Game Development Community

MMO Server Theoretical Question

by CDMS · in General Discussion · 05/08/2011 (5:08 pm) · 3 replies

Hi everyone. I have a theoretical question for anyone who knows some general server information. I've been looking into some information (for fun) on MMO Servers and what they need, and I haven't exactly found the information I'm looking for. I know that there has to be a PC with a Client on it, as well as a high-powered server to host the MMO on. But what kind of setup would be needed to run an MMO? Some examples would be helpful so that I can fully understand. Something tells me one server wouldn't exactly "work".

Thanks
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from General Discussion


Torque Owner Brian Mayberry
Dead on Que Productions
#1
05/08/2011 (6:25 pm)
A very basic setup would have each major play area of your game on its own server, expecting to top out somewhere under 200 players per server. These servers would then be linked together to generate the "server" your players would actually click and join up with. It would also need a server to handle the item and mob database, and likely yet another separate sever for PLAYER database. Plus at least one authentication server that will bottle up around 100~200 simultaneous log-ins, depending on how beefy it and the internet pipe is. Ideally, you would have multiple server load-outs like this in each major geographical region, so players could actually enjoy the game, and not be completely lagged out. (Westcoast, Eastcoast, UK, AU, HK, etc.)

So for one "server" in an mmo with 4 major areas, you would need 8 server boxes at minimum for 100~200 players in a specific region. The actual player and total box count could vary for all kinds of reasons.

This is all hypothetical guesstimation off the top of my head, of course. :P

Torque 3D Owner Ted Southard
#2
05/09/2011 (6:49 am)
Minions of Mirth ran on something like seven physical boxes supporting a total player base of about 40,000. Do a search through Josh Engebretson's blogs, or take a look at my MMO thread in the comments (where links are posted).

Honestly, you don't need that "high end" a machine to run a Torque dedicated server, even for an MMO. You'll need a bit more resources for it, but since most MMOs are quite custom when it comes to back-end code, it's something you need to test with.

For my own tests, I've had 8 zone servers running on a single physical box with no issues except bandwidth (and that's where you need to look heavily, since bandwidth also costs money).

Torque 3D Owner Joshua Halls (Xerves)
#3
05/09/2011 (8:20 pm)
Depends on what your target size is for your world. The biggest limit you are going to run into is the number of players you can have in a zone. A lot of working with an MMO is trying to offload processing away from the zone server so it has to do as little processing as humanly possible. Otherwise your bottleneck is going to be a zone server. It is really noticeable in highly populated areas such as a major city.

BigWorld is probably the best 3rd party solution I have seen at handling this issue as they abstract a lot of zone processing into many nodes that can dynamically scale. That is the reason they can handle an extremely high concurrent connection (you can literally just keep throwing more servers at it to a certain extent).

Unless you are looking for experience developing an MMO framework I would highly suggest looking at the MMO options out there instead of trying to build your own.