Schmunzels development Blog

Hi everyone *waves all around*

As we now have our new and shiny Forums in order to communicate more with you guys out there I thought that I give it a go and start with the communication process.

In this "blog" of mine I intend to post in an irregular way about my development endeavors so that you guys out there can have some basic idea of what I am doing here with our beloved precu.

Today I want to tell you about our general server layout.

As you possibly know (and if not you will learn it now) one of the major features of our server is its scalability which allows any possible layout starting from a small private party server to a fully fledged data-center install.

Scalability mainly boils down to the organization of data between different nodes of processing.
In a server layout were you allow a zone (say planet) being divided into different subzones which then might be run on a different cpu or an entirely different box, you have to organize your data-flow and the data ownership between them. In a real server implementation this would mean that you would have one central data-broker who would serve the nodes data-requests with potentially a lot of organizational overlap and a huge amount of inter-server communication to coordinate objects and their interactions between your nodes.

In our planet-based MMO this approach would be especially effective when you have large amounts of players evenly distributed over an entire planet which - in a perfect world- wouldn’t interact with each other like by seeing each other.

And this is exactly where the problems start. When our players are near each other but on different zones we need to inform the neighboring zones of what is happening on their adjacent zones. Players will interact with each other and the world around them regardless of zone boundaries - this subzone communication will require huge amounts of processing power and bandwidth.

Bearing this in mind we decided early on in development that given the amount of CPU power available nowadays the only real bottleneck a server would be likely to face is bandwidth.

While the bandwidth necessary in inter-server communication will be huge it will not be the main problem as servers usually should be interconnected by fast lan connections. However for the connection to the player this is quite markedly different - ignoring the extreme case of a lan-party with 1000 players.

As an example I will tell you that our private test center in Canada - which is on a 1MB upload line - can support around 40 to 50 players running around and interacting (combat socializing etc). The cpu is at this point hardly affected by one single zone (though in our case we host all 11 servers on a dualcore machine).
On my private machine (a 6000 Athlon dualcore) I have up to 300 bots running around in a single city in debug mode when debugging/testing the network layer, reaching around 40% load with the occasional spike upwards when new players log in.

Thus we made for ourselves the decision to go a markedly different way in terms of server design.
Our layout has a central connection server which handles the communication between the different zones and the players and one zoneserver per planet (and / or instance). The advantage here is mainly that the interservercommunication between planets is very limited - mainly to chat and travelling players.

This means that the community - or private person out there - will be able to decide whether they want to run a big scaled server with one zone sitting on one machine connected to the other zones over high speed network or whether they want to go for a smaller party server were all zones can be run on a single machine with the option of running only selected planets if this should be desired.

The upside to this is that our network layer has a much smaller overhead both in processing power and interserver bandwidth while it is only truly limited in the size of the outward connection.
The downside to this is that given a huge outward line it will in theory be possible to reach the limits of the CPU. This will quite certainly happen on older low memory machines.

However, the shared distribution approach will have its tangible limits reached in nearly the exact same situation as ours - when we are dealing with huge amounts of players on one spot, whereas its benefits of course are that the theoretical amount of players will be much higher, when the players are evenly distributed over the entire planet.

I hope that you had fun having this first look into our server design and I’ll promise to be back soon

sch

Communities

Please if you are a community leader please send us your info for our communities pages.

http://www.swganh.com/anh_communities/

SWG:ANH - Desktop Wallpapers

Hi Everyone,

as with everything in regards to the website look & feel, thanks to DavidTirno, the Downloads Section is now live. Featured on this page are a number of Wallpapers made by Temploiter who’s currently part of our QA group.

We hope that you’ll enjoy the downloads and if you have a submission that you’d like to perhaps have featured as a download please let us know, if it’s something that fits within the SWG:ANH theme & mentality we’ll be sure to include it here…

Best wishes from all of us here at SWG:ANH!

SWGANH QA Scoop (Weekly QA News)

The Sunday Scoop: January 31, 2009

Note: QA has a weekly information column on the Developer Forums and we wondered if visitors to this site might enjoy reading about what happens at SWG:ANH during the week from the QA perspective. So I have reprinted it here. Happy reading!

Dev News (and some tester news mixed in!)
Eruptor has been quietly working away on the tutorial for some time and this week we were able to get another look at his progress! The tutorial is made up of nine parts. Eru has completed Parts I through III and is well into Part IV.

Most of us probably took the original tutorial once or twice. But, it was likely to have been in 2003! You may feel a strange sort of ‘déjà vu’ when you are in the tutorial again. So testers, if you haven’t been to the tutorial since Eru added the latest stuff, you must go!

In Part I, you learn how to navigate and go from third to first person. You learn to chat also. Then in Part II, you are shown how to use the radial menu and collect your basic supplies from the Imperial Officer. Moving to Part III, you learn about banking and the Bazaar, and in Part IV, cloning and insurance. You will notice that Eru also added some new NPCs. He gave us this hint: ‘the tutorial space station is now populated with more NPCs who have a lot of opinions of what you do in there ’

Read On…

SWGANH Releases Their New Site

New Website for Star Wars Galaxies: A New Hope

Emphasis on Communication

Star Wars Galaxies: A New Hope (SWG:ANH) has introduced a new website at http://www.swganh.com. Informative and interactive, it is hoped that the site will renew the relationship between the SWG:ANH emulator project and those who are interested in Star Wars Galaxies as it was played prior to the Combat Upgrade (CU).

Communication is a key feature of the new site that will include moderated Public Forums. Once registered, visitors may exchange ideas, make suggestions, ask questions, and post comments. The forums will provide an avenue for communication among and between visitors and team members.

Navigation through the site begins on the Home page. From a unique planetary map, visitors can choose the areas of the site they wish to visit. These areas include the About section, where visitors will find a brief history of the SWG:ANH project and staff, as well as technical information for future server administrators. The Milestones section gives visitors a visual representation of what has been accomplished on the project to date and what remains to be completed. The site also includes a Gallery of videos and screenshots from the Test Center that are sure to bring back memories of the game that so many still long to play.

The News section will be updated regularly with developments, added features, and other ANH news. In How To Help, visitors will find FAQs to answer general questions about the project and offer information to those who may be interested in becoming part of the SWG:ANH team. An Opportunities page lists positions that are currently available for developers, researchers, and other staff. There is also information about the search for particular screenshots and certain files the development team hopes former players might possess and be willing to share. The final section of the site honors our Contributors who have given their time and talent to the SWG:ANH project.

The team at SWG:ANH invite you to visit the website and look forward to hearing from you!

SWG Development Teams

SWGServers.com is Reaching out to all those SWG Dev Teams to contact us so we can get you listed and get info about you for all to see your progress!

Please visit our Contact Us Page and give us any info possable, so we can create/update your page and Dev Team Info.

our Current list of SWG Dev Teams are:

SWGAnh
SWGEmu

Please help us make this list grow, with as much info as possable about each team.

Thanks