On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Eugen Leitl wrote:
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).
Yeah, and my experiences with 2ndL are highly negatory as a consequence.
It is a bad cluster design. It does not scale.
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.
SL needs to adopt some of the technologies of other MMRPGs -- the ones
that work. It makes the result more complex on the client side -- one
has to update WoW every six months or so with new textures, maps, and
display side bugfixes -- but it scales much, much better on the server
side and is much less bottlenecked at the client side network (which may
be "only" DSL). SL is a resource hog all around.
I note that people are most impressed with it if they've never hung out
in one of the well-designed, scalable worlds of WoW. Any player of WoW
would laugh and cry to see how primitive, slow, clumsy it is. It has a
good idea -- the ability of users to create objects and add them to the
environment -- but it needs a much better algorithm for managing the
construction process and an object-oriented look-ahead synchronization
process that reduces the bottlenecks to something endurable.
rgb
--
Robert G. Brown Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
Duke University Physics Dept, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb
Book of Lilith Website: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lilith.php
Lulu Bookstore: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=877977
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