MMORPG White Papers and Research

[Idimmu]

Hi, I\'m an MSc student, and I have to do a research paper on 3D engines suitable for a MMORPG and the technical conciderations for a game server with regards to high speed networking etc, (a bit vague I know, but it\'s all I have to go on).

I was wondering if anyone knew of any sites/papers/anything that would cover any of the research/technology that should be thought about when creating a MMORPG engine or server that may be of use to me? Basically anything that would be of any help would be gratefully received.

I will be looking at the PlaneShift engine alot as its the only open engine im aware of, but not as a competitor, this research is to help with one of the lecturers teach a new course next year.

Thanks very much.

[Caldazar]

I dont think that this is what you are looking for but.. its better to have one more site than one less..

Sourceforge Its the biggest open-source site that I know of.

[CadRipper]

My 3D references are quite old, but here they are anyway  

I\'m not sure about the server part in all this though...

A book that has always been a reference :
James D. Foley, Andries van Dam, Steven K. Feiner, John F. Hughes; Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C (2nd Edition); Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996.

You will find a lot of information on Paul Heckbert\'s page

You can probably have more info and interesting contacts on Seth Teller\'s page

There was the 3D Engine List, too bad it has been discontinued  

The Gamasutra site used to have interesting coding articles, though I didn\'t check it for a long time now.

Of course, like pointed by Caldazar, you will probably find interesting information on source forge. You can check Crystal Space (the engine used in PS), which contains docs and interesting links (probably more recents )

Good luck with your work !

[magnus99]

Nearly all MMORPGs use standard client-server models for networking, mainly because they are easy to implement and have well known properties (and hard limitations -- e.g., they do not scale). There probably have been some implementations that do ad hoc load balancing on clusters (for example, splitting up realms), but none of this is that interesting from an academic standpoint (mostly just \"hacks\").

A lot of the same ideas have been explored before in the context of FPS games. There probably is motivation to reevaluate this area since the latency assumptions in a MMORPG are drastically less stringint than in a FPS. If you just lookup \"games\" or something in a papers database (try citeseer), you will probably find stuff that is relevant (dead-reckoning, multicast groups, etc.). Projects off the top of my head are MazeMan (the first academic distributed architecture -- not client-server but p2p) and Mercury (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/Papers/publications/2002.netgames/) which implemented Quake using a publish-subscribe system over a Chord-like p2p network (Chord is the distributed hash table developed at MIT; but anyone involved in academia and is into systems or networking will know what a DHT is since they are all the rave now . Aside from that, I once read an article on gamestra about a clustered mmorpg implementation that some company was selling (and customers would just \"populate\" the engine to have a functioning mmorpg). Not sure if that was anything novel or not, but the PR release sounded interesting. There was some presentation about another MMORPG project over Pastry or something (another DHT) at Yale or someplace... it was shown at OSDI last fall... should be able to look it up.

[Idimmu]

Excellent, thanks very much, Ill give all those places a gander over the next few days!

[Vengeance]

This is one of the better articles I know of regarding the networking:

http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20020916/lambright_01.htm

Also, just for the record, the PS engine does implement both Dead Reckoning and Multicast groups as the other guy astutely mentioned.

- V