Neeeext!
V0.2 officially enters the testing phase as soon as I verify that one bug is fixed and fix a second. Yes, I got all of the rest of the features done except for one hat I decided needed more thought, so I postponed it until the next version. The problem mainly was that in order to figure out how the feature should work, things needed to be a little further along then they are. Anyway, I’m excited about the new version. On the surface, it doesn’t really seem like a lot has been added. The client now has terrain and a sky, but nothing much else. Under the hood, though, a lot of things are there that hadn’t been including all the systems for connecting servers together to distribute the game.
Speaking of that, in my last post, I mentioned that I wish I knew how the other MMORPGs did it. Since then, I was able to at least partially answer that question. This white-paper is a very long read, but anyone interested in MMORPG development should consider it. It is a document put together by some of the bigger guys in the MMORPG field which goes over many aspects of creating MMORPGs. It was fairly informative, though a lot of the stuff I already knew or had guessed. It sounds like my method of having lots of little servers simulate the game world is the most flexible way of doing things (although not the easiest). The easiest of course is to throw some big iron at the problem and get a 64/128 CPU server to handle your whole game. That’s a little out of my budget, and when that big honking machine crashes, down goes your game. In my case, it would take quite a few servers going down for clients to see downtime. If one server goes down, the load balancing automatically replaces it. How cool is that? And I’m not talking pie in the sky features that aren’t coded, I’m talking currently finished and tested features. Well, they have to go through the release testing, but they’ve already been internally tested by me. The load balancing works at pretty much all levels. The very top level servers, though, are redundant and have fail over, but can not appoint new top level servers. Fortunately, they work off of a database (or replicated databases), so there can be any number of them. The other big thing for v0.2 was performance. Having lots of objects around doesn’t hurt performance unless many of them start moving.
The next version (0.3) is mostly about getting the game to the point where content can be produced that won’t need to be thrown away later. A lot of it involves audio and visual features on the client side, so screenshots should start to get prettier.
Anyway, if you have been following this and would like to become an alpha tester, I am still looking for more, so leave a comment below. I still prefer to stick to people I know, but leave a comment if you are interested. The next two weeks will involve a lot of testing.