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Scripts and Scaling In Online Games
CowboyRobot writes "Jim Waldo of Sun Microsystems has written an article titled Scaling In Games & Virtual Worlds, saying that they 'should be perfect vehicles to show the performance gains possible with multicore chips and groups of cooperating servers. Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.' A group of researchers at Cornell wrote a related piece about improving game development and performance through better scripting."
Unexpectedly, I had a source tag error in processing this article about better scripting.
Seems to scale OK as long as everyone stays within the same light-cone.
You can tell its scripting is feature complete because the nerds have gone out and written virtual computers that run on top of the game.
You mean the screen /shouldn't/ freeze in UT3 when connecting to a server, not allowing you to click on the 'cancel' button? (on my dual-core CPU, multitasking OS)
glScaled(GLdouble x, GLdouble y, GLdouble z)
What's so notable about that?
other gamers out there with zero interest in grinding for gear
That's what scripting is for.
"You will be married within a year." What, is Slashdot trying to cheer up the hopelessly romantic, loser geeks that make up the core of the site's user base?
The article is extremely technical in nature
Not really. It just discusses the general nature of the problem, not what they did about it. For that, there's the DarkStar documentation.
This is a new data storage back end, like the ones from Google and Amazon. This one is specialized for game usage. It's really a transaction engine which links to a transaction-oriented object store. Entire transactions are atomic; either all the objects being changed commit, or none of them do. In a real system, the application transactions (in Java) run on a farm of machines, while the data objects reside on a second farm of machines. Clients talk to the application farm; the application farm talks to the data farm.
It's not really game-oriented at all. It's more general than that. It would be a reasonable back end for a big social-networking site, or a big auction site. The general assumption is that transactions and data objects are small; big stuff like canned web pages, images, and such goes elsewhere.
Incidentally, it may not all be open source. The current single node version is open source. But that's just a toy. There's no point in using the DarkStar architecture unless you need to scale up. Sun is vague about what the deal for the scalable architecture will be.
Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.
Except that's really not that hard of a problem to solve. It just takes good basic software engineering to divide this problem up. You create zones, and then a little glue to make sure things happen smoothly at the edges.
The hard problem is when you have huge data sets like that, and *everything* interacts with each other, but you still need to divide the problem into discrete pieces to process in parallel.
This is a technical article concerning MMOGs, using an anecdote from the most popular MMOG. What's wrong with that?
Don't blank out as soon as you see those three letters. Doesn't help you in the slightest.
Not only did it NOT suggest this, but it was not technical. You randomly ranted about something unrelated to the topic, then implied there must be a more applicable virtual world for a topic on scaling strategies, than the all-time most popular virtual world. You must be retarded. A retard who managed +1 karma for trolling. *facepalm*
P.S.
If you want to hear from people who actually program for various commercial games, engines, and MMOs, see f13.net's forums.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
And can we please see some articles in here that aren't somehow connected to WoW?
I don't know what Slashdot YOU have been reading, but on mine, there's been tons of articles discussing all kinds of things not related to WoW (or any games for that matter).
And can we please see some articles in here that aren't somehow connected to WoW?
Yes you can see them, but please do not RTFA. Remember, this is /.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
There is no mention in the article about scripts; so why is it in the title?
The language in these articles is horrendous. You can tell, without it ever being stated outright, that a programmer wrote them!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
... if there's some important aspect of logic or computability which the Universe lacks, you couldn't conceive it existing, and thus you would mistakenly consider the Universe feature complete.
The proof is the pudding?
She made the willows dance
On the other hand, this would take more coding power than just a handful of developers throwing code out there so the confused players can run into bugs and exploits.
Plus it would be too expensive for an MMO budget. And if it was too hard, who would wanna do it anyway? It's much easier to just throw out the basic 'click this once, wait until it dies from repetitive whacking, click the next one' script where you kill to get everything, then to make it more complex.
The cake is a lie?
This website apparently doesn't scale very well.
Anyone have a mirror?
How you managed "+1 Informative" is beyond me. Did you mod yourself up with one of your other identities?
I admitted in my post that I don't understand the topic, then made a conjecture based on what it seemed to be saying to me. I also made a value judgment that I am sick to death of articles about WoW like it's the only gaming news ever worth reporting on Slashdot. I then invited criticism/correction.
You can call me retarded, say my post was unrelated to the topic, even though it was absolutely related to the topic, I don't care. It just shows that you have a superiority complex, good for you, hope that serves you well in the real world. Enjoy eating your teeth when someone finally gets sick of your shit. Or maybe you're a passive-aggressive, who gets back at others by peeing in the water cooler. Whatever, fill your boots.
And P.S. if you want to act like a know-it-all post some links. Otherwise you're a troll.
Apparently, scripting is also for posting funny comments to Slashdot after you're dead.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Mod parent down, -1 Undead.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
ROLAND LIVES!!!!!!
Gotta undo-modding. I hate when fat fingers. =P
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell