高彈性高延展性易用之MMOG中介軟體之設計

Abstract

MMOG(Massively Multiplayer Online Game)是一種可以支援上千人同時在一個虛擬遊戲世界互動的遊戲類型。然而，開發一個MMOG的難度遠超過我們所想像，很多議題都是遊戲開發者可能會遭遇到的，例如高效能的網路、分散式的技術、負載平衡等。同時，要開發一個具有競爭力的遊戲，Time-to-Market也是十分重要的考量。因此，MMOG中介軟體解決方案的需求大量增加，而MMOG中介軟體的研究也逐漸受到重視。 在本篇論文中，我們分享在開發MMOG Middleware的經驗。一方面，我們試圖解決開發MMOG所會遇到的共同問題。另一方面，我們嘗試的簡化設計遊戲的API以減低開發MMOG的難度。除此之外，我們也保留彈性給開發者以部署各種不同類型的遊戲在平台之上。

MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) is a game genre, which allows more than 1,000 players to play in the same game through a network concurrently. However, it is much harder than we think to develop a MMOG. There are plenty of issues that MMOG developers may encounter, such as high performance network, distributed technology, load balancing, and so forth. In the meantime, time-to-market is also an important issue to develop a competitive MMOG. Therefore, the demand of middleware solutions for MMOG rises by degrees and the research of MMOG middleware gains more and more respect. In this paper, we would like to share our experience on designing our MMOG middleware. On one hand, we try to overcome the common issues arisen in the MMOG environment. On the other hand, we attempt to simplify the API in order to reduce the complexity of developing MMOGs. In addition, our platform leaves developers the flexibility to adopt the solution and deploy it to any kind of MMOGs.