[MUD-Dev] [NEWS] Warhammer Online Cancelled -- Why?

[Jim Purbrick]

Adam Martin wrote:

> I kind of got worried when Jim posted here asking for help solving
> really basic scalability problems that suggested they'd wasted
> many months trying to build a large scale server with little or no
> idea what they were doing:

>   Currently we've got a send and receive thread per-connection and
>   need to support ~2500 connections per box, so we're going to end
>   up with ~5000 threads.

>   http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2003Q3/msg00466.php

FWIW this is no longer a problem.

> Arriving in the middle of a project at a games company as a single
> individual to try and fix a from-scratch mmog engine sounds to me
> like a pretty impossible mountain to climb :(.

I don't recommend it ;-)

OTOH the mountain was climbed and was no longer a consideration when
the plug was pulled.

> Another notch on the "I told you so" for the middleware companies?
> (tongue in cheek!). Although we did tell them so. And, as I said,
> I believe we weren't the only ones to do so.

I'm not convinced. One lesson that I've learned from this is that
while there are difficult and interesting technical issues to solve
developing MMOs, the biggest problems are managerial. Dealing with
the vast amounts of content that are produced and need to be
produced dwarf any tricky technical problem that need to be
solved. It's something that Raph was telling me at Siggraph a couple
of years ago when I was trying to sell him middleware and he didn't
want to hear about anything other than better ways to create and
manage content. A lot of the middleware solutions are very nice
technical solutions, but they still leave you with all the content
management problems to solve. Even if you bring someone in half way
through the project to build the server tech from scratch they'll be
done before you've solved the content creation problems.

> But, as David said, it could easily have been a revenues issue
> rather than costs.

Or the result of fickle investor whim.
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