Hi, i am interested in servers and i want to know more about what they are and what they can do as they play a huge role in multiplayer game development.
Questions
Say you made a fantasy game like World of Warcraft but your server only allowed 80 players, can servers interact with each other allowing a player to move from server to server without having to exit the game so instead they stay on a loading screen.
I went to the dell website the other day i i noticed they sell servers, they arn’t cheap but i’m not sure which one some one could need or use for a game (I’m not going to buy a server unless i have created a game)
Can you turn your pc into a server and if you can would you be able to use your pc at the same time or would it restrict you from using your pc.
Thanks for reading i am intrested in servers they seem handy.
Well, when you look at Dell’s servers, you are looking at the modern usage for server, which is more akin to server-class hardware. These systems are designed for various things such as broad concurrency or fast processing.
For your case servers are just applications, but would require hardware capable of running what you intend to do with them. You could run Unity as a persistent server if you’d like, but to do much with requires some skill. To anything with networking requires more skill than a single player game, but persistency and database connectivity complicates matters as well.
Physical servers, are just computers dedicated to providing a network based service. Yes, any computer (or network enabled device) can be a server. That said, most commerical servers are built with service providing in mind. They have more ram, different boards, network cards, and chasis than say a home computer. The most common special function servers are e-mail, file servers, application, database, and web.
For an MMO, the real hard parts are finding MMO server application suites that give your game functionality, integrating them into your game, and then finding the right hosting environment (beyond the servers, there’s network bandwidth, security (physical and network), etc…). MMO hosting can get expensive, real fast! Many people are looking into virualized or Cloud hosting to help address the cost verses performance. (you should get a better handle on hardware before you try and wrap your mind around virtualization of hardware).
Okay thanks for the information, but is there a way to not use much money or no money in order to have a multiplayer game, the idea i’m looking at is 60-80 players but if i could run the game for free with one server and only 10 or more players i would like to know, thanks anyway.
(I wouldn’t have one server and ten or more players, i would run the game like that as a test or alpha with a few friends to show them what i have done and to test it out)
You can probably run something with 10 players on a typical home computer, unless it is really poorly written or is a very large game. By large, I mean data large, not terrain large although large terrain does take up more resources.
I bought my servers, and co-locate them at a datacenter here in the UK.
The one thing I’d suggest is that if you are not familiar with server management, security, optimisations etc - then just hire/lease a dedicated server. It is a little more expensive - but at least they take care of OS upgrades/patches/networking, firewalls etc for you.And you can concentrate on your game development and not server management (which is another full time job!)
Its much nicer to be able to pick up the phone and say - “my servers real slow at the moment, can you look into it for me” - and you can expect a fix within an hour at any time of day/night.
My datacenter is http://www.rapidswitch.com - who also offer dedicated servers - so worth a look if your in the UK.
VPS can be cheaper - but your sharing your server hardware with others, and it can reach a limit quite quickly… but good for starting out on!