On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 09:53:10AM -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote: > And they may well do this. There are a lot of problems in provisioning > online MMRPGs with "Universes" that are shared with HPC clusters and > with HA clusters. Most of the sane ones spin off the actual rendering > onto the clients, but they are still responsible for managing a huge > inventory of objects as well as all the NPCs, in realtime interaction > with PCs, in a large distributed "space". In some cases e.g. WoW the
The Second Life does the physics server-side. With the given technology, a region (one virtual server) will become sluggish (and soon herafter crash) after some 60-70 avatars frolick in the area. There's definitely potential for better interconnects and game clusters (deja vu, we must have discussed this some 5-8 years ago). > space has some fairly obvious boundaries -- different continents are > plausibly on different servers in a realm cluster, ditto instances, SL islands are rectangular boxes (the client used to crash spectacularly when altitude exceeded a signed short int). The world tesselates trivially on a 2d or 3rd grid/torus. > where there are clear "cuts" when your character is "moved" from one > server to another. They may even partition continents, but to do that > (and manage a smooth passage across "country" boundaries) they need > bottlenecks to limit traffic and a region of real-time overlap where > characters are maintained (as it were) on both servers. Here IB or gigE > would be very useful. It also might let them increase the fineness or > granularity of boundaries, increase the server capacity for handling > large numbers of simultaneous gamers by adding more physical servers > to handle the large numbers of players that can occur in any given > continent or country, and so on. To start with, writing distributed game servers with MPI would be a nice touch. I'm not aware of any effort which does it. > Actually, MMRPGs are fun both to play and to think about as a cluster > problem. But the big companies tend to be a bit chary of revealing > their technology, although I have read a few articles on the subject. > It is likely that many of the details of their implementations remain > hidden. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
