Being in a high vocational education about cloud architecture/infrastructure and after having attended lectures, courses, guest speakers, and/or expos about the three biggest cloud provider's offerings (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) I have been wondering what the full solution will be for CoT on the server side of things.
I did some searches but couldn't find anything about the whole setup.
According to Tyche [url=https://cityoftitans.com/comment/54131#comment-54131]here[/url] the base server will be the built-in "server mode" that comes with UE, but as Lin says [url=https://cityoftitans.com/comment/89972#comment-89972]here[/url] a single one will most likely not be enough to support the whole player base, thus needing several instances running. Now Tyche mentioned a central watchdog system so I guess that will be the main control system that not only loads the content but also handles spawning and despawning of instances as needed. My main thoughts here is about if MWM will go with hosting providers or cloud services, and if cloud if going with VM's, containers, or possibly even utilizing serverless options. But also will one open world game instance be one server instance or can the server run more than one open world game instance.
The main thing that got me thinking about this was a presentation from Dice Operations (partner company to Dice/EA that runs the online portion of those's games) and reading up about Amazon's Lumberyard (their adaptation of the Crytek Engine to make it much online and MMO friendly by integrating Amazon's cloud services into the server portion). Dice Operations' presentation was about how they managed to lower their costs by moving to a cloud solution and through it massively lower the need to over provision capacity and instead having capacity match demand peaks and such, though they did set a minimum capacity level that at its lowest was maybe 80-85% utilized (otherwise they had a buffer equal to maybe 100 players).
So if a dev could chime in with the details they can provide then I would be very happy.
I'm currently working on seeing if I can get an official reply for you. I consider your question a good one.
This is a personal response and does not reflect on any official policy of Missing Worlds Media, Inc., any of its subsidiary's, or any of its products, now or in the future.
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[color=#FF0000]Senior Developer/Project Manager/Co-Founder... and then some.[/color]
First off: There is no such thing as a traditional "Open World" in our setup. Or rather, it's not a single instance, but multiple working together. By using transitioning/loading, a player gets handed off between servers as they travel across the map. Those Zone borders you'll see on the main map are where each world map instance transition happens.
So, you have a cluster of instances to make the world. These may be further expanded upon for PvP vs PvE vs Social, etc. We use a cloud solution for this, allowing for rapid spin-up of such instances as needed. We've tested up to a dozen instanced maps on each container w/o issue.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
So will transitioning involve load screens (the ‘old-school’ way, a’la EQ) or not (more like how Asheron’s Call and Second Life handle the transition)? :)
Ok sounds good, but if I am on say map/instance #5 and run across such zoning border I will stay on map/instance #5? And is "overpopulation" (for determining to spin up more "open world" instances) measured on the entire outdoor map or for each district?
Ohh, sounds nice. Now that gets me wondering if these containers are specialized, not in rule sets like PvE vs PvP vs Social but rather in map type like indoor (temporary, personal, procedural) vs outdoor ("permanent", shared, static) or maybe even in functionality like map vs chat vs login?
Containers sound suspiciously like Servers...
"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle
Virtual is as virtual does. It doesn't much matter what the "physical" nature of server hardware is anymore (i.e which CPU is in which box). What matters now is how that hardware is virtually organized to "juggle" multiple instances of whatever you want to juggle... like in this case multiple MMO gaming environments.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I was going to say, you can have multiple servers on one box or multiple boxes supporting one server (for example, an Exchange mail server may have multiple components on different physical boxes).
I support IT on a government WAN and I don’t know or even care how many boxes we have supporting which servers. Only the guys who manage the physical infrastructure would care.
None of the above. You may recall me mentioning load-screen animations in the past.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
I might, if I had time to read through tens of thousands of posts when I first found this a couple of months ago :)
Can you link me to where that was explained?
While they are right now mostly used for server-type software they are not a "server" in the traditional sense where you install an OS and then some software in a server-role. They are self-contained units with all (barring an OS) runtimes and libraries they need to run, and they won't care about what software is "running" the container itself. The major advantage of containers over VM's (Virtual Machines, or more traditional servers) is that they take seconds to spin up new instances compared to minutes for VM's, they also have much less overhead (all virtualization has some overhead) since you don't have an OS for each instance.
If you have any idea of virtualization then containers just move it one step up to "virtualize" individual programs instead of the hardware in a whole computer that VM's do.
Nice.
I have used virtual computers for running multiple OS environments simultaneously but it has been several years since I did. The containers term was new to me but I understand better now.
Thanks for the info guys!
"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle