February 2003
- Announcing Game Programming Gems 4 Andrew Kirmse
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Brian Hook
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Paul Schwanz
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Sasha Hart
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Brian Hook
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Koster, Raph
- Secondary characters as a mechanic adam
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Ted L. Chen
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Brian Hook
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Rayzam
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Sasha Hart
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Michael Tresca
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Serafina Pechan
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Damion Schubert
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Sasha Hart
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Secondary characters as a mechanic John Buehler
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Edward Glowacki
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Brian Hook
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Wes Connell
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Harrok
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Brian Hook
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Brian Hook
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Sasha Hart
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Adam
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Russ Whiteman
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Valerio Santinelli
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Adam Burr
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Valerio Santinelli
- Secondary characters as a mechanic Adam Burr
- Limited character lifespans Dan Shiovitz
- Limited character lifespans Richard Krush
- Limited character lifespans Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
- Limited character lifespans Peter "Pietro" Rossmann
- Limited character lifespans shren
- Limited character lifespans Paul Cobb
- Limited character lifespans Rayzam
- Limited character lifespans Sasha Hart
- Limited character lifespans Paul Schwanz
- Limited character lifespans Damion Schubert
- Limited character lifespans David H. Loeser Jr.
- How to Find a VC Michael Tresca
- How to Find a VC Koster, Raph
- How to Find a VC Amanda Walker
- How to Find a VC Marc Fielding
- Re:Secondary characters as a mechanic Thiago Moraes
- AP Wire story on activism in MMOG games Marc Fielding
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Chris
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Paul Schwanz
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Dave Rickey
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? John Buehler
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Damion Schubert
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? John Buehler
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? ceo
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Marian Griffith
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Dave Rickey
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Lee Sheldon
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? J C Lawrence
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Paul Schwanz
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? J C Lawrence
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Lee Sheldon
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? J C Lawrence
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Ron Gabbard
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Damion Schubert
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Paul Schwanz
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Zach Collins {Siege}
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Amanda Walker
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Amanda Walker
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? J C Lawrence
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Chris Holko
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Dave Rickey
- MMORPG, buildings, is it bad to be just props? Koster, Raph
- Predictive models for churn in subscription based games Scott A. Farley
- Predictive models for churn in subscription based games Damion Schubert
- Mud Servers on RedHat Linux 7.2 Coyote
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Ron Gabbard
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Sasha Hart
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Paul Schwanz
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Damion Schubert
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Ron Gabbard
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Marc Fielding
- Protecting the Player's Suspension of Disbelief Serafina Pechan
- Asian markets research question Dr. Cat
- MUD-Dev conference J C Lawrence
- MUD-Dev conference J C Lawrence
- Re:Secondary characters as a mechanic Thiago Moraes
- Re:Secondary characters as a mechanic Sasha Hart
- Gaming 'is good for you' Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Gaming 'is good for you' Daniel
- Skill vs Knowledge (was: Brand Loyalty) ceo
- Skill vs Knowledge (was: Brand Loyalty) Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- FW: Cultural impact on Muds (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Damion Schubert
- Cultural impact on Muds Matt Mihaly
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Rudy Fink
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Damion Schubert
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Matt Mihaly
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Marc Fielding
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Matt Mihaly
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? eric
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? J C Lawrence
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Matt Mihaly
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? eric
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Matt Mihaly
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Zach Collins {Siege}
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? eric
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Matt Mihaly
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? Steven J. Owens
- Justification for audit trails in guilds? chrep@hotmail.com
- New issue of the Daedalus Project Koster, Raph
- New issue of the Daedalus Project Ola Fosheim Grøstad
- Movie-Making Games (Was Spam: Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server) Damion Schubert
