front will create
> ONE login point for the user. The user basically logs in on a
> login server and gets assigned a proxy which is valid for him
> until he logs off.

Whilst this is attractive in its simplicity, it adds an extra hop
which doesn't strike me as ideal. Furthermore if the login server
goes down, you lose all active connections too. EQ for instance has
a login server, but only talks to it for initial auth, thus you
don't have such a major single point of failure.

Granted moving between servers if you are trying to have transparent
zoning becomes harder under these circumstances as you end up having
a 3 way hand shake between 'server being left', 'destination server'
& 'client'.

In the end, I've just not worried about any of it for the time being
in my game. Authentication can be worried about when theres actually
a game :)

Dan

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