Our last couple of posts were about two talks from GDC 2011. The GDC Vault contains hundreds of talks on all aspects of video game development. The talk slides are usually free. Members can access videos of the presentations, though some of those are free too. Here are a few more that are networking related:
GDC2011: Large-scale Messaging at IMVU, Jon Watte, Technical Director
A talk about scaling up a IMVU’s messaging systems to millions of connections. Very interesting discussion and links for anyone building a MMO. Nice to see Erlang gaining in popularity.
GDCChina 2010: The Server Technology Of Eve Online: How To Cope With 300,000 Players In One World, Kristján Valur Jónsson
At the time of the talk they had peaked at >60,000 simultaneous users. Talks about a few key parts of their infrastructure: some numbers about their database (2000 transactions/s peak), their use of Stackless Python (also discussed here), and the partitioning of servers and services.
GDCAustin 2010: Scalability for Social Games, Robert Zubek
Zynga’s social games (Farmville, etc.) are slow-paced games, so they are very amenable to implementation on standard web technologies. This talk gives some basic outline of how web services are scaled.
GDCAustin 2010: MMO 101: Approaches that have been taken at Disney Online Studios in the development of our MMO environments, Roger H. Hughston
We discussed Disney’s ToonTown in the book. This talk gives a broader overview of Disney’s MMOs including ToonTown. The technology for ToonTown was re-used in Pirates of the Caribbean Online. Its broad-brush; they use zones worlds and try to give a seamless experience; they do network filtering using a channel-based approach.