- Movie-Making Games (Was Spam: Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server) Damion Schubert
- Threading and Queues (What Fun) Ben Chambers
- Threading and Queues (What Fun) Sean Miller
- Threading and Queues (What Fun) szii@sziisoft.com
- Threading and Queues (What Fun) lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Marian Griffith
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Scott Miller - Intelligent Life Games
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Thomas Tomiczek
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) J C Lawrence
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Scott Miller - Intelligent Life Games
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Travis Casey
- A new game paradigm (was: Star Wars Galaxies) Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Weston Fryatt
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Edward Glowacki
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Edward Glowacki
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Thomas Tomiczek
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Bruce Mitchener
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Thomas Tomiczek
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design ceo
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Damion Schubert
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Jeremy Noetzelman
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Weston Fryatt
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Jeremy Noetzelman
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Weston Fryatt
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Weston Fryatt
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Damion Schubert
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Derek Licciardi
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design ceo
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Sean Kelly
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design John Buehler
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Sean Kelly
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Thomas Tomiczek
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Keith Brewer
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design J C Lawrence
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Mike Shaver
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Keith Brewer
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Mike Shaver
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design Ted L. Chen
- Movie-Making Games (Was Spam: Star Wars Scott Jennings
- Movie-Making Games (Was Spam: Star Wars ceo
- Multithreading: AI, Sockets, Brains, Bodies, and Storage Brian Lindahl
- Multithreading: AI, Sockets, Brains, Bodies, and Storage J C Lawrence
- Multithreading: AI, Sockets, Brains, Bodies, and Storage J C Lawrence
- Multithreading: AI, Sockets, Brains, Bodies, and Storage Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? Tom Sullivan
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? J C Lawrence
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? Tom Sullivan
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? J C Lawrence
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? Mark Cheverton
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? Daniel.Harman@barclayscapital.com
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? Stephane Boisjoli
- Perl - SOAP/XML - Slow? Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- Hourly usage Peter Tyson
- Hourly usage lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- Hourly usage Michael Tresca
- In this corner.representing SCS.The Tyrant! F. Randall Farmer
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Mike Shaver
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Felix A. Croes
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Travis Nixon
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Felix A. Croes
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Felix A. Croes
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Felix A. Croes
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Amanda Walker
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Ted L. Chen
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Ben Hoyt
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Derek Licciardi
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Ben Hoyt
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Felix A. Croes
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Caliban Tiresias Darklock
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Ben Hoyt
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Ben Hoyt
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design lynx@lynx.purrsia.com
- MMORPG/MMOG P2P design Crosbie Fitch
- workload simulation (was: MMORPG/MMOG Server design) Mike Shaver
- workload simulation (was: MMORPG/MMOG Server design) Adam
Mike Shaver wrote:
> All this (fascinating) talk about server design leads me to ask a
> question I never get tired of:
> Are large-scale server designers doing anything to simulate
> workload, in order to test their algorithmic changes and
> hardware capabilities? I know that the Shadowbane server crew
> have been hard at work on improvements to their server
> architecture, with very impressive reduction in lag
> (esp. timer-based), so maybe they have some tips to share. How
> to make sure that a given change to the server won't reintroduce
> those problems, or similar ones? Do you just try to get a few
> thousand testers logged in at once and see how she holds up, or
> is there some logging+replay system used to verify new builds?
> I suppose, actually, that this question extends to other parts of
> game design. Are people running "simulations of their
> simulations", to validate play-balance changes? Again to pick on
> the Shadowbane guys, a recent build saw one power (a
> health-draining/transfer spell) spiral way out of balance when the
> set of attributes that affected was changed. Do designers
> generally have systems set up to compute such effects before
> play-test begins ("given these character stats taken from our
> player base, what damage/mana cost/hit-rate/etc. will we have for
> Power X after these changes?")? Any best-practices to share?
I believe you're talking about three problems:
- 1. simulating a "heavily loaded" system (to run continuously in
parallel with all other simulations)
- 2. stimulating (note the extra letter) the "emergent behaviour"
problems that only occur due to the complex interaction of
multiple users
- 3. tracking, logging, and examining that emergent behaviour to
try and find out why undesirable effects happened.
