New Technologies Attack the One-World Problem 157
Hugh Pickens writes "An MIT Technology Review article has new details on the challenges of a 'one world design' in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Most games shard their servers, putting up artificial barriers between friends and family members. Technologies are now being developed to keep lots of players within a single world, some of them based off of the unique PvP-heavy title EVE Online. The best part - the technologies don't just apply to gaming. 'NASDAQ, for example, can be thought of as a very large MMO, supporting very large numbers of 'players' performing billions of transactions daily in a graphically intense environment, all within a single shard. Technologies that solve this problem effectively, says George Dolbier, technical lead for games and interactive entertainment at IBM, will have applications in any industry that requires spotting and reacting to trends, or "anything where behavior is dynamic and you need to move resources around rapidly."'"
No shit, sherlock (Score:3, Funny)
Jeezs, you mean there are large transaction systems out there? Thank god MMO's brought the technology to the world! Gah. MMO's do nothing technically new regarding transaction.
Also, what is the 'Graphically intense' interface the NASDAQ has? Compared to MMO's it's nothing.
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Re:No shit, sherlock (Score:5, Funny)
bzzzzt
For even mentioning that movie, your Geek Factor suffers a -10 hit.
You're RPG equivelant is now "Tunnels and Trolls", and your Star Wars equivelant is set to "Jar Jar".
Want to worsen it? Mention that Sandra Bullock movie./p.
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Here, [google.com] just type in your address and call the first number that comes up. They'll help you out of your mom's basement.
Don't knock Tunnels and Trolls! (Score:2)
You're RPG equivelant is now "Tunnels and Trolls", and your Star Wars equivelant is set to "Jar Jar".
Are you knocking Tunnels and Trolls? T&T was a great "beer and pretzels" game of yesteryear. The rules were dirt simple in comparison to the fantasy RPGs of its day, and it didn't take itself seriously. What other game has spells like "Take That, You Fiend," giant squirrels as dungeon monsters, and modules with names like "Rat on a Sti
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I know I'm moving off topic and replying to my own post but I'm reminded of a few years ago, I was back in San Diego at the home office, I was the Far East Technical Training Manager for the company and GL had just re-released "Empire Strikes Back". I was in the theater with a bunch of kids who weren't born when it was first released. The kid next to me was mouthing almost every scene and getting all excited at the key points in the movie. When Darth announces he is Luke's father,
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Personally, I'd argue that a willingness to try games from less well-known publishers like Flying Buffalo instead of just following the mainstream shows a little more "geek sophistication." Besides, T
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Nice Try (Score:3, Funny)
You're trying to get me to say the name of that other Sandra Bullock computer movie.
Well, it ain't working, sparky.
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Hell no! Think about what a NASDAQ MMO would be like! I'd buy a bunch of shares in a company with foreign holdings, and then order the third-world factories not to use the regular safety precautions, monitor them, and then sell all my shares when there's an accident before the news hits the market! That would be both graphic *and* intense. I don't think the interface would take much from that experience.
Of c
You're confused... (Score:1)
MMO's could certainly make certai
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This became popular when the first big MMO (Ultima Online) came onto the scene. In an intro movie of UO, you have some kind of evil wizard casting a spell to destroy the universe/take over the world (I don't remember exactly, it's been a while). Eventually the world gets.. encapsulated by some magic crystal ball that he had. Then came along the mysterious avatar to battle this villan, which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters.
turns out that the destruction of the cryst
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...which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters.... turns out that the destruction of the crystal ball did not destroy the world/universe/whatever, but instead ended up creating 'reflections' of the world identical to the original.
Interesting. I work at Google, and "shard" is Google-speak for one "partition" of a distributed system. It's also a verb: "shard it" is the usual response when someone has to write a system dealing with large amounts of data. And last year, some Google engineers open-sourced a sharded version of Hibernate [hibernate.org] (an ORM layer for Java) a year or so ago, and some of the papers [google.com] on research.google.com talk about this technique too, I think. And on a lighter note, a couple of years ago someone replaced the "Sh
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Also, what is the 'Graphically intense' interface the NASDAQ has? Compared to MMO's it's nothing.
Yeah. I didn't get that either, considering that MMO servers aren't graphically intensive either. All of the graphically intensive work on MMOs was done on the client end, I thought.
Gamers Changing the world... (Score:2, Funny)
--Ray
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God bless you, gamers. Without you, we wouldn't have a space program, a Hubble telescope, high impact plastics, modern medicine...oh, wait.
But, after Halo, I think we have enough fodder for the cannons.
Because of gamers, we have a bunch of dorks running around with kanji tatoos without knowing the mea
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From the article:
>EVE Online's servers, for example, which now support only 200,000 players, currently process more than 150 million operations per day.
Oooh look 150 million operations... That would be the combined trading for Dell, Microsoft, IBM, and YHOO. How many stocks are there on the NASDAQ? Hmm, several *thousand* Then you need to add options, futures, and a few other instruments.
Now to top it all off! Equities on a world wide level is ab
Re:Gamers Changing the world... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sorta curious where you got your numbers. From what I could find with a quick search Nasdaq handles about 550,000 trades per day total. Granted that covers over a billion shares moved each day, but the number of transactions seems to be about one third of EVE Online. On top that the trades seem to be between 5,500 or so listings, moved by 7000+ brokers. That would seem to be easier to streamline than the actions of 30,000 players interacting with however many tens of thousands of EVE environmental items there are. http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/downloads/Nasdaq.pdf [hp.com]
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Re:Gamers Changing the world... (Score:4, Interesting)
As a teenager I spent many, many hours in front of a computer playing games.
Since then, I have never been afraid of computer technology. I am not despaired when challenged by a technical problem, I embrace it. I have always been drawn to learning and becoming better. I am better at problem solving, deciphering UI's and reacting quickly when a crisis arises. These days, as a hobby, I program computer games, which keeps my mind sharp and the logic ticking. Yes, I attribute a great deal of my professional skills, and in fact, my computer mentality, to video games.
You know, I might just say that playing computer games was a better learning experience than playing high school sports.
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One time during rush hour traffic, a passenger of my car told me I drive like I'm playing a video game.
I replied that "I play to win".
NASDAQ=MMO (Score:5, Funny)
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Worst. Pun. Ever. (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't seem to me that thousands of stock-trend charts and graphs really count, unless you're making a terrible pun.
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I live in a GMT+08 place (i.e. approximately on the opposite side of the Earth) and I knew of friends who invested in USA stocks, and they really do stay up at night to keep an eye on the market.....
Guild Wars has had "one world" for 2+ years (Score:2, Informative)
Since GW is largely instance-based there might be fewer performance issues to deal with than with WoW in this regard, but my point is
Re:Guild Wars has had "one world" for 2+ years (Score:5, Interesting)
GW doesn't allow a thousand players to engage in an epic battle across miles of terrain. Let alone a hundred thousand or a million. You get split into identical but differently numbered shards and yes, you can move between them, but if a bunch of people want to meet up and have that huge, epic, battle, it's not possible in GW.
I don't even want to think what the bandwidth requirements per CLIENT would be in a epic battle on the scale of D-Day or something similar with thousands of players moving and performing actions simultaneously.
Let's imagine each client uploads 5kb/sec of action data to the server. If there were 1000 players in the battle doing this simultaneously then each client would need to download 999*5kb/sec of data to say updated in the battle. So, close to 5 megabytes per second. I.E. you'd need to have a 40 megabit internet connection running at it's full capacity and with a good ping time to be able to even stay current with the battle.
Just drop it down to 1k/sec. You'd still need an 8mb connection running at full capacity.
This is why epic, world-sized battles aren't a reality in MMOs. GW cannot do this.
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Is the article linked to about creating 1000-man battles? Because server load would be far from the only issue. Exactly right when you say bandwith requirements. There's also the issue of RAM
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The real problem that EVE has is the server. It just chokes on ke
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If you take some basic principles, such as level of detail that you expect to see or not see:
* In a 1000 person match it's highly unlikely that it woul
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I do see what you mean though, even if you average at maybe 3k/s (not including packet overhead) per player, with 150 you've averaging ~570kb/s which does need a pretty beefy connection, you could probably bring this down to 300kb/s by reducing the update frequency for players out of your immediate vicinity.
Still - I know a lot of people who are on "broadband" but can
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Not at all. The information transferred between players is not a completely connected graph. For instance, if I'm looking away from player A there's no need to update player A's visual information.
This is similar to the real world. If I'm a mile away from an explosion in a battle
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As long as a player is in your potentia
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I never stated such a thing, and if you can find where I said that and quote me on it, I'll eat my hat. (it's made of cotton candy btw)
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Methinks you fail at writing comprehension.
