New Technologies Attack the One-World Problem

Hugh Pickens writes "An MIT Technology Review article has new details on the challenges of a 'one world design' in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Most games shard their servers, putting up artificial barriers between friends and family members. Technologies are now being developed to keep lots of players within a single world, some of them based off of the unique PvP-heavy title EVE Online. The best part - the technologies don't just apply to gaming. 'NASDAQ, for example, can be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of 'players' performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, says George Dolbier, technical lead for games and interactive entertainment at IBM, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."'"

Comments

Re:One world MMO?

[everphilski]

First, can a server even handle 2 million simultaneous logins?

Distributed computing. You have your world spread across multiple servers, with certain zones on certain servers. It is done this way already in modern MMO's.

Second, the game world would have to be enormous in order to give people enough room to move around and do their own thing. Just imagine hunting a single boss, 300 people at the same time trying to kill one monster... it'd make me quit.

(1) bigger world with more targets
(2) instancing - allow multiple groups of people to have-at the same target at the same time. Everquest had this since 2003, and WoW does this too on certain targets.

And updating every user's stats? Unless we all have 1000mbit internet connections, I don't think we even have enough bandwidth.

And the travel time in-game for that kind of world? You better give everyone instant teleport to any destination or nobody's going to want to move around...

Or spread it out logically. Theres no reason a max level character should travel to a noobie zone unless (1) it is for a quest or (2) they are trying to twink out a new friend. So lay out the world such that they progress from easy to hard. Travel won't be difficult if you follow the natural progression. More zones - less people - less updating.

Re:Gamers Changing the world...

[happy_place]

Don't get me wrong, I agree... but it's cute (imo) how there's a need to explain how gaming technology is benefitting the blind people in Africa. :) It's like deep inside every gamer, there's this need to apologize for having fun with technology, rather than solving all the world's problems. :) Game on! --Ray