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Intel Salivates Over Virtual World Processing Demands
CNet has up an article looking at the lucrative virtual world market for processor companies. An Intel developer forum held in San Francisco this week highlighted the opportunities for selling hardware to both consumers and vendors in the VW marketplace. "[Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner] showed statistics that indicated a PC's processor bumps up to 20 percent utilization while browsing the Web, while its graphics processor doesn't even break above 1 percent. But running Second Life--even with today's coarse graphics--pushes those to 70 percent for the main processor and 35 to 70 percent for the graphics processor, he said. The Google Maps Web site and Google Earth software pose intermediate demands. Running a virtual worlds server is vastly more computationally challenging, though, when compared with 2D Web sites and even massively multiplayer online games such as Eve Online. An Eve Online server can handle 34,420 users at a time, but Second Life maxes a server out with just 160 users."
I find it hard to believe that SL doesn't allow more than 160 concurrent users to log in simultaneously. 160 users per CPU or per chassis blade, maybe, but 160 total all at once or even 160 per shard?
EVE does not have 34,000 people on one server. One shard which people call a "server", but the Tranquility cluster is some SERIOUS hardware. I think they're up to something like 160-200 dual or quad-core blades, at least.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Nah, the article is just plain wrong and uses differing meanings for "server".
SL - "Server" appears to mean a single CPU or box
EVE - "Server" is used to describe the entirety of the Tranquility cluster, which has at least 150-200+ dual or quad-core blades that handle the solar systems, plus some serious database servers.
EVE can achieve around 150-200 on a single machine before things start getting laggy, things get massively painful in the 500-700 range, and much above that and nodes start dropping. EVE has an architecture limitation in that processing for a given solar system cannot be spread across multiple CPUs, so if a single solar system in EVE has 200+ players, they're all on the same CPU. Meanwhile, 10 systems with 5 users each will likely share a CPU, and 50 systems with zero users probably also share.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Second Life is not sharded. It's clustered (they refer to the cluster as "The Grid"). Everyone is on the same grid (though there is a teen grid and a test grid, they aren't used much, and they are 100% independent except for authentication/transaction systems).
In Second Life, the game world is broken up into "sims"... sections of the virtual world that represent 256 x 256 in-game "meters". Each sim has its own master process, two of which run on each server within a cluster... everything that goes on within the sim stays on that server, except for "global" systems: inventory, monetary transactions, group/private IM, login authorization, assets (textures, sounds, etc). When you walk/fly/teleport from one sim to another, you are going to another server. Frequently, this is a painful process, and you can experience long delays or dropped connections if the destination server is unable to take in your session.
There are no global "game rules" per se; the base systems are movement (fly, walk, teleport, with collisions detected), lighting, spatialized sound, object placement, object and state delivery to the client (including animations, other players, textures, sounds, etc.), a primitive physics engine, and an advanced scripting system. If a combat system is in place on a given sim, it's been written by a player. (the built-in crude "combat" system really isn't used).
Because of the very high overhead of script processing, the pipe dream of player-created "mini MMOs" has never materialized. There are some imbedded games, but for performance reasons they don't scale, and because of the small size of sims their scope is very limited.
There are two types of sims: mainland and private. Mainland sims are run by Linden Labs, while private sims are leased by and run by individuals (I have two). Mainland sims have more restrictive conditions and behavioral rules; private sims are largely up to the sim owners, though there is still a minimum AUP for every location, be it mainland or private.
Second Life uses an OpenGL-based client package which has recently been open sourced. Because Second Life is connected directly to your credit card read-write (you can buy and sell in-game objects and services with "Lindens", in-game currency... and buy and sell Lindens for real cash, hence the recent crackdown on online casino operations which were de facto unregulated real-cash systems), there are significant hazards associated with a client build from any source other than what Linden labs has vetted.
One significant shackle to Second Life is the fact of player-created content: when SL releases a feature, players build around that feature's abilities AND limitations. If a bug fix changes how objects are rendered, etc., then it will break player-content that has worked around (or even incorporated) that bug. SL therefore has very limited room in which to improve things; given that their entire proposition is "it's player-created content", breaking player-created content breaks EVERYTHING. Once a feature ships, it's more or less graven in stone. Optimization becomes a nightmare.
Second Life uses blade servers running AMD processors provided by a company called Silicon Mechanics.
Comparing Second Life to Eve or WoW is apples-and-oranges. SL has much more in common with a chat room system that happens to have 3-D rendering and animations than with a modern MMO; its simply a different thing.
SL claims about 9 million accounts and 40,000+ simultaneous connects at peak usage. There is some controversy about the validity of these numbers, as most of those accounts are free/unverified, and "camping" is a widespread practice (characters logged in and idle to artificially boost traffic numbers for sim and business owners so they appear higher in in-game searches; sim and business owners often pay micropayments to campers in return for boosting their traffic ratings).
There are many other SL-style "sandbox"/microtransaction games currently in development on the premise of "great idea but Linden Labs is running it poorly enough that there is opportunity for others in the same product type". I happen to agree; the challenge is for one of these potential competitors to gain critical mass and learn from Linden Labs' mistakes.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
The way SL works (as per my second or third hand reading), is that the whole world (The Grid) is made up of a bunch of squares of virtual land (Sims). Supposedly each sim is its own server/blade/whatever. That sim is responsible for everything that happens within its virtual land space. This includes dealing with all of the players who are currently in that sim, but also all the interactions of physical objects within that sim, and probably more importantly, all of the scripted objects within that sim. When you create something in SL, you can not only model and texture it, but you can also use the SL scripting language to make objects function in all sorts of ways. You edit the script, it gets compiled, and it gets tucked into the object. Objects can have multiple scripts in them.
While in a sim, SL will share lots of information about what that particular server is dealing with. It's not unusual for some of the more crowded sims to have thousands of scripted objects living in a sim, and that's a lot of little things going on. Many of those scripts were not written by experienced programmers, so efficiency was likely not a big consideration.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I find it hard to believe that SL doesn't allow more than 160 concurrent users to log in simultaneously.
There's no "shards". The world is contiguous: you pause less than a second crossing from one sim to another and it's even possible to fly planes across multiple region boundaries at 25 meters a second (hitting a new region every 7-10 seconds depending on the direction you're flying) without losing control... you *can* still "outfly" the sims and crash but it's gotten a lot better than it has been.
Typically the SL server farm (grid) supports 20-30,000 users concurrently, and seeing over 40,000 isn't unusual.
It's a lot more servers than an Eve cluster but its also doing a lot of physics on in-world objects written and programmed by amateurs.