The Very Large World of Wish
Devin Cambridge, 2004-06-10

Servers: Single System Image and Clusters (lots and lots of techno babble)

When we talk about a server, most people think of one machine connected to a network. Hopefully that machine contains a fast processor, lots of memory, and a fast network connection. However, when a lot of people join the server, they may over task the processor, network, or even the memory. Thus, the server provides one side of the equation (the other side of the equation is the players' machines and their ability to receive and display data at an adequate rate). For a MMORPG company, the server side is the most important aspect since the server side is the side they control. The standard solution to MMORPG implementation is to replicate the game world across multiple servers and limit the number of players per server. The disadvantages remain obvious. Friends may be forced to live on different servers and will never see each other during game play, or one server might be more popular than another creating a slower game for those on that particular server. One might think, "So what we need is a bigger, faster server." These types of machines exist. IBM, SGI and Cray Research specialize in the large server, "big iron" market. They create machines characterized as Symmetric Multi-Processing. This means they take a lot of processors and force them to work together. Dual processing machines exist in the PC space and some of our readers may have even used a few. Now, imagine a machine that possesses 32, 64, 128 or even 2048 processors. In such a machine the processors work in unison provided the programs (including the operating system) are parallelized. In other words the software must be told to break its calculations into equal parts for each of the processors to work on. This creates a complex task for the programmer who must now think in parallel. Thinking in parallel makes programming difficult but the results allow advanced machine clusters to overcome the limitation of a single CPU's speed. Ideally, the programming team writes the operating system's kernel, the main program on a computer that controls all hardware, to execute in parallel and instructs the kernel on how to effectively make all the processors, boards, and memory look effectively like one system. This is called a Single System Image. On a regular PC, the CPU normally has direct access to the adjacent memory at very fast speeds. If we imagine taking sixteen machines and connecting them together via a network, we create a network cluster. However, the first machine has very fast access to the memory on its board, but slower access to the memory on the fifth machine. It would be nice if we could increase the speed of the network to that of the on system pipe-way so that the time to access the memory on the fifth system's memory is equal to the time it would take to access the local memory. If the electrical pipe ways, or buses, between each processor and the memory locations are near equal and large, the system classifies as a Symmetric Multi-Processing machine. The advantage of an SMP machine that is built by expert hands resides in the effective, large system that results. Not only do the processors divide up the task, but also the memory in the system aggregates. If each system board in a SMP machine holds four processors and a terabyte of memory, a 128 processor machine will effectively hold 32 terabytes of fast access RAM. But, designing and building a SMP machine takes a lot of skill (the memory access and bus design problem becomes geometric as the number of CPU's increase) and expense.

WISH Blade Server Technology (or why I just went into a long diatribe about clustering)

When Marc Laukien and I met under the large yellow stripped tent at the Mutable Realms booth at E3, I was impressed by his amiable and easygoing attitude. His attitude belied his technical skill and achievements. Marc graduated from the Technical University in Munich, Germany and he later formed a company called ZeroC to foster a middleware clustering technology called ICE (Internet Communications Engine) that would aid him in launching Mutable Realms. Much like the Nevrax NeL engine, software aficionados can obtain ICE free under the Gnu Public License or purchase a commercial license from ZeroC. For WISH, Mutable Realms combines ICE with Verari Rackserver hardware. The Rackserver is a cluster of PC blades. A PC blade is essentially a low profile PC on a board that slides into a telecommunications rack. The ICE software controls the cluster and a dedicated network provides the pathway between nodes. The design allows for a very large and scalable online world. The implementation of WISH gives the player a nice experience. Unlike a lot of the commercial MMORPG clusters currently implemented, there is no "skip" or pause when traversing boundaries. In addition, for such a large world, Marc and the WISH team spent a lot of time on pathfinding so that the creatures could not only find their way in tight areas, but also follow you across boundaries. The illusion created makes the player feel as if the backend architecture exists as a single server. Also, if one of the blades should crash, the load disperses to the other blades making the cluster fault resistant, an important aspect to large scale MMORPG model.

Content is King

The back end technology remains compelling. Compelling enough that when Shanghai Cartoon scoured through the multitude of MMORPG technologies on the market, they felt that ICE and the WISH engine possessed the best technology to fuel their upcoming Chinese title Sui Tang Online, an MMORPG based on their popular animation title Sui Tang Ying Xiong Zhuan, about the revolt that lead to the overthrow of the Sui Dynasty and the formation of the Tang Dynasty. Marc introduced me to Lan Hai Wen, President of Shanghai Cartoon. When discussing the philosophy of Shanghai Cartoon's decision, Lan Hai Wen stated that the WISH engine provided the much needed scalability to be profitable. While the Chinese people don't have the money to generate the margins western gamers pay to play games, they have the volume to enable an online game to be profitable. Lan Hai Wen estimates that over 13 million Chinese citizens play online games either directly online via the 8 million established internet connections in China or in gaming cafés; thus, Shanghai Cartoon hopes to create a low margin, high volume enterprise with Sui Tang Online. The prospect of a massive game environment that contains the entire empire of China during the Tang dynasty seems like something that even Asian savvy western gamers might be interested. In fact, Sui Tang Online seemed to possess more promise than the content seen at the WISH terminals. In the MMORPG arena content is king. While the sketches for the WISH material look good, I couldn't help but feel that WISH played like another generic Dungeons and Dragons style RPG. Also, while the technology provides a seamless world, players need interesting storylines to motivate their exploration and adventure. Sui Tang seemed interesting. During my travels, I have had the opportunity to see some pretty spectacular looking games in Asia. Unfortunately, few localize to the western market. Also, when the west attempts to produce an "Asian" themed game, the view and flavor of the world becomes somewhat bland and ordinary, like Hunan food served at a restaurant in lower Utah. In conclusion, it would be nice to see an Asian game genre produced in China and localized by an American company.

Other large scale worlds exist. While I didn't review the title, I did look at Dark and Light. Much like WISH they possess an extraordinary technology. In their instance, the terrain renderer from VWorld Powered is perhaps the best I have seen. Graphically, the terrain and clouds look like a live aerial view from a plane. But like WISH, DnL remains short on content. In an ideal world, the WISH team would partner with the DnL team to create a technology solution second to none. If they could then license the content, character and building objects from Sui Tang and publish the title in North America and Europe, I think they would have a hit on their hands. While this would probably never happen, a reviewer can at least wish.