Ultra massively multiplayer games with Ice

[JohnBates]

Was Ice's development affected by Mutable Realms' experience making their game? Just curious what technical road blocks in Ice had to be dealt with or worked around to support an ultra massively mutliplayer online game.

A while back we were experimenting with MICO to see if it could be used in a peer-to-peer, distributed, real-time system. We ended up running the CORBA clients in a separate process and used IPC to interact. Far from ideal. The main issue was MICO's lack of support for asynchronous method invocation and dispatch.

John
Sony Computer Entertainment R&D

[benoit]

Yes, as a MutableRealms developer I can testify that MutableRealms and ZeroC worked very closely to ensure that Ice provides all the features required to develop an ultra massively multi player online game .

Ice supports both asynchronous method invocation and dispatch (AMI and AMD). It also supports many more features that we needed for the development of the game (mostly for the server):

* Ice supports bzip2 compression, oneway, batch oneway messages, ssl, ...
* Freeze allows us to easily persist objects to a database.
* Glacier provides us a very secure firewall solution.
* IcePack provides a location service and powerful server deployment facilities.

I should also mention that Ice is much easier to understand and work with than CORBA. The C++ and Java mapping are for instance much simpler. I have no doubt that our productivity wouldn't be as good if we were using CORBA as our middleware technology.

So far, I don't think we've encountered any technical road blocks that couldn't be solved by ZeroC.

Benoit.