Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
194
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
MMOG CONSTRUCTION
FACTORS AND SOLUTIONS
We’ve now seen some of the production challenges that accompany MMOGs. What
further considerations and possible solutions are there? In the following sections,
we’ll take a look at some of the specific considerations for building MMOGs. Each of
these considerations is important for the design focus of an MMOG. In all of game
development, but especially in MMOG creation, technical limitations play a large
role in determining design orientation. If the technology support structure for game
development were as wide open as our imaginations, there would be little need to
consider these in any detail. However, this is clearly not the case. Technology parameters
regularly forcefully shape design specifics.
General MMOG Structures
If we consider the structure of an MMOG, what do we find? We know that we want
hundreds or maybe even thousands of players connected together inside each instance
of our game world as it lives on each game server. We know that players will
load the game on their PCs and become game clients, and then, via an ISP (Internet
service provider) connection and a network cloud (what’s between the ISP and the
game server via the Internet), they can exchange data via a game server. Figure 8-1
represents this idea graphically.
You can see from Figure 8-1 that there are network cloud and ISP dependencies
that the transfer or flow of the game data will encounter. As game data travels from
the player’s machine (the client) through its pathway to the game server, that data is
acknowledged and acted on by the game server as input and sent back to the player’s
machine. Although this physical process is fairly rapid, for a real-time game, considerable
amounts of time are being spent on data travel. This scenario creates one of the
biggest problems for MMOG design, commonly called latency. Figure 8-2 illustrates
how making router-to-router jumps within a network cloud as data travels back and
forth to the player’s client machine contributes to latency. We’ll talk more about exactly
why this is such a problem in the “Latency” section, later in this chapter.
If this is a typical MMOG structure, then, from a design standpoint, we know
what we have to design around or consider in our design ideas. It’s important to understand
that for game event updating (like determining if a player’s projectile “hits”
an enemy and performing the resulting animation and damage updates), your
messaging system has to traverse this somewhat slow and convoluted highway from
point A to point B and then back to point A again.