Scott Hanselman talks with Next Games‘ CTO, Kalle Hiitola, about the server architecture of their newest game, The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land. This is a great opportunity for those of us interested in game server development to learn from others’ real-world experience.
Continue reading [Podcast] Hanselminutes: Scaling The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land
How do we create a game server that permits unlimited freedom of movement and game play on an expansive map with no apparent boundaries?
We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to interact with each other in a single huge virtual world. Continue reading Pattern: Seamless World Game Server
How do we distribute core game play load across multiple processes in a way that supports flexible scaling and efficient allocation of computing resources?
We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a distributed architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to interact with each other in a shared virtual world. Continue reading Pattern: Responsibility-Oriented Game Server
Software architecture is about the big picture of development. It’s also about identifying and managing engineering risk. The development team is at the nexus of these two concepts. The team is your greatest asset, and the greatest contributor to the success of any software architecture. The big picture revolves around the development team and its ability to create the software for your game.
The team’s development environment is a cornerstone of its ability to deliver. A team with inadequate tools or support to do the work required is at least inefficient, if not ineffective. A team with an inferior development environment is a likely source of engineering risk. Continue reading Invest in your Development Environment
How do we distribute the load of running core game play functionality across multiple processes to support thousands of concurrent players?
We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to interact with each other in a shared virtual world. Continue reading Pattern: Map-Centric Game Server
How do we ensure a balanced distribution of client connections across a set of connection servers in a distributed game server architecture?
We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to connect simultaneously to the same virtual world. Continue reading Pattern: Client Side Load Balancing
How do we support the greatest number of concurrent client connections to our multiplayer game server?
We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to connect simultaneously to the same virtual world. Continue reading Pattern: Distributed Network Connections
What is the game server’s deployment architecture?
We are developing the server for a multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture.
The game design seeks to create engaging game play within fixed technical and resource constraints. It trades game play features against number of concurrent players, player immersion, and size or complexity of the game world to simplify implementation, deployment, and maintenance. Continue reading Pattern: Monolithic Architecture
This page presents a collection of multiplayer game server architecture patterns that describe solutions to common problems in multiplayer game server development. Over time, I hope to build a library of patterns based on real-world experience, research and experimentation by game server developers.
Problem How do we ensure a balanced distribution of client connections across a set of connection servers in a distributed game server architecture? Context We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to connect simultaneously … Continue reading Pattern: Client Side Load Balancing
Problem How do we distribute the load of running core game play functionality across multiple processes to support thousands of concurrent players? Context We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to interact with each other in a … Continue reading Pattern: Map-Centric Game Server
Problem How do we distribute core game play load across multiple processes in a way that supports flexible scaling and efficient allocation of computing resources? Context We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a distributed architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to interact … Continue reading Pattern: Responsibility-Oriented Game Server
Problem How do we create a game server that permits unlimited freedom of movement and game play on an expansive map with no apparent boundaries? Context We are developing the server for a massively multiplayer online game with a client-server architecture. The game design seeks to create an immersive play experience by enabling thousands of players to interact with … Continue reading Pattern: Seamless World Game Server
A description of the Monolithic Architecture pattern as it applies to multiplayer game server architecture.
Use the Distributed Network Connections pattern to maximize the number of connected clients with minimal impact on game server performance.
If you have feedback, corrections, or questions about any of the patterns you see at Engines of Delight, please leave a comment on this page, or any of the specific pattern posts.
In an earlier post I described some multiplayer game types and identified several clues about the server architecture required to build each type. Now I want to take a closer look at some of those clues to see how they can help us know what to build. Continue reading Know what to Build: Assessing Impacts