Dedicated game servers are a requirement in today’s MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) for the seamless play that makes these games so appealing. The fact that you can connect and play a game like World of Warcraft or Aion is an impressive achievement when you consider the thousands of people in the game at the same time. With the steadily increasing capability of the servers 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, online video game playing 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. To accomplish this lots of information must move between the various servers that are involved and this requires a lot of processing power, bandwidth, and storage space. 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 use their processing power to make the game world function for hundreds or thousands of simultaneous players.
A lot of work is done by the game server. For example, a game server will compare and calculate a character’s position, the position of the 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 attacks, calculating spells and missiles and reporting and tracking damage, as well as logging what killed your character or determining the loot acquired.
In the real world however it is not just a single dedicated server, but it really more of 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. In addition, many of these games actually have a number of “realms” or “shards” which can be treated as different worlds, each requiring different servers.
A login server, for example, allow gamers to put in their login information and access the game world from anywhere in the real world. Chat servers relay text information between different players. Voice traffic, perhaps used in a raid, is handled by VoIP or Ventrilo servers.
Since thousands of users access these games at one time, the data centers that house the server farms allow for massive bandwidth and very high data transfer speeds. The company that owns the game title generally also owns the servers, allowing them to more easily update, change, and control these virutal words 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.