A distributed server architecture for massively multiplayer online games \
(2006)Abstract
There has been a tremendous growth in the popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (or MMOGs) with millions of players interacting in their virtual game space at the same time. However, the centralized server architecture of most modern day MMOGs is unable to cope with this increase in the number of participating players. Hence, there is a need for a scalable network architecture which can support these large number of players without affecting the overall gaming experience for each player. In this thesis we propose a scalable distributed server architecture which divides the virtual game space in smaller sub spaces and assigns them across a cluster of server nodes thereby reducing the overall load per server. It is based on a distributed publish/subscribe architecture which takes care of client-server as well as server-server communication. We discuss the implementation of this architecture in a real MMOG and experimentally prove that it shows better scalability than the centralized server architecture.