I was learning about the architecture of MMO games and how they have Patch Servers, Login Servers, World Servers etc and I wondered how they would communicate together.
For example, when a user first starts up the client it will connect to the patch server and update itself before launching. Then, the user will log in to the Login Server which will check that the account is valid etc and pass on this information to the World Servers. Since these servers will be running on different machines for most setups, do they simply talk to eachother via sockets? Is it as simple as that or is there more to it?
I’d say that more then likely it’s not encrypted, but rather a local-only connection which is hardwired to the other local severs with no entry-point from the wild other then the one public facing server.
There’s more than one way to handle this. For example, I’m currently building an MMO game where I’ve designed it in such a way that there will be almost no server to server communication directly, but instead all talk to a central database cluster.