An Adaptive Distributed MMORPG Server Architecture And Its Prototype Implementation

Recently,MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) has been widely welcomed and attracting much attention. It takes advantage of networks which is not limited by time and place, makes players located in different places to exchange and play in a persistent virtual world, by which players can exert the potential that not held in the real world, improving the quality of interaction and competition tremendously and is welcomed by many players. However, the development of MMORPG is limited by its server scalability. The number of simultaneous players in a single virtual world could hardly break through 100,000, which limited the interaction of players, degraded the experience of the game. To achieve high scalability, distributed server architecture, excellent algorithm of interest management and efficient load balancing must be taken.This dissertation absorbed the research results of MMORPG server before, and mainly on load distribution strategy, distributed architecture and techniques of load balancing for the purpose of scalability, and implemented an prototype system of MMORPG server. Through experiment, it proved the system's scalability and the deployment pattern's effect on the server performance.The server architecture and load distribution strategy it proposed, let the system operate in a way in the middle of the regionalization and global copy and transit smoothly, avoid the crowd problem in single region and the communication overhead of global copy. It divided the server into two components of simulator and connection manager, separates the function of connection management, alleviate the load of simulator so that raises the performance of the system. The architecture it brought forward made utilizing simple and efficient load balancing algorithms possible and provided the conditions of using load balancing hardware. It advanced the concept of Flock Predictive Area of Interest to carry out the interest management between simulators. On internal interest management of simulators, it made clients get state information actively reducing the area of interest and increasing the player's field of view on the same time, decreasing the occupation of bandwidth and enhancing the experience of game. Further, it designed an extensible protocol of game. The architecture it put forward could be applied in the commercials in order to raise the number of players that carried and improve the experience of players.