Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two) It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:
system architecture
18 posts
Beware – latest version of Google Docs has the Gmail bug whereby emails (documents) randomly disappear and become completely inaccessible (this happens a few times a year with Gmail’s IMAP client). With Gmail, you can use the web interface to get around it and see the actual email – but […]
Two things here: if you run any Rails site, check out the security hole ASAP if you haven’t already. You might be safe – but given that even GitHub wasn’t, I’d double check if I were you. (The Rails community seemingly isn’t patching it – and there’s nothing recent on […]
There’s good reasons for adopting Mongo, I’m unconvinced (but open-minded) that performance is one of them. Here’s a ROFLMAO viewpoint on it: “If your write fails, you’re ****ed” Obviously, MySQL’s not perfect, but in most cases I’ve seen, it’s been lack of competence on the developer side, and the lack […]
The IM maintainers seem to be taking a leaf out of Apple’s book: if you don’t purchase the latest Apple OS upgrade (that most people don’t need), you can no longer use their software. If you follow their 4-line install instructions, you’ll get: dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libpng15.15.dylib Referenced from: […]
IMHO, Flickr/Yahoo has one of the best user-authentication systems I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it’s no accident that Twitter (eventually) moved to a system that is extremely similar. (NB: I don’t know if flickr copied if from someone else, but they were the first I remember seeing like this, many […]
Conferences don’t make these public. But they should. So … here are the evaluations (from the audience) for our panel session at AGDC 09. Judge for yourself whether you want to attend any future sessions featuring us again (Adam Martin, Bill Dalton, Rick Lambright, Joe Ludwig, Marty Poulin). Head Count: […]
With some WordPress-Fu, I’ve added a page that’s a category and auto-includes links with custom meta-information. Or, in other words, there’s now a page where I can effortlessly post all my various bookmarked links to do with MMO development – and add my own commentary to each link – which […]
Massively Multiplayer Entity Systems: Introduction So, what’s the connection between ES and MMO, that I’ve so tantalisingly been dangling in the title of the last three posts? (start here if you haven’t read them yet). The short answer is: it’s all about data. And data is a lot harder than […]
I work at a company where managing and directing a subset of the global core-tech is part of my day-to-day job, and I’ve been trying to find good, positive ways forwards. After a year in this role, I’m looking back and wondering whether it’s working for us, and where it’s […]
Sometimes, it’s the little things you do that get noticed Last year I would have ranted about how retarded it is that game data is either entirely inaccessible to the web, or only accessible to an “official” website. …This year, however, is all about the positive. Rather than rant about […]
Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…) Questions, questions… First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the […]
Part 2 – What is an Entity System? (Part 1 is here) Sadly, there’s some disagreement about what exactly an Entity System (ES) is. For some people, it’s the same as a Component System (CS) and even Component-Oriented Programming (COP). For others, it means something substantially different. To keep things […]
Networked games use the internet, and the difficulties of making these games evolve on Internet Time, which means that the articles people wrote as recently as a year ago on how to make a networked or multiplayer game are already out of date. Most of the literature is more than […]
No, it’s not, it’s really not. In fact, source code is probably the worst form of documentation, it fails in most of the roles that documentation is actually required to fulfil (see bottom of this post for a shortlist). But something else is…
…was my section in the fourth GPG book from Charles River Media. And, sadly, although I tried to put some resources up on the web, a series of unfortunate events led to that all disappearing. But now … they’re back! (and I’ll be adding more followup stuff in the coming […]
UPDATE: short, complete, 42-slide version now available from the CMP website – https://www.cmpevents.com/sessions/GD/S5762i1.ppt …but if you want the 144-slide version (!), see below. No extra content.
A few years ago, entity systems (or component systems) were a hot topic. In particular, Scott Bilas gave a great GDC talk (http://scottbilas.com/files/2002/gdc_san_jose/game_objects_slides.pdf – updated link thanks to @junkdogAP) on using them in the development of Dungeon Siege. The main advantages to entity systems were: No programmer required for designers […]