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Friday, September 14, 2007 The One-World Video-Game ChallengeTechnologies being developed to make massive multiplayer games handle more people could be beneficial to the financial industry. By Erica Naone
As more and more players sign up for online games, companies are employing increasingly sophisticated server architecture to support them. A new trend of keeping lots of players within a single world is pushing the envelope even farther. While some massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) already involve a lot of people--Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft recently passed the nine-million-player mark--players usually aren't truly together, inside one world. Instead, a game company makes many copies, called shards, of the world, each of which holds several thousand players. These worlds exist in parallel, and players can't move seamlessly from one shard to another. Dave Laux, global executive for games and interactive entertainment at IBM, says that sharding is popular in part because it's easy to add more shards to accommodate new players as a game grows in popularity, and because it can prevent overcrowding in small virtual worlds. But some virtual worlds try to remain whole. The creators of the MMO EVE Online, for example, decided to avoid splitting the game into shards, in part because of its science-fiction setting, which spreads through vast reaches of space. "When you watch a typical sci-fi movie, you have the sense that you're watching a small part of a larger world," says Hilmar Petursson, CEO of CCP Games, the Iceland-based parent company of EVE Online. Petursson says that a single-shard environment is also attractive because the game can be more culturally diverse, and can more accurately simulate a large-scale economy. But the problem of avoiding shards isn't specific to EVE Online. Wu-chang Feng, an associate professor of computer science at Portland State University, says, "I would say it's something most MMOs will go to, if they can." The challenge, he believes, is to create an elegant experience for users at the front end while constructing and managing servers on the back end that can keep up with the pressure of large numbers of players online at once. Other companies working on the problem include IBM, which works with EVE Online and other MMOs; Australian game developer BigWorld Technology; and Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. In the case of EVE Online, instead of having different computer clusters running many copies of the same world, the company sets up clusters to support different solar systems. As Feng explains, different machines simulate different parts of a single virtual world. Load-balancing software between the clusters moves computer resources to solar systems where they are needed most. (All the servers are physically located in one central location in London.) Since its inception in 2003, EVE Online has grown to 200,000 users. While the maximum size of a battle in World of Warcraft is about 40-on-40 players, in EVE Online, about 400 people can do battle at once in a single location in the game. (Approximately 35,000 gamers have played the game concurrently but they were scattered throughout the world.) |
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Playing God
06/23/2008
Comments
gfair on 09/14/2007 at 2:10 PM
1
Unfortunately, at that epic end of EVE PVP, the game performance slows immensely. People have reported 20 minute intervals between screen updates when entering the engagement. They fly in with a ship ready to PVP, and 20 minutes later find that they are in a "pod" (an escape ship of sorts, for those that don't play EVE).
Even smaller engagements can suffer lag of 2-3 minutes before screen updates. I was recently in one.
I wonder if IP Multicasting would help EVE, or not, in situations like that? Either that, or a "battleground" concept like Blizzard uses with WoW.
With that said, EVE is still the best game of all time, in terms of the detail, the sheer number of ways you can participate in PVP (including Economic warfare), and the politics and espionage that give the game the all-too-real feel.
Erica Naone on 09/14/2007 at 2:22 PM
Assistant Editor
25
Erica Naone
esseye on 09/15/2007 at 11:13 AM
1
The reality of any large fleet battle in EVE is the mechanics of the game force you to do it, even though you know the same broken mechanics are going to make it suicide. When I say suicide, I mean in the sense that you will never even see what kills you, nor will you be able to activate any of your modules.
I recently cancelled my subscriptions after finally giving up on hoping CCP would fix this. The fleet battle in question was only around 438 total, not a huge number by any means. Unfortunately, the server side lag (often called module lag by EVE players) was between 20 and 30 minutes(that's right, 2 digit minutes of lag).
I sent in the client logs as is always requested, along with screenshots showing the timestamps of the error message (You get a message when you try to activate a module you have already activated, saying 'an attempt to activate this module is already underway').
The problem in these situations is that CCP refuses to even acknowledge the lag problem. The CCP GMs will simply say that the server logs do not indicate there was any problem. Why? Because they have nothing monitoring the lag. This is what finally forced me (after 4 years) to give up on them. EVE is a wonderful game, but as CCP won't even acknowledge the problem, and in fact gives data like this article, it will never be fixed.
Good luck to anyone signing up! We did have the makings of one of the most epic battles in gaming history quite a while ago in a battle known as "F-T" for the system it was in. The numbers, had it been anywhere near possible, would have reached closer to 2000 total. Unfortunately, not only did the people in the system completely lag out, but those of us 3 and 4 jumps away lagged out for several hours (I spent 3 hours on a gate staring at a black screen. That's right, 3 hours without being able to even load). It would have been pretty great, but in reality about 80 total participants were able to get to the target system, and then actually see anything once there.
thatguy on 09/14/2007 at 7:50 PM
1
The most disturbing part in all of this is CCP has a record of claiming the "lagg" is client side, given hundreds of players have the same problems. On the outside CCP likes to make it seem like these fleet battles are possible, when they are entirely a luck vs lag fest.