Thoughts on MMORPG programming

[Wrentia]

One of my bigger beefs with EQ is the Verant Policy of saying something like "We can't change the core fundamentals of the game". I think if something is wrong, changes must be made. The best way to do this IMO would be to have a small core game program that calls other programs to handle various functions. Each part of the game system would be handled by a module called by the core program. The core program could be expanded as well by adding the code to call an additional module, then writing the module.
This would allow for faster patches as well since if an update was done to the skill system, you DL the skill system module and not the complete game program.

Anyway, I'm fairly sure things are to far along to make such core changes now....and I am not sure how practical this is, but I thought I'd post it anyway for discussion sake.

-Wrentia

[Saint Faucet]

Wouldn't calling to separate programs cause slowdown?

Let me start this with "I don't know much about programming." :) Your idea of several programs working together with the core would be nice for updating purposes, but it seems to me that processing slowdown would occur each time the 'core' accessed one of its external parts. Granted that the slowdown might not be noticeable thanks to the speed of today's processors, but I believe a wholely integrated program would run much more efficently and quickly than a group of smaller ones.

Furthermore, what happens when some of the programming pieces are server-side? With one person accessing the system, there shouldn't be much of a problem. But with ten people? A hundred? A thousand? Talk about sudden server slowdown (say that five times fast).

Either way, it all comes down to whether you want smaller and easier updates or better program performance. Personally, I'd vote for the latter (though the former would be nice as well if a compromise could be reached with the performance issue).

[Slitherrr]

Hmm, isn't it possible to patch parts of the program anyways, so you don't have to worry about separating it into modules? This is probably a non-issue to the developers, I'd suspect they have it figured out and are doing the ol' "smile and nod" to our concerns, heh. However, I can definitely see the underlying concern, the fact that if something is wrong with the game fundamentals, that thing will be changable, so whattaya say Rich and Rolfey, yes? Please?

[Lordosis]

It's really a non-issue as far as patching goes. Slitherr is right. You could have a 50 gigabyte file, but just change 10 kilobytes of it in the middle somewhere, and the players would only have to download the 10 kilobytes. That's the whole point of "patching". Otherwise, it would just be called "overwriting".

I've been trying my best from the get-go to design the actual source code to allow any particular piece to be fixes/changed/added without wreaking havoc on the rest of the code. You can never do this perfectly, but I'm doing my best. Some thing will be harder to change than others. But I know what you mean, some of the things that "other" game company says that can't change are rediculous. "No, sorry, we can't change the color of the text without rewriting the entire game". Give me a break.

Yeah, using seperate programs would slow it down, and there's really no reason to. You'll basically have an executable Arcanity.exe file, then a whole freaking mess of data files (landscape, character models, textures, you name it). You can write seperate modules into DLL files, but I don't see the advantage in our case.