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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."
I know there are 10 million WoW subscribers, showing online RPGs can be a massive cash cow. But I really don't care. There are still millions of other gamers out there with zero interest in grinding for gear and guild drama and I'm sure this article has other applications for gaming than simply better WoW servers.
Anyone have any ideas? The article is extremely technical in nature but it seems to be suggesting ways to take the load off the client, possibly lowering system requirements for people to take part in dynamic virtual worlds. Oh wait, doesn't Second Life already do that?
I don't see a lot new here, it still seems to operate on the assumption that a trade-off will always have to be made between whiz-bang graphics and greater interactivity between players. But hey, I'm no software engineer.
And can we please see some articles in here that aren't somehow connected to WoW?