My assertion is that each client need not download all information that every other client uploads. Your statement asserts that every client would need to do that. Though I'm sure you'll find some way to wiggl
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This isn't about 'winning'. And I can't go 'home'. I, like most other
Epic, World-sized battles possible. (Score:2)
It doesn't take 1k/sec. (Score:2)
Let's look at some real numbers [cstrike-planet.com], hmm?
And that's for Counter-Strike Source, which, if you don't know, is a very fast-paced FPS which absolutely needs to be as accurate as possible (so people can get headshots, etc). It probably uses several orders of magnitude more bandwidth per player than your typical MMO.
Note, also, that this is server bandwidth needed, not client bandwidth.
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Microsoft of all people was developing a technology called DonnyBrook [digg.com] which would theoretically allow a thousand player Counter Strike match. It basically creates something called guidable AI which only 4 players actually sends information to each other player and the "AI" assumes or takes control of everyone els
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Look, I don't know the real numbers, and I am willing to be they're different for each game. Why don't you get
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My only point, largely lost in the details, was that in today's games with today's internet connections in today's average household one cannot expect to be involved in battles of epic proportions because the bandwidth requirements are simply too great. Even with advanced ne
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I'm not so sure I want one server for everyone, though: some games have certain RP elements that attract a certain crowd, so having RP servers is a nice way to make a community; same for PVP se
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Massive: You bet
Multiplayer: Yep
Online: Definitely
Role-playing Game: That too
And Guild Wars actually let's me communicate with EVERYONE in a given city and travel easily between servers, unlike WoW which locks my character into one server and charges me $12 to do a simple move.
Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
To illustrate what I mean: in WoW I can for example take a treck from Anvilmar to Ironforge to Stormwind to Goldshire (see for example the funny video with the 40 level 1 gnomes raid on Hogger for a group doing just that) and me
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My point is that with GW's approach even though players are temporarily fragmented, they are not cl
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With the instances the developers know pretty much how much processing power they'll need, since there's only so much that can go into one instance at a time. I'm not saying it's easy to figure out, but knowing that only 6 or 7 people (can't remember what it is in GW) per instance means you can limit the processing power req
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It's not a true 'one server' solution. It is, however, a very smooth and well thought-out system of instant on-demand character transfer between servers.
NASDAQ MMO (Score:5, Funny)
And you thought the grind in WoW was boring!
Re:NASDAQ MMO (Score:5, Funny)
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One world MMO? (Score:2, Interesting)
First, can a server even handle 2 million simultaneous logins? I bet they could do something, but it would cost a LOT more than splitting them up into managable chunks.
Second, the game world would have to be enormous in order to give people enough room to move around and do their own thing. Just imagine hunting
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Distributed computing. You have your world spread across multiple servers, with certain zones on certain servers. It is done this way already in modern MMO's.
Second, the game world would have to be enormous in order to give people enough room to move around and do their own thing. Just imagine hunting a single boss, 300 people at the same time trying to kill one monster... it'd make me quit.
(1) bigger world with more targets
(2) instancin
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Not "we all" - only the game servers have to be connected with ultrafat low latency pipes. "We all" are supposed to log onto the nearest server and be happy with our current bandwidth. The technical problem is in making the distributed servers act transparently as one big server to "us all", so that Joe, Ivan and Taro from Australia, Russia and Japan can b
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Obligatory Second Life Comment (Score:5, Interesting)
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this is of course what Second Life does ... everyone is in the same world
Although it is true that there is no end user experience of selecting a world, my guess is that it is still a shard based architecture based on location within the world. I base that guess on the observation that object rendering and latency seems to be dependent on the number of people and objects in an area. A densely crowded area has much more lag then a sparely populated area. It is not dependent, however, on how many users are currently logged in to the world.
It seems to me that SL is multi-shard
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However in practice this is a relatively minor consideration. More specifically anyone inwo
EVE is a special case (Score:2, Informative)
The landscape in the likes of WoW is a lot more design intensive, you have features and locations with NPCs and dungeons and so on put in place. To double the population on the server you would need to either double the design/quest writing hours, add in a bunch of
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They can always tweak the stuff for specific places later.
What I would like to see is a more dynamic world.
I haven't really played any MMOs since Dark Age of Camelot so I'm not sure what the state of NPCs are nowadays, but I think it would be interesting to see monsters migrate across the game world, players and NPCs building new c
apples vs. oranges (Score:1)
and that bit about 40-on-40 battle size for WoW is totally bogus. That might be the largest battleground instance, b
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I'm pretty sure that WoW doesn't have 200k on just one server. They'd only need 40 servers then.
