Games and virtual worlds
Analysis of how database and related technologies are used in games and virtual worlds. Related subjects include:
- CEP (Complex Event Processing)
- (in The Monash Report) Other aspects of game technology
Quick thoughts on the StreamBase Component Exchange
Streambase is announcing something called the StreamBase Component Exchange, for developers to exchange components to be used with the StreamBase engine, presumably on an open source basis. I simultaneously think:
- This is a good idea, and many software vendors should do it if they aren’t already.
- It’s no big deal.
For reasons why, let me quote an email I just sent to an inquiring reporter:
- StreamBase sells mainly to the financial services and intelligence community markets. Neither group will share much in the way of core algorithms.
- But both groups are pretty interested in open source software even so. (I think for both the price and customizability benefits.)
- Open source software commonly gets community contributions for connectors, adapters, and (national) language translations.
- But useful contributions in other areas are much rarer.
- Linden Labs is one of StreamBase’s few significant customers outside its two core markets.
- All of the above are consistent with the press release (which quotes only one StreamBase customer — guess who?).
| Categories: Complex event processing (CEP), Games and virtual worlds, Investment research and trading, Open source, StreamBase | 5 Comments |
Aleri update
My skeptical remarks on the Aleri/Coral8 merger generated some pushback. Today I actually got around to talking with John Morell, who was marketing chief at Coral8 and has remained with the combined company. First, some quick metrics:
- The combined Aleri has around 100 employees, 60-40 from Aleri vs. Coral8.
- The combined Aleri has around 80 customers. All of Aleri’s, with one sort-of exception at Banks.com, were in financial services. A large minority of Coral8’s were in financial services too.
- However, half of Aleri’s marketing spend going forward is budgeted outside the financial services markets. Not unreasonably, John presents this as a proof point Aleri is serious about selling to other markets.
- Aleri had 12-14 people in the UK pre-merger. Coral8 had none in Europe.
- Coral8 had 15 OEMs pre-merger, some actually generating revenue. Aleri had substantially none.
- Coral8 had been closing a “couple” of customers/quarter in online commerce. But recently, that rate ramped up to a “few.”
- Aleri’s engine is used to handle “many” hundreds of thousands of messages per second. Coral8’s highest-throughput user processes 100-150,000 messages/second.
John is sticking by the company line that there will be an integrated Aleri/Coral8 engine in around 12 months, with all the performance optimization of Aleri and flexibility of Coral8, that compiles and runs code from any of the development tools either Aleri or Coral8 now has. While this is a lot faster than, say, the Informix/Illustra or Oracle/IRI Express integrations, John insists that integrating CEP engines is a lot easier. We’ll see.
I focused most of the conversation on Aleri’s forthcoming efforts outside the financial services market. John sees these as being focused around Coral8’s old “Continuous (Business) Intelligence” message, enhanced by Aleri’s Live OLAP. Aleri Live OLAP is an in-memory OLAP engine, real-time/event-driven, fed by CEP. Queries can be submitted via ODBO/MDX today. XMLA is coming. John reports that quite a few Coral8 customers are interested in Live OLAP, and positions the capability as one Coral8 would have had to develop had the company remained independent. Read more
| Categories: Aleri and Coral8, Analytic technologies, Application areas, Complex event processing (CEP), Games and virtual worlds, Investment research and trading, MOLAP, Web analytics | 3 Comments |
Truviso and EnterpriseDB blend event processing with ordinary database management
Truviso and EnterpriseDB announced today that there’s a Truviso “blade” for Postgres Plus. By email, EnterpriseDB Bob Zurek endorsed my tentative summary of what this means technically, namely:
There’s data being managed transactionally by EnterpriseDB.
Truviso’s DML has all along included ways to talk to a persistent Postgres data store.
If, in addition, one wants to do stream processing things on the same data, that’s now possible, using Truviso’s usual DML.
One of the funniest fake press releases ever
About an extended outage in Lord of the Rings Online.
Edited July 2, 2008: New URL that works at least for now.
| Categories: Games and virtual worlds, Humor | 1 Comment |
Thoughts on database management in role-playing games
I’ve just started a research project on the IT-like technology of games and virtual worlds, especially MMORPGs. My three recent posts on Guild Wars attracted considerable attention in GW’s community, and elicited some interesting commentary, especially for the revelation of Guild Wars’ very simple database architecture. Specifically, pretty much all character information is banged into a BLOB or two, and stored as a string of tokens, with little of the record-level detail one might expect. By way of contrast, Everquest is run on Oracle (and being transitioned to EnterpriseDB), at least one console-based game maker uses StreamBase, and so on.
Much of the attention has focused on the implications for the in-game economy – how can players buy and sell to their hearts’ content if there’s no transactional back-end. Frankly, I think that’s the least of the issues. For one thing, without a nice forms-based UI you probably won’t create enough transactions to matter, and integrating that into the game client isn’t trivial. For another, virtual items can be literally created and destroyed by the computer, with no negative effect on game play, a factor which drastically reduces the integrity burdens the game otherwise would face.
Rather, where I think the Guild Wars developers at ArenaNet may be greatly missing out is in the areas of business intelligence, data mining, and associated game control. Here are some examples of analyses they surely would find it helpful to do. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Games and virtual worlds, Memory-centric data management, OLTP | Leave a Comment |
The database technology of Guild Wars
I have the enviable task of researching online game and virtual world technology. My first interview, quite naturally, was with the lead developers of a game I actually play – Guild Wars. The overview is in another post; that may provide context for this one, which focuses on the database technology. (I also did a short post just on the implications for Guild Wars players.) It also has a brief description of what Guild Wars is – namely, a MMORPG (Massively MultiPlayer Role-Playing Game) with the unusual feature that most of the game world is instanced rather than utterly shared.
First, some scope. ArenaNet (Guild Wars’ developer, now a subsidiary of NCsoft) runs Microsoft SQL Server, mainly Enterprise Edition, having just switched to 2005 4 months ago. They run 1500-2500 transactions/second all day, spiking up to 5000 in their busiest periods. They have no full-time DBA, and when the developers started this project they didn’t know SQL. They’ve only had one major SQL Server failure in the 2+ years the game has been running, and that was (like most of their bugs) a network driver problem more than an issue with the core system.
As for what’s going on — there are a few different kinds of database things that happen in an instanced MMORPG. Read more
EnterpriseDB’s Oracle clone — fact or fiction?
PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB is attracting a bit of attention. Philip Howard, as he does of most products, takes a favorable view. Seth Grimes regards the company as dirty, rotten liars. The company suggests that Everquest gameplay* runs on an RDBMS. I find this inherently implausible, and hence am starting out with a skeptical view of the company’s marketing messages.
*As in character movement. The idea that character inventory is stored in an RDBMS I find vastly more credible. Ditto other less volatile aspects of character state.
Read more