Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

worldql.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 145 posts

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#31

Post by e12e »

cdev_gl wrote: post #12
Jaxkr wrote: post #6

Hi, I made this! Was gonna wait until it was downloadable and the documentation was more complete before posting it on HN. Thanks for sharing it though. The Minecraft setup will be available and useable by anyone Wednesday of next week. More documentation and a roadmap will follow shortly after.

I rent a small Linode to run a minecraft server for my extended family. Sometimes it struggles to keep up with just a half dozen of us, and when I tried swapping from a spigot based system to a forge one so the kids could have mods it was basically unplayable. I can't imagine scaling out to thousands of users, this was some amazing work. While developing this did you come up with any best practice recommendations for…

It might be too pricy, but if you go to about 25usd/month, you can get a dedicated server with an i7 from hetzner server auction. These cheap boxes don't have ecc ram etc - but should work well for things like this.

https://www.hetzner.com/sb?country=us

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#33

Post by fire »

Jaxkr wrote: post #6

Hi, I made this! Was gonna wait until it was downloadable and the documentation was more complete before posting it on HN. Thanks for sharing it though. The Minecraft setup will be available and useable by anyone Wednesday of next week. More documentation and a roadmap will follow shortly after.

Do you have any articles or information available that explain why a spacial database is useful for and helps solve problems like this?

This is super interesting and I'm excited that someone has finally made real progress on distributed game world software

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#35

Post by bruce343434 »

Thaxll wrote: post #29
ScaleneTriangle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the developer blogs for EVE Online, you'll have endless reading about massive scale multiplayer servers. Possibly the most technically impressive massively multiplayer experience

EvE is one of the worst architecture for an MMO, there is almost nothing to do and yet they need to slow down the simulation loop when there are too many players. I mean when you gameserver is based on Python what else can you do?

They also call servers not being able to keep up and thus the gameloop slowing down "tidi" (time dilation). Like yeah, that's just what happens when a gameserver can't keep up.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#36

Post by Jaxkr »

mintplant wrote: post #27

Just to clarify, WorldQL is hosted-only software, right? No on-premise? If I tie my game to WorldQL, do I have any options if WorldQL goes under (other than re-engineering everything)? Not to diminish the impressive work on display here - I've just been wondering this since I saw your r/gamedev post.

It’ll be self-hostable too. I need to be clear about that on the homepage. Thanks for your question.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#37

Post by 8note »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #28
Fiahil wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a specific reason why Minecraft hasn’t been “adapted” from the original game to a robust design that could scale to larger worlds and player populations before your project ?

Pretty much no video game engine scales with cores. There are too many dependent systems. There's no game engine that I'm aware of that effectively uses more than a couple of cores for gameplay simulation. Distributed physics is a well understood problem with no "solution". Just different trade-offs. This solution is cool, but it's not novel or anything. Minecraft is particularly challenging because the entire world…

Couldn't Minecraft chunks run fairly independently, with some message passing when something needs to move between chunks?

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#39

Post by kevingadd »

8note wrote: post #37
forrestthewoods wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much no video game engine scales with cores. There are too many dependent systems. There's no game engine that I'm aware of that effectively uses more than a couple of cores for gameplay simulation. Distributed physics is a well understood problem with no "solution". Just different trade-offs. This solution is cool, but it's not novel or anything. Minecraft is particularly challenging because the entire world…

Couldn't Minecraft chunks run fairly independently, with some message passing when something needs to move between chunks?

Yes*, but players build complex machinery fairly often that can span chunk boundaries, so that requires synchronous coordination between the chunks for those machines to work right.

Re: How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players

#40

Post by tdeck »

I'm always amazed by how so much Minecraft innovation is driven entirely by hobbyists. For years Minecraft was unplayable on many machines without the Optifine plugin. Even with a huge corporation behind it, Microsoft didn't build the capacity for large-scale servers, and the very large paid servers seem to use region based sharding with portals. This project is truly exciting.
Post reply on HN