MMO Architecture: Source of truth, Dataflows, I/O bottlenecks and how to solve

Post by gabereiser » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 6:30 AM UTC

Strom wrote: post #60

gabereiser wrote: post #55

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.…

> 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. 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 mechani…

Post by imtringued » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

gabereiser wrote: post #61

Strom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 mechani…

While I commend his efforts, it’s not even remotely MMO. A few thousand can be handled by one server. One beefy server, but one server nonetheless. I’m talking about 10,000+ players. Where you need clusters of servers and synchronization techniques. There have been some small multiplayer games that have tried to pass as mmo’s but without the player base in the 10k+ range, you never encounter certain classes of engine…

Post by reactordev » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 12:54 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #63

gabereiser wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I commend his efforts, it’s not even remotely MMO. A few thousand can be handled by one server. One beefy server, but one server nonetheless. I’m talking about 10,000+ players. Where you need clusters of servers and synchronization techniques. There have been some small multiplayer games that have tried to pass as mmo’s but without the player base in the 10k+ range, you never encounter certain classes of engine…

Going by your logic. Nothing is an MMO. Minecraft is a significantly more demanding game than some cooldoen based ability activator where you can only hit things you click on or hit with an area attack and yet it is possible to have thousands of players on one big server. Your "synchronization techniques" pale in the face of destructible terrain.

Post by itsthecourier » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 2:32 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #53

quadral wrote: post #8

You missed the opportunity to talk about WoW private servers like Trinitycore. Trinitycore emulator can handle 10k+ players on a single server.

I don't understand how they are able to replicate all the interaction rules. There's a bunch of things going on in WoW, and unless you did a heck of a lot of experiments how would you uncover the rules governing all the interactions between different things? For instance you can bubble hearth on classic but not in hardcore. How is an external server developer going to know that? Also how do they place all the NPCs an…

Post by jfim » Sat, Sep 30, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

doctorpangloss wrote: post #46

justinlloyd wrote: post #29

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,"…