Thread: Hi, hey, hello
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Old 09-30-2013, 11:00 PM   #11
the_logos
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Re: Hi, hey, hello

It's only true from a very literal perspective. If you're building a very basic graphical MMO targeting a very small population, and using a downloadable client model, it's probably more or less true. At Sparkplay, my engineers built tech for predictively streaming 3d open world MMOs, and a couple of the issues that cropped up that I'd never had to deal with in text MUD servers before that come to mind (there are others, but these are the ones that immediately come to min):

* Scale. Large numbers of players compared to the tiny populations of MUDs make a huge difference in how you might engineer the server-side component, including sharding, enabling cross-shard interaction, and so on. MUDs don't have to deal with this because they don't target scaled up player populations (though some of us would love to have this problem!). The need to prepare for scale changes how one approaches a large range of server-side issues.

* Web-based or thin client with predictive streaming content to facilitate an open world with minimal downloads or waiting while running around the world. This is a very tricky issue that text MUD servers don't have to deal with.

* When you're running around in a client-server model in a 3d world, for instance, you typically have to have the client and server working pretty closely together to prevent 'skipping' around or jittery movement. Movement prediction is important, and something that our team spent a lot of time getting to feel right. Another issue that just doesn't come up in MUDs.

So while it is technically true that there doesn't need to be a big difference, in practice on the commercial side, there is a big difference, which I saw directly when tasking the same guy that had built the Iron Realms 'Rapture' server engine with architecting the MMO server engine for us, and despite having half a decade of extra experience by the time he did the latter, it took him far longer, and he spent far more time beating his head against his monitor (and he wasn't doing it alone in that case, whereas he did it alone in the case of Rapture).

As with everything, until you do it, you don't know what you don't know.
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