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Role Playing (Games)

Engineering Everquest 29

Posted by Zonk from the iron-behind-the-giant dept.
The IEEE Spectrum site has an article up discussing the engineering required to keep Norrath running. From the article: "The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room containing the rows and rows of servers that run Sony's online games. The whooshing of a massive air-conditioning system is so loud that conversation is almost impossible. A large steel cage surrounds more than 500 servers stacked 32 high in towering racks--and this is just one battalion, albeit the largest, in Sony's 1500-machine army of servers."
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Engineering Everquest More

Engineering Everquest

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  • The Death Star is a huge, warm, windowless room containing the rows and rows of servers that run Sony's online games. The whooshing of a massive air-conditioning system is so loud that conversation is almost impossible.
    That's no moon , It's a space station

  • Not just Everquest (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MMaestro ( 585010 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @04:00AM (#13040105)
    At any given time, Sony is hosting more than 150 000 sword-wielding, laser-shooting, dragon-slaying gamers from all over the world.

    Everquest is merely the highlight of the report, but theres also EQ2, Planetside and SWG all running off these servers. With that in mind, 150,000 users 'at any given time' isn't too impressive when spread out over 1,500 servers. Assuming the number of users is equally divided (37,500 users and 375 servers per game 'at any given time') then theres not much workload really being put on the servers. That comes out to roughly 1 server per 100 players.

    • Remember, though, that Raph Koster mentioned in an article linked in another Slashdot post [slashdot.org] that servers devote roughly 40% of their processing time to pathfinding for NPCs. (The stat was for SWG in particular, though it likely applies to most games with the same NPC-to-PC ratio).
      • That's hilarious. At least from a City of Heroes and World of Warcraft (the 2 mmos I've played) pathfinding on npcs can be described as:

        1. Walk mob between predetermined points A and B when not fighting.
        2. Chase after player who is running away in a straight line path. Maybe move around small obstacle to continue chasing player. On the other hand, maybe get stuck and decide following player is too much trouble, so return to path outlined in number 1 above.
        • City of Heroes is worse than that. In City of heroes, if the NPC finds any difficulty when going from point A to point B it'll merely jump to the next point in the path and merrily continue its way. This mighty leap is undeterred by players (there's collision detection in CoH), crates, scenery, walls, skyscrappers, player-created obstructions (such as "rain" powers or AoE location debuffs)... You name it, the NPC can jump to/through/over it.

          If that "pathfinding" requires 40% of their server resources, I
        • Yea, but think of how many hundreds of thousands of NPCs there are to move, keep track of stats, hit the loot tables for when killed every second.

          On that note, I've wondered for a while what the WoW servers are like for a world, say, Uther where I am.
        • Pathfinding requires heavy computation even for crappy versions (WoWs is a little better than you describe, but not much). Even the best pathfinding algorithms have poor worst case performance - which is why developers put early bail out with "cheats", like the walking through walls or jumping to the player you see so often, in.
      • And yet NPC pathing in EQ was one of the worst, despite the fact it used the rail system. MOBs moved along defined rails to get to you and often would get lost easily and eventually appear right on top of you. This was also very obvious to pet classes where their pet was told to attack a monster in front of you and it decided to go sideway, through 6 interconnecting rooms, up and down some stairs and finally get to its destination with the whole damn dungeon in tow... which was instant death for you and t
        • Actually, the only time that a mob would appear right on top of you like that is if the "cheat detection" went off. Back in the day (1999), when not everybody was completely uberized, people actually used to grind XPs in Lavastorm. The less scrupulous would tag a mob, run to the entrance to Najena, and duck to the left just before the zoneline. If they were fast enough, they could do it before the mob got inside the cave entrance, and it would get stuck on the outside of the cave on the hill, where they
          • WoW has a long way to go until they get the pet issues right, too bad they didn't learn any lessons from EQ. I played a mage and necro to 65, so I was all about pet classes and endured the horrid growing pains early in 1998 and through 2002 when I finally gave up, at that point the pets were mediocre in the lower planes and you really needed a focus to get them to be workable, luckily the LDON one was relatively easy to get, but rest of the focii were a royal pain. I was 2 boxing a mage and cleric just so
    • Yet they still lag :)

