51–60 of 76 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume that is a tongue-in-cheek description for Grand Theft Auto (whichever one they made online). That game series has had various moral discussions / controversy surrounding it since before the first game came out like 25 years ago.
Not Carmageddon?
Carmageddon is not an MMO. :-)
You missed the opportunity to talk about WoW private servers like Trinitycore. Trinitycore emulator can handle 10k+ players on a single server.
Also how do they place all the NPCs and hook up the quests and lot tables? Do they scrape wowhead?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume that is a tongue-in-cheek description for Grand Theft Auto (whichever one they made online). That game series has had various moral discussions / controversy surrounding it since before the first game came out like 25 years ago.
I assume he got that and he was referring to the jankiness of GTA Online. For example, it took 5+ minutes to load for years, until some random guy fixed it for them [1]. Though I suppose that had little to do with the overall architecture. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31681515
Rewind 15-20 years ago and all the folks who wanted to make a game, their first game, and they want to build an mmo. None of them succeeded. Not 1. The only ones since were from people who knew the ask. Or had a crowdfunded ponzi scheme.
The "cache, lots of cache" statement is the most true of any MMO architecture we can build. I did some optimization work earlier this year on a project where the single back-end server is now handling 2 billion requests per minute and had around 3TB of RAM for cache (I think the final production system was aiming for 12TB of RAM). There's concerns around race conditions as you pointed out, message passing from client…
Let's say that among developers there was a history of how-to-implement gameplay traditions (like how to implement third person player movement, "gameplay ability systems", etc.) in programming languages besides C++. Like C# & Java, the memory managed friendly ones with good tooling. And let's say you're forbidden from reinventing C++ inside C# or Java, like Unity's Burst does (so called HPC#). But you can "do ECS,"…
You’ll frequently find Java, C#, Go, and Python as backend rpc/tcp game servers.
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the last expansion that was any good?
Depending on who you ask. Tangent: Imho, the only reason it is good is because it's not as grindy and / or the community just didn't put as much emphasis on min-maxing things. GearScore was a thing of course, but theory crafting wasn't anywhere close to what we have now.
Played through pandaland, skipped warlords, came back for some of legion and then finally broke the habit.
When I worked on a MMO with a five figure concurrent player count we got by fine with a single database server.
The much bigger I/O bottleneck were with the load balancers.
Oh I feel for the author. I’ve made games. I’ve made distributed web platforms. I have profound respect for modern mmo architectures because of one, nasty, “I wish this wasn’t a thing” class of data. State. Who, where, what animation, what modeled entity, is in my party, on my screen, under my axe. Synchronized playback of my swing to my party members so we all yell in excitement at the same time when the boss falls.…
I guess it depends on how you define success, but I would posit FOnline [1][2] as a success story. FOnline is a fan made MMO of Fallout by a single guy, using the assets of the original Fallout 1 & 2 single-player games. Having these assets and also general game mechanics already finished definitely played a huge role in getting it to a playable state in reasonable time. Still, FOnline is a from scratch code base not a mod of the originals. Also it changed plenty of mechanics too, most notably being real-time while the original games were turn-based.
It's still being pushed forward even today after 20 years of development by this one guy but it was playable in late 2000s already. Peak concurrent players that I remember seeing was a few thousand. Definitely not AAA level, but way past simple multiplayer. Would have gone higher due to the hype at the time, but the server started to really struggle at that point. After a few years of being a closed source free game it got converted into a SDK and spawned a dozen new fan games using that engine.
Perhaps even more importantly, it was extremely fun in the early days. PvP gained you experience and all the other player's loot. Later on the PvP was limited due to PvE lobbyists, but perhaps it made the game more fun for PvE lovers.
Here's a random screenshot from my personal archive that shows a bunch of players on the screen at once. [3]
In any case, I view it as a great example of a single person MMO success.
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