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34 "High" population PvP servers
31 "Medium" population PvP servers
36 "Low" population PvP servers
17 "High" population regular servers
69 "Medium" population regular servers
13 "Low" population regular servers
22 assorted population density "special" servers
= 222 servers
The total AVERAGE number of USERS on a server would therefore be in the 40k area.
As for the activity level, I'd be seriously surprised if they manage to have over 10k concurent users online on any of them, more like 5k
The problem is surge capacity (Score:2)
If you have 100,000 users and some kind of non-instanced shared event (say you tried to have a virtual stadium where spectators in the stands saw an event below) the capacity required is beyond the capacity of current hardware.
OneWorld Problems? (Score:2)
Oh, wait, you didn't mean JD Edwards. Never mind.
Three Things To Think About (Score:2)
2. The concept of being forced to play with people who think PvP is great just bores the tears out of me. Just as my RPG style probably does the same thing to PvPers. So, having a fractured community is kind of nice, and it's also good in that, should I totally mess up (as I did when I founded a Squirrelly Wrath guild on one ser
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We discuss such things. One learns morals by interaction.
Want to talk family values? Let's see how all those "moral" people do in the real world.
At least we talk about it. When one is a teen, it's easy to see things in black and white. Some people grow out of it, the rest remain neo-cons.
Fixes one problem but makes more (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying that the problem can't be fixed, but it is something that would be hard, if not impossible, to fix in an existing large MMORPG without causing lots of trouble for the users.
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I wanted to see how big the in game world of Azeroth really was. Since Azeroth mostly contained two continents of roughly equal size, I came to the conclusion that 1 continent would be roughly the size of Manhattan.
And at 9 million people, which is slightly larger than NYC, that would mean Azeroth would be about 1/2 as dense as Manhattan.
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Other applications as well ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Like, say
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You mean like they have since... well, time immemorial? Seriously, that's the definition of generalship in a nutshell -
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Problem is... (Score:2, Interesting)
RTA carefully (Score:3, Insightful)
First, this George Dolbier says that MMOs and massively distributed financial systems share the same problems, and that the financial systems have gone a long way to address them. He says MMOs should adopt solutions applied to the finance sector.
The second thing to note is that he talks about predicting and reallocating server computing resources. He's from IBM, who hawks services and products in this very area.
Sharding in WoW really is a big pain (Score:2)
Are any of them ever on the same server? No, of course not
Of course, supporting the density of 9 million people on a single wow server would both require and allow massive shifts in gameplay. No more grinding thirty mobs at once - you've have to zerg rush a single murloc to get him down, or the world would be completely overrun in murlocs.
Easy to do (Score:2)
1> Instancing of all areas, ala Guild Wars style.
2> Select your character, THEN choose your server, ala FPS game style.
You solve two issues, it's easier to scale up when your game gets popular(no character migrations off of heavy servers to deal with) and it's easy to scale down when the game starts to die off(no annoying server merges).
But on the downside you can't charge people $25 to move their character just so they can play with their friends.
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Not a technology problem! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's actually a content production problem. If you're going to put 8,000,000 people into a single virtual world, you have to have places for them all to go and not be horribly overcrowded. Ideally you want all those places to be unique, interesting, and compelling to play. The fundamental problem is that we simply don't know how to create that much content. Hand-crafted content is far too slow and expensive to produce at that scale, and auto-generated content is repetitive and boring. Eve Online manages to hold 200,000 players in a single server cluster environment only because all of its environments are the same random-generated solar systems. Once you've seen four or five systems in Eve, you've seen them all. Fortunately Eve's strength doesn't rely on the environments, it relies on PVP action. WoW couldn't get away with that.
Fleet (Score:2)
Rich.
Not Really A Tech Problem (Score:2)
The problem is a design resources and player density problem. The whole reason that players want to play on the same server is socialization but this runs the risk of everyone wanting to be in the same place. While crowds may make it self-controlling in some sense it will scuttle the feel of the small shop in the woods or tiny forest town if it
Magic: The Gathering online (Score:2)
The "Is the server up" tread on the forums runs to 143 pages since November 2006 and is very scary http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=733609 [gleemax.com]
'Shard' came from UO, didn't it? (Score:2)
Re:dumbass (Score:5, Funny)
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