Love the Servers Behind Your Favorite MMORPG
Dedicated game servers are a requirement in today’s MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for the seamless play that makes these games so appealing. The fact that you can connect and play a game like World of Warcraft or Aion with thousands of other players is an impressive achievement.Thanks to the dedicated game servers, with their ever increasing capabilities, the quality of the MMORPGs is being taken to a whole new level with improving gameplay, better graphcis, and so on.
Just as you would log into any large business system and view or post or sort data, game playing online has also made it possible to log in play a game, save your game (automatically) and continue exactly from where you left off. In order to do all of this, lots of data must move between the various servers that are involved and this requires a lot of processing power, bandwidth, and storage space. In a traditional video game everything is handled on your computer. In an MMORPG the dedicated servers unload much of the work from your machine and use their processing power to make the game world function for hundreds or thousands of simultaneous players.
Game servers do a lot of work. For example, the server will compare and calculate a character’s position, the position of the other players, etc., while doing the same thing for all the other players and every mobile object in the game. Servers also constantly interact with your computer during an attack, report damage, calculate projectiles, as well as logging what kills a character.
In the real world however it is not just a single dedicated server, but it really more of a server farm. MMORPGs handle enough data that a single server would be vastly inadequate. Hundreds or thousands of players access these games at any one time, chatting, playing, and interacting with everything in-game. In addition, many of these games actually have a number of “realms” or “shards” which can be treated as different worlds, each requiring different servers.
Access to the game, from anywhere in the real world, for example, is handled by the “login server.” Players can communicate with each other, via text, with the “chat servers.” Voice traffic, perhaps used in a raid, is handled by VoIP or Ventrilo servers.
Since thousands of users access these games at one time, the game servers require data centers that allow fast data transmission speeds that the average home broadband connection can only dream about. Most of these servers are run by the software company that owns the game title, allowing them to more easily control and update the game worlds as well as offer the required speeds and environments that allow for the best game play features. So the next time you log in to play your Final Fantasy MMO game, remember that server farm that makes the game live.
Gamers Notebooks aion, game servers, mmorpg, servers, warcaft, world of warcraft