Companies in the game development industry are constantly attempting to keep up with the demands of consumers to provide more elaborate environments to inhabit. Games such as EVE Online, World of WarCraft, Planeshift and The Lord of The Rings Online are fun and enjoyable, yet have huge limitations.
These games are designed to support a gigantic user base; in fact, the developers of these games do an amazing job of setting up an environment capable of supporting thousands of users. Unfortunately, the current networking system used by these games is limited in two ways. First, an enormous number of servers are required to allow these simulated environments to function. Second, an exuberant amount of Internet bandwidth is consumed by these games. Considering these factors, these games do not scale well at all.
I am writing a research paper designed to address both of these issues. It will discuss different ways of load balancing the actual game play, allowing a minimal internet connection, and using just a few servers to support the gaming environment.
In addition, it will also include code snippets from a small sample game that will be used to show example code of these load balancing algorithms and practices at work. My goal with this project is to increase my knowledge of how these types of games work as well as create an environment that is not limited to only a few hundred thousand poeple. I want a place where millions can interact with each other. Come back for more information. This project is under a huge amount of work right now, and I will post more as it is available.