Slides for our panel arehere: “Killing mmo tech sacred cows.pdf”.
Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic).
PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).
4 replies on “AGDC-2009: Killing the Sacred Cows of MMO Technology”
I don’t think I saw one comment supporting the use of Linux for a server…
And I don’t think I noticed one comment/topic about the growth of OSX in the consumer market…
CaesarsGhost: Here’s one.
Windows management has continued to evolve in the direction of direct, at-the-desk interaction. Remote Windows administration “works,” but is flaky beyond belief – it is predicated on either something like RDP (which is just awful over high latency connections), or third-party software you pay through the nose (again) for.
Linux is simply better at being a remotely-managed server. A crappy network is fine; all of the software required is free, included, and widely understood. It provides better-understood and simpler (that is, harder to screw up) security model that can help mitigate the risks that all server software development has to live with.
This doesn’t matter until your game is live (including alpha and beta testing), so naturally you have to balance this against the value mentioned in the slides of ease of development when everything is on your machine; but lots of technical decisions have to be made with balances like that in mind, and I think simply ignoring half the equation is a huge mistake.
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