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Feature: 'Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2: Architecture and Techniques for an MMORTS'

Today's main Gamasutra feature article, an excerpt from the Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2 book, describes the algorithmic basis needed for implementing ...

Simon Carless, Blogger

June 13, 2005

1 Min Read
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Today's main Gamasutra feature article, an excerpt from the Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2 book, describes the algorithmic basis needed for implementing an MMORTS game capable of sustaining hundreds of units for each player. The introduction to the piece, by authors Gideon Amir and Ramon Axelrod, explains: "In a massive multiplayer online real-time strategy game (MMORTS), thousands of players share the same contiguous virtual space. Each player controls dozens of units (in contrast with MMORPGs) and can battle with/against any number of players simultaneously. The players need to receive information in the immediate surrounding of all their units. As these units can be very far apart and see many other players with thousands of units, the amount of information that must be transferred to the client machines to keep their world state consistent is far greater than those required in the MMORPG genre. Dealing with this tremendous flow of information poses one of the greatest challenges of the MMORTS game genre. Naïvely, updating all the information (in excess of 50KB/sec) around each of the players’ units all the time is impractical in today’s low-bandwidth modems. Even if every end user had equipment capable of reaching this kind of throughput, the cost of such communication load will be tremendous to the game provider." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).

About the Author

Simon Carless

Blogger

Simon Carless is the founder of the GameDiscoverCo agency and creator of the popular GameDiscoverCo game discoverability newsletter. He consults with a number of PC/console publishers and developers, and was previously most known for his role helping to shape the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Conference for many years.

He is also an investor and advisor to UK indie game publisher No More Robots (Descenders, Hypnospace Outlaw), a previous publisher and editor-in-chief at both Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, and sits on the board of the Video Game History Foundation.

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