server side game_development

Server Side Game Development

is hard!

Too many front end platforms

-ios-android-browsers-flash

Session is evil

-Can not scale

Long polling

-Socket programming-Protocols-Ups!

Database?

-Read/Write is small-Not a good idea to use MySQL+Memcache-NoSQL shines

Write your own server?

Not a good idea

Open Source alternatives

-Reddwarf Server (Project Darkstar)

Buy a good one?

-Smartfox Serverhttp://www.smartfoxserver.com/

Smartfox Server

The good-Less code via listener based API-Client API’s, no need for socket programming-Stable-Out of the box HTTP tunneling

Smartfox Server

The bad-2500 Euro / server / year-Not a Free Software

Smartfox Server

The Ugly- Does not scale!

What others do?

Social Game-Zynga-King.com-WoogaMMO’s-EA Games-Blizzard

Wooga Open Source

- https://github.com/wooga Wooga Github- Pocket Island - HTML5 game (Ruby, NodeJS)https://github.com/wooga/Pocket-Island- Lots of Ruby-Erlang-Redis-JS stuff- Wooga SlideSharehttp://www.slideshare.net/wooga

NoSQL is your friend

-Redis-Memcache-MongoDB-Hazelcast-CouchDB-Riak-Cassandra

Wooga

-Diamond Dash (4.6M DAU)-Monster World-Bubble Island-Brain Buddies (LAMP)

LAMP

-Brain Buddies, Bubble Island-Nginx instead of Apache-MySQL is fast enough

Rails World

Monster World- Started with Rails - MySQL-Not so useful, Farming games are not arcade games-Switched to Redis, now it rocks!Happy Hospital-Rails - Redis cluster-Fast enough but Redis is not RDB-Redis problems as main DB

Magic Land- No DB is faster than no DB- S3, Erlang- Erlang Workers, S3 used for records- Stateful development is complex- Open sourced most of the erlang stuff used for this game in github

StateFul

Rails Again

Pearls Peril- Rails, Redis (High score, Metadata, etc), Riak (All other stuff)

Problems

Software is easy, data is hard-RedisNo backup, No slave-AWSFast to create instance, it fails sometimes, Slow IO on EBS-JRubyHelps a lot as Concurrency libraries are great for threading in Java World

Alternatives

Write your own server- NodeJS- Java NIO, Akka, Netty- Erlang, Scala

Questions?