Number one is, well, either "very hard" or "pretty easy". If you
need to test anything that depends upon the realism of the
connections (e.g. testing your front-facing socket-listening stuff),
then it's hard. Good example of a problem that I know some games
failed to discover (because they didn't do this kind of testing
until too late):
1. Some event causes a lot of clients to disconnect
simultaneously (e.g. a "hiccup" on a minor backbone connection)
2. They all try to reconnect simultaneously.
3. Every Server involved receives a DDOS attack (in effect) and
at least one falls over - they had provisioned for a sensible
value for "maximum peak connection attempts in one second"; this
was way above sensible.
(In this example, they could also have avoided the problem
altogether by doing some failure-mode analysis, but then that's
what testing is there for :).
In the easy case, there are many ways of simulating heavy load on a
server, on a sliding scale from "get x thousand machines to connect
only once simultaneously" through to "get 1 machine to open x
thousand connections simultaneously" - although for large X the
latter case is not feasibly due to the client-simulator not being
able to exert much actual in-game load. This isn't a problem: you
just don't go below e.g. 5 client-simulators and x/5 thousand
connections each.
Number 2, AFAIAA, is an NP-complete problem. In other words, if
anyone can come up with a solution that is more efficient than "try
every possible interaction in turn" then they'll win a Nobel prize
for mathematics. No, seriously :). [All Nobel-wannabes please note:
this isn't quite true unless the solution is a generic one; if your
solution depends on game-specific knowledge to reduce the workload,
I'm afraid you won't win anything].
In effect, if there's a better way of testing number 2, it's only
because of a particular feature of the design document of *your*
particular game.
Number 3 is, I believe, similar to number 2 (although I'm not so
sure on this one: it's a bit less intrinsically obvious).
So. In conclusion, if you want such tools they are in fact very easy
to write :). But they're going to have to do the slowest possible
search of all possible outcomes (and probably generate terrifying
amounts of data); there's no "clever" improvements possible. Unless
there's a specific speedup available to your game in particular...
The GrexEngine has some decent tools for this - but they
cheat. Essentially, part of the development-environment has a
runtime component that has to also be embedded into the main
runtime-system. Now, because this component was around at
development-time, its able to take advantage of special knowledge
particular to your game (as described above as a possible short-cut)
and use that knowledge to simplify the search process.
The "knowledge of the game" that the component has comes in two
forms:
- Deduced knowledge. (development-time optimizations;
"compile"-like processes which essentially pre-assess various
data and behaviours, and store a summary; etc)
- Human-dictated knowledge. (at development time, the tool
either suggests constraints to the developer, or the developer
adds his/her own constraints, feeding into the deduced
knowledge. These constraints are things that are not
mathematically deducible, but a human can predict.)
An example of a constraint above might be "no player can ever move
directly upwards, except when on a ladder". For many games, this
might be an intrinsically obvious constraint, e.g. for a
maze-searching game it's actually undesirable for the constraint to
be broken (but it's not mathematically deducible; the tool needs a
designer's decision). Of course, it completely disallows jumping, so
for a 3D-platform game it would completely suck.
Adam M
- workload simulation (was: MMORPG/MMOG Server design) Adam
- MMORPG/MMOG Server design - intel-ligent choices of hardware ; ) ceo
- workload simulation (was: MMORPG/MMOG Server design) ceo
- Team management Peter Harkins
- Team management Tom Sullivan
- Team management Sanvean
- Team management Michael Tresca
- Virtual worlds meet LARPs Richard A. Bartle
- Virtual worlds meet LARPs Mark Cheverton
- Virtual worlds meet LARPs Richard A. Bartle
- Virtual worlds meet LARPs Lee Sheldon
- Skotos Kicks Off Associate Program Shannon Appelcline
- Infrastructure kat-Zygfryd