IBM MMOG Roundtable Rundown

Plaguelands has up a rundown on the recent IBM MMOG Roundtable, with speakers such as Steven Reid, Raph Koster, and Geoff Heath putting in their two cents on the growing massive industry. Krones is not shy about voicing his opinions as regards the speakers and their effectiveness. From the article: "Continuing on, despite my subjective disagreement, Steven Reid; Directory of Community Relations NCsoft Europe stepped in after Heath and he pretty much spoke general edification about mmo communities. His presentation was average, not up to the quality of articles seen from community specialist Jessica Mulligan, but I believe he is well qualified in doing what he does and has an excellent head on his shoulders. The defining part of his presentation on community building is that community leaders should be local and native from that community. This is crucial for many reasons... including the most important, cultural differences." Also includes links to streaming media of the event.

Comments

Re:Pathfinding

[RaphKoster]

The MMO servers I have seen run anywhere from 100ms to 250ms frame times. They all amortize CPU load across multiple frames, of course, to keep player responsiveness as high as possible. So as load increases, AI is usually the first thing to get deprioritized. 250ms seems to be the slowest you really want to run an MMO server at.

All the optimizations you cited are pretty standard. In addition, there's a lot of preset paths, use of client-side steering (in other words, only making it LOOK like the creature avoided the bush), and more.