[vworld-tech] Straw poll...what are people working on?

Weston Fryatt wfryatt at muuf.com
Tue Dec 30 08:53:30 PST 2003


> Your approach is actually pretty similar to DAOC's - although in our
> case, we don't have seperate boxes for things like "weather" and "NPCs"
> but instead seperate them by world area, with seperate server boxes for
> things like databases and logins. I don't have first hand knowledge of
> other game's solutions but I gather server clustering is fairly standard
> (in fact, I think only Shadowbane tried to shove everything on one box
> and it caused them no end of frustration).
>
> Generally, a single point of failure is very, very bad.

And that is what I'm trying to avoid.  I feel by distributing the servers
and having multiple of them will help to prevent a single point of failure.
Another point to make is each server is independent from the rest. If you
have 3 NPC servers and one fails the cluster of them does not fail. The nice
thing about this is it provide you both a distributed network and failover.
There is still a lot of things in my design that needs to be worked out, But
I feel its a better way of going than with a single massive server design. I
just can't see a single server handle thousands, if not tens of thousands of
connections and still have enough horse power to run the rest of the game.

To be honest with the list here, This is my first MMOG game.  I'm doing this
for fun and a hobby, But with the vision and goal that someday I could take
this idea into the commercial market. One of the reason why I joined this
list is to help better my understanding of MMOG designs and where the
industry is going next.

What OS does the DAOC server run under? Unix? Windows? a mix? custom?  This
is another question that I have thought about alot.

Thanks,
Weston Fryatt





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