The Servers That Run the MMOs
In Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) dedicated game servers are a requirement for the seamless play that makes these games so appealing. Playing in virtual worlds, like Aion or the World of Warcraft, 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 like you would log into your company’s database online and view or post data onto the servers, game playing online has also made it possible sign into the game and interact with the entire “world,” picking up from the exact place from where you logged out. In order to do all of this, lots of data must be moved between the client (your machine) and the server ( Aion ‘s machine) and handling all this information requires lots of processing power. In a traditional video game everything is handled on your computer. In an online game much of the work is handled by the servers, unloading it from your machine and they make the virtual world come alive for hundreds or thouisands of players.
Game servers do a lot of work. For example, a game server will compare and calculate a character’s position, the distance from other players, and so on while doing the same thing for all the other players and every mobile object in the game. Servers also notify a client during an attack, report damage, calculate projectiles, as well as logging what killed your character or determining the loot acquired.
Actually it’s not really a single dedicated server we’re talking about, but a server farm. This “farm” of dedicated game servers is needed for most MMORPGs. Hundreds or thousands of players access these games at any one time, chatting, playing, and interacting with everything in-game. Many of these games also have a number of realms (virtual worlds) within the game, each of which lives on a separate server.
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.” A VoIP server allows for voice traffic.
Since they have to provide for thousands of simultaneous users, data centers that house the server farms allow for massive bandwidth and very high data transfer speeds. 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 World of of Warcraft game, remember that server farm that makes the game live.