      As SWG is one of the (if not the) lowest populated games, I'd say there's something awry with the numbers. I'm on a faily low populated server, and at any given time there are (just guessing) 1-2k players on. The more heavily popilated servers have around 3k players. SOE stopped reporting number of active accounts some time ago when they dropped from the initial 350k, so I can only guess what the actual numbers are. What I don't know is how many servers run my galaxy. But I can

  • Second place (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @04:51AM (#13040287)
    I'd rather have an article describing, you know, the awesome engineering obstacles (failures and successes, thanks) a similar but larger project a few people may've heard of. I seriously felt like this was a copy of an article from Time magazine, what with the information that was just @#$@ old and common knowledge (that is, to the audience of people who would be interested in the first place), and really just an advertisement in disguise.

    I admit I'm new to reading this periodical, and skipped straight to this article, but... I sortof held IEEE to higher standards. Maybe I should go to journalism school, or something, but ... why do I care? I didn't learn anything. They were small, got bigger. They make revenue from customers. Now, if this was a wonderful introduction to When Projects Go Off Expectations, with a "case study", then that would have been something.

    "We budgeted the game to hit 200,000 subscribers, 20% churn, eleventy billion in cash, and so we set up servers (because YUO LIKES TEH OVERFLOWZ) to support 300,000. When 500,000 people showed up on opening day, Leeroy Jenkins shat his pants. He dropped a drumstick and suggested we throttle connectivity, so that players who do get on have the experience we designed, and players that don't have a tangible explanation as to our undercapacity. Thus was born the much hated queue system, and you can bet Leeroy a chicken that we burnt the midnight oil adding capacity. A unique issue games like EverWowSide face is that we can't just take the servers down for teh upgradez. So we had to do a cost benefits analysis and for the first two weeks we did rolling reboots [SEE SIDEPANEL]... our original upgrade-lifecycle plan [SEE SIDEPANEL] expected us to have this sort of user growth over the course of a year, but we had to have had it doned yesterdays liek JeffKs. So [INTERESTINGLY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE ABOUT A MASSIVE ROLLOUT IN A MONTH THAT WAS PLANNED FOR A YEAR, HOPEFULLY AVOIDING TOO MUCH BACK PATTING AND MAY POSSIBLY BE RELATED TO ENGINEERING, AS OPPOSED TO COME PLAY EVERSIDEGALAXIES2]"

    No, wait. I'm wrong. An article about all those empty servers is much more interesting.
    • No, wait. I'm wrong. An article about all those empty servers is much more interesting.

      EverQuest 2 servers are hardly empty.
      • EQ2 servers were empty by comparisson to the EQ servers maybe 2 years ago. Outside of the newbie zone it's pretty barren.

        I checked on EQ about 3 months ago at a friend's house (I refuse to go back) and almost every zone he went on was either completely empty or had 1 person running through it en route to a raid zone where almost everyone plays in (since many guilds imploded and combined into 1 big guild just so they can handle the high end content).

        We then played some EQ2 (for sh*ts and giggles) and zone
  • After reading this I was wondering if anyone had this sort of story about the Ultima Online servers, and how they have changed/ grown onver the last 7 years.

    I'm curious now as to how many servers run the oceania shard (supposedly in Sydney)

  • NO PICTURES? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mjpaci ( 33725 ) * on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @07:22AM (#13040731) Homepage Journal
    This is geek porn! How can you talk of a room full of computers running a popular MMORPG and NOT HAVE PICTURES? /. ppl get excited about pictures of cruddy wiring in LAN closets! This article might as well be a harlequin romance novel.

    --Mike

    • Re:NO PICTURES? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The print version of the article has a picture of the server cluster and the Death Star.

      Your local library may receive a subscription, but if you live near a university that offers electical or computer engineering degrees you might have better luck contacting the campus library.

  • SOE glue sniffers (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fiz Ocelot ( 642698 ) <baelzharon@gmailQUOTE.com minus punct> on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @02:17PM (#13044825)
    From the article: "The NOC, a crowded room in Sony Online Entertainment's main office building, smells faintly of elementary-school glue.

    That really goes a loooong way in explaining a lot of things that go on over at SOE. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they eat it too.

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