Gamertell

With the increasing popularity of MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Games) and the growing user community, the technologies behind them have to evolve in order to accommodate hordes of players living and interacting in a virtual world. As hundreds of thousands of users conduct raids and battles, powerful computer clusters have to keep track of every move and action users make. As the users keep on coming, companies have to figure out ways of keeping these worlds running smoothly.

While different companies employ different architectures to simulate these virtual environments, all of them are working to develop a solution in which all the players could really share a single virtual world. In case of the popular World of Warcraft, Blizzard uses what they call “shards,” which are copies of the same world running in different machines. Users of WOW, which now total over 9 million, are distributed amongst these shards to balance the loads on the servers and although all of the users live in the same world for practical purposes, they can’t move from one shard to another.

The developers of EVE Online, another popular MMOG, use another approach. Instead of creating multiple copies of the world, they adopted an architecture in which every solar system is represented in a different computer cluster. As players move around this virtual universe, computer resources are moved from one solar system cluster to the other depending on the amount of users in each one. This approach allows all the users to exist within a single playing field but EVE Online’s users are only a fraction of the ones playing WOW so as more users register for EVE this approach will face challenges of its own.

As users increase, developers will have to adopt new strategies to keep their unified worlds up and running and although innovation will play a key role, maybe they can adopt ideas that have worked in the real world. The technologies employed in MMOGs have great similarities with the ones used in stock markets and similar financial institutions. Both need to support massive amounts of users that demand lag-free and error-free transactions as well as huge databases. Maybe in the future we will see technologies like the one that supports something like NASDAQ applied to World of Warcraft. It can work both ways and maybe the technology that allows players to live and interact in a single world will one day support our credit card transactions.

Read [Technology Review]

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