[vworld-tech] Straw poll...what are people working on?
ceo
ceo at grexengine.com
Tue Dec 23 06:40:02 PST 2003
I'm just wondering what kind of tech people on this list are working on
at the moment...
Personally, I'm working on two vworld projects:
1. A modular MMOG server system, based upon a two-layer architecture.
Lower layer has two purposes:
- abstraction of the execution environment
- offers very useful and common functions for MMOG servers (e.g.
high-level functions for distributed-system comms, e.g. provides
distributed and local logs, e.g. easy access to transaction-processing
system etc)
Upper layer contains lots of modular systems that are mostly only
loosely integrated. A typical example is a geographic system for
handling all sorts of game maps, providing efficient algorithms for
reading/altering the map, and for getting particular subsets of
mobs/players on the map very fast etc.
Another example is an efficient HTTP server making it easy (almost
trivial) to export any game-data / systems to the web.
2. A much simpler system that shares the same architecture, but with a
grossly simplified lower layer - there's no clustering, no distributed
systems code, etc.
Almost no development goes into the lower layer (it's complete and too
simple to need much further development), so all the R&D is in creating
new upper-layer modules. At the moment, we have production-ready modules
for e.g.:
- A rules-based system that makes it easy to rapidly develop and
alter all the game-logic (the technology is fairly simple, but effective)
- templating systems that interface directly into asynch I/O libs
(there are some pretty good general-purpose templating systems, e.g. one
of my favourites is Velocity, but they're never integrated with asynch
IO. This is a major pain). General purpose, so used for everything from
dynamic speech systems (for NPC's) to PHP3-esque HTML.
- database abstraction system. Mainly to cover the wholes and
incompatibility horrors of SQL. Also to remove most of the boiler-plate
code which is an inevitability of SQL development (...unless you already
have a high-level DB API on top of your SQL)
Adam
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