Due to Popular Demand: PDFs of Beta Chapters from “Development & Deployment of Multiplayer Online Games”

Comments

1. Justin says

   January 13, 2016 at 7:51 pm

   Nice interesting work, thanks for sharing. I’m not familiar with the reddit articles, I came here via a link on high scalability. After browsing the first few chapters, I feel like one thing thats acutely missing is: who you are.

   Maybe I missed it in the intro and improved formatting would point it out…but it would be good to hear the story of how you came to gain all of this knowledge, what projects you worked on, when you did it, etc. Essentially: why should I buy the book and listen to you vs someone else? 😉

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   • "No Bugs" Hare says

     January 15, 2016 at 12:43 pm

     Good question, but TBH, I prefer the book to be judged by the content, and not by the cover 😉 . That being said, a little bit is written here: http://ithare.com/contents-of-development-and-deployment-of-massively-multiplayer-games-from-social-games-to-mmofps-with-stock-exchanges-in-between/#about

     Also, as for listening to somebody else: there aren’t that many books on MMO to start with, and none with this level of detail, so you simply don’t have any choice who to trust 😉 .

     Reply

2. David Elrod says

   June 15, 2016 at 8:59 pm

   When you publish the paper version of the book, please consider making a small boxed set of “pocket book” sized volumes. I find a 700 page book to be unwieldy to hold. A set of 3-5 shorter smaller books in a set will cost a bit more to produce, but would be far more manageable for readers.

   For example: I have a boxed set of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, along with a nice leatherbound version that is all in one volume. The smaller books in the boxed set fit in a jacket pocket, and are now very well worn. The leatherbound book looks nice on the shelf… (grin)

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   • "No Bugs" Hare says

     June 16, 2016 at 4:36 am

     Currently we’re planning to have 3 volumes of 400-500 pages (~150K words) each, around 6×9″ to 7×10″ format. I assume you’d prefer something smaller, but which format and how many volumes?

     P.S. Overall, the whole thing is Really Large (at 450K words total it is comparable to “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy ;-)), so “how to split” question is Really Important…

     Reply

3. Jason Guzzardo says

   June 27, 2016 at 6:32 am

   I’m a distributed systems architect that had a short stint in the games industry and this is the kind of thing I’ve been waiting to see catch fire in the games industry for some time. The concept of non-blocking, asynchronous/concurrent, micros-service based architectures expressed via actors/futures, etc is not something you typically see in games. Most of the industry still seems to be caught up in low level socket based UDP/TCP frameworks…

   Just got done reading chapter VI(d) and it does an excellent job of illustrating the usefulness of functional programming in distributed systems. It’s often times difficult to explain why imperative languages are sometimes not the best choice here but you broke it down really well. I’m hoping to see a more detailed exploration of actor systems like akka and how they might fit in with an MMO based architecture. Anyway, great job! Really looking forward to reading your series of books!

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   • "No Bugs" Hare says

     June 27, 2016 at 7:45 am

     TBH, I am Big Fan of deterministic non-blocking FSMs/Reactors (for many reasons). To implement them, lambdas/closures MIGHT indeed be necessary, though from my perspective functional programming is much more a _tool_ to achieve the goal of such non-blocking FSMs/Reactors, than the “end in itself”. OTOH, I certainly recognise the inherent value of certain concepts coming from functional programming (such as “pure” functions – oh, I _love_ them even for purely imperative programs). BTW, if you’re into this kind of things, you MIGHT be interested in the following rant of mine about functional programming for interactive programs and FSMs: http://ithare.com/on-zero-side-effect-interactive-programming-actors-and-fsms/ (it is quite on a “thinking aloud” side and may be not as straightforward as it should be, but it MIGHT be of interest).

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4. Farzam says

   July 24, 2016 at 4:08 pm

   I think the word “Designer” should be replaced with artist/modeler in chapter V(a) in the paragraph below:

   “3D design, usually made using readily available 3rd-party 3D toolchain. For this purpose, you can use such tools as Maya, 3D Max, Poser, or – for really adventurous ones – Blender. 3D design is not normally done by developers, but by designers. It includes both models (including textures etc.) and animations.”

   as we use the word “designer” mainly for “game designer”s in the industry.

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   • "No Bugs" Hare says

     July 25, 2016 at 9:48 am

     You’re right, I hope that I’ve fixed most of this kind of stuff in “beta 2” of the book (in particular, Chapter I was SEVERELY rewritten), but this one apparently slipped the rewriting. Will fix for “beta 2”, THANKS!

     Reply