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
I was researching stateful distributed systems for an article today and found a post on High Scalability that was a perfect fit. It’s an unofficial transcript of a StrangeLoop 2015 talk by Caitie McCaffrey, Tech Lead for Observability at Twitter. I read the transcript first, then felt compelled to watch the presentation. Continue reading [Presentation] Building Scalable Stateful Services
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
I discovered this post today while doing some research for another post I’m writing. It’s about the server architecture of the sci-fi MMO sandbox game, Face of Mankind: Fall of the Dominion, published by Nexeon Technologies.
The post is a couple of years old, but I think the topics are still important. Sadly, the game was recently shut down. However, I think the article is still worth reading. It’s a nice summary of some high-level MMO server architecture concepts. It’s also a pretty good survey of some possible deployment architectures used by MMO projects.
This is definitely relevant to our topic here at Engines of Delight, so I thought I’d highlight it as a resource. Note that the post describes the Distributed Network Connections pattern in its mention of the Proxy Server. It also discusses some patterns that I will write about in the future. When I post those, I’ll update these notes with relevant links.
Anyway, it’s a good read, so enjoy. Cheers to Marko Dieckmann of the Face of Mankind dev team for writing it!
Source: A Journey Into MMO Server Architecture – MMORPG.com Blogs
The Know what to Build articles discuss how to identify our multiplayer game’s server architecture early in the project. This reveals technical risks and key engineering questions before we’ve invested much development time.
In a recent post I described how to assess the impacts of our game’s key design features on the server architecture. In this post I’ll describe a way to develop a high level estimate of the amount of work our server will have to do, to help us know what to build.
Developing the architecture for our game server requires making trade-offs. Knowing how to do this requires a general understanding of the operations the server will perform, and the amount of work required.
We’ll use the server loop as a conceptual model for this. The server loop is a variant of the classic game loop pattern, applied to server-side functionality. Because this is just a model, we’ll ignore implementation details such as fixed or variable step sizes. Also, for now we’ll assume our server is single-threaded and runs on a single core machine. Continue reading Know what to Build: The Server Loop
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
Micro services is an emerging trend in software architecture that focuses on small, lightweight applications as a means to avoid large, unmaintainable, monolithic systems. Continue reading [Podcast] SE Radio: Stefan Tilkov on Architecture and Micro Services
![[Discussion] A Journey Into MMO Server Architecture](https://gameserverarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/fom_screenshot_029.jpg){kind=link}