[MUD-Dev] Autumn books

[ceo]

Browsing the Amazon page that Daniel Harman pointed to, I came across:

  Practical Grid Computing for Massively Multiplayer Games:

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1584502924/ref=pd_sim_b_dp_1/026-0408919-9282814

I was surprised I hadn't heard of it, until I noticed the publishing
date ;).

Has anyone heard of / read / etc this book? (perhaps some people on
the list might get advance review copies)

The primary author is David Levine, who also happens to be CEO of
Butterfly, the only games company specialising in using Grids to
supply MMOG middleware solutions (AFAIAA; Grid's are quite an
esoteric specialism, and I'd be surprised if there were other games
companies using them).

Hopefully it's not a marketing exercise nor commercial evangelism;
the publisher's blurb "in depth look at all aspects of developing a
grid computing system for games, including end user platforms,
TCP/IP and UDP protocols, game servers, artificial intelligence,
scripting and programming language options, and database management
systems" sounds promising...

...but the bit "touches on business issues such as the emerging
relationships between service providers, community portals,
publishers and developers" makes me rather more suspicious, since
Butterfly are trying to promote a new business model which changes
the above relationships in interesting ways. (no comment on the
business model, I'm just afraid the book might veer off into
self-promotion).

Adam M
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