Thursday, October 02, 2008

Building a MMO backend.

I've just read a interesting article at IBM developerWorks discussing MMO backend architecture.

Using this kind of architecture, any modern game engine which provides the typical MOG game tools (such as Unity) can be used as a MMO platform, as long as the web glue between MOG instances is seamless. I've done this, using Python/Pylons, and it works well.

If Unity Technologies is to compete effectively for MMO developer attention, they need to provide a headless server which can run on Linux. Once this last piece is in place, it will become a viable option for MMO type projects.

1 comment:

Ben Sizer said...

I'm a bit confused: the article talks about an MMO game architecture but almost immediate concedes that you already need the server and client software set up. So what exactly are they providing? Querying the database is one of the smaller problems and you wouldn't waste performance by wrapping that up in unnecessary HTTP requests.

They also seem to be assuming geographical partitioning of the world with slow transitions between them, which is not suitable for many types of game.

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