Jumpgate Evolution

Since this remains a topic of at least minor confusion, I’d like to make a last-ditch attempt to offer a primer on the subject for members of our community unfamiliar with sharded games.

First, a quick history lesson: The term "shard" originates from Ultima Online, one of the oldest graphical MMOGs. Due to UO’s popularity, it was technically impossible for the server architecture of UO to support the number of simultaneous users attempting to play the game. Multiple servers were thus established, each as an independent copy of the game world, so that more people could play. The game fiction described these multiple worlds as the shards of a shattered world-gem (Mondain’s, for those faithful Avatars who remember that far back). Other games have occasionally chosen different genre-specific terminology, but in much of the game industry, "shards" and "sharding" have become the simple generic handles used to discuss the subject.

While it is true that some shards can be purposed, i.e. for moderation of special Role-playing environments, or for PvP rules, ultimately sharding is almost always performed for technical reasons, not for game design reasons. Purposing shards is perhaps a means to make the best of things, since you’re going to have to shard the game anyway.

Science fiction has called the sudden arrival of too many people in one place a "flash crowd"[1], and the phenomenon has real meaning in the modern Internet where traffic surges occur that can knock down servers. In an unsharded game world, as on the greater Internet, the simple knowledge that a special event will occur at a certain time in a certain place can easily result in a flash crowd at the target location. Sharding is a very easy way to prevent this instability: the server administration process simply limits the number of accounts permitted to use a certain server. Heavily used servers are typically listed as "full", and either new subscribers are directed to other shards, or new logins to that shard are disallowed until the load eases, or both. Overall load is distributed, and no server crosses the threshold of instability. Nearly every mainstream online game that boasts more than a few thousand simultaneous players is sharded. Depending on the direct traffic handling ability of the server hardware, the figures that have been suggested to me to use as an example are 2500-5000 users per shard.

EvE Online is most often given as the best-known example of a successful monolithic, unsharded game. EvE was doubtless designed from the ground up to be that way – it uses many server nodes, but each is only responsible for a region of the game. EvE’s design is exemplary, but just as with a sharded game, the nodes in EvE still have physical limits and still can only handle a certain amount of player traffic before they are overloaded. The larger corporations in the game are known to prearrange major fleet engagements with EvE’s support staff, so that additional machines can be assigned to the affected node to reduce the possibility that node will collapse due to the spike in demand. Though EvE’s structure is resilient, the support team is responsive, and the problems are indeed minimized, EvE still suffers from this basic problem of any unsharded game.

Jumpgate is an interesting case because a naive look at its architecture suggests that it also could function as an unsharded game. Jumpgate includes "spaceservers" that handle regions of the game world, and which in fact are scalable so that theoretically any number of spaceservers can be used, from one supporting the whole game, to one supporting every independent sector of the game space (~170 in JGC). This design predates EvE’s architecture by several years, and was chosen because Jumpgate’s real-time spaceflight simulation relies on very rapid packet transfers between clients and spaceservers to provide smooth location and damage updates for combat, as the PvPers in our community especially are very well aware (and when this system isn’t running smoothly, it’s obvious). The absolutely critical factor here is that whereas the spaceserver design is optimized for rapid combat information flow and scalability, for all noncombat transactions the game relies on a central state server, which is not at all scalable in the same way.

A fundamental redesign of the Jumpgate server architecture has never been practical within the development timeline of Jumpgate Evolution. Jumpgate Classic itself was sharded for two reasons: improved service in terms of network latency for the European customers, and a business agreement with the European publisher that they would operate their own copy of the game. In all stress tests of Jumpgate Classic during beta, we never reached a point where the total number of online users truly taxed the state server, thus an unsharded game would indeed have been possible with our architecture, up to a point. Since we never had large numbers of subscribers, we still do not entirely know how many thousand simultaneous users represent the threshold where we are forced to shard the game.

With Jumpgate Evolution, and all the new expertise, new energy, and new interest coming together on the project, we intend and expect to find out what those limits truly are. At the end of the day, that is the ultimate reason we will shard.



Notes:

1. Niven, Larry – "Flash Crowd" (c) 1973, orig. appeared in Three Trips in Time and Space, by Robert Silverberg, ed. (also in short story compilation The Flight of the Horse, (c) 1973 by Larry Niven).

first post!

i win at forum!


So from what you say, it looks like sharding is going to be a definite in JGE?

Will there definitely be US and EU servers?
Will there definitely be PvP and PvE servers?

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While one who sings with his tongue on fire gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers. Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in.

If there are distinguished servers for PvP, PvE and possibly more, can you tell anything about the game rules in them? (Are players not attackable in PvE? Is PvP a major fragfest without consecuences? etc.)

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one volley, one podride… NOVA Mk.1

All we can say with certainty at this point is that sharding will depend on the number of players. As I tried to make painfully clear in the bulletin – the decision to shard is a technical issue. The topic of "what kinds of servers will there be?" is a design matter quite subsidiary to the actual sharding decision itself.

In other words, JGE’s success will dictate the existance of shards, and the individual rules of said shards will depend on whether or not the JG cummunity can learn to behave itself. Does that about sum it up?

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Chewcaca – I will put on the Rubber Glove of Colon crushing +5. You will cry, and so will baby Jesus.
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"First of Foot, and Right of the Line"

So basically:

1) There will probably be sharding due to performance issues
2) There may be sharding due to locality issues
3) There may be sharding due to PvP issues

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While one who sings with his tongue on fire gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers. Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in.

i think that’s a great write-up and i agree that really the only reasons you should shard the game is for latency and load issues.

Ok then let’s clear this up right away, Open up an alpha test with me and 4000 of my closest friends and let’s see how many people it takes to bring down the server. Seems reasonable eh?


You have my email address, I will be expecting something shortly.

Can understand why but im off to puke

But if we get a EU server i might just not project it,

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Seems to me that ND will only decide to shard the game IF there are too many users…not due to PVP concerns.