Also, if you use Twitter, I’m going to keep minor and day-to-day project updates there:

http://twitter.com/bakedon

Ghostees is not just an RPG, it is a proof of concept of the server platform. The server platform is designed so that we can develop additional MMORPG-style games and leverage all that back end technology as much as possible.

The server technology is interesting. Our background is primarily in high performance serverdevelopment. We wanted a design that could scale to support a very large number of players. Who doesn’t? Server-side tasks are logically divided into services and architected so that they can run and live independently on remote hardware. This way we can distribute the load based on capacities any particular service can handle.

Servers are auto discoverable and communicate with each other efficiently over UDP. This is a huge benefit. As servers come on and offline, we don’t need to do any reconfiguring of dependent servers. They are designed to locate the appropriate service by dropping a service discovery packet on the network. All servers that provide that service respond with server information and current server load. This way the seeking server can choose among servers with more available capacity.

Servers are auto discoverable and communicate with each other efficiently over UDP

For instance we have a combat service. All it does is create and maintain a combat encounter for a set of entities (players and NPCs). A Ghosteesplayer initiating combat will cause the player’s gateway server to request a combat encounter instance on an available combat server. Other players and NPCs can join a combat encounter even if they are not on the same gateway.

A gateway is the server a player’s browser communicates directly with. It takes care of the core RTMP / AMFstuff that Flash communicates with natively. It is also responsible for persisting player information to the database and also for facilitating access to the other servers in the system. It does not do chat, movement, routing or even quests or NPC AI. Those are all different services potentially running elsewhere.

A zone server is responsible for simply tracking the entrance/exit and movement of entities. When an entity enters a zone (player or NPC), the zone broadcasts to all connected gateways that they need to subscribe to this new entity. It also sends messages back to the connecting player information about the zone, such as graphic asset information, music, collision layers and other existing entities.

To a zone server, an NPC looks just like any other player.

On each simulation step the zone server updates the positions of entities it knows about. When a player or NPC requests a route to a new destination, the zone server facilitates the route calculation, obstacle avoidance and potential zone transfers. Once the route is calculated it is sent to the requesting entity. This overrides any predicted route done by the client.  It’s pretty cool actually!

NPC AI runs on their own gateway server. To a zone server, an NPC looks just like any other player. NPCs can be scripted to request routes and respond to player interactions among other things just like a player.

I think your getting the idea by now. We’re really enjoying working with this design. It’s quite flexible and powerful.

Hiya, cats and kittens! I am the writer and class designer for Ghostees!, our upcoming MMORPG, and I just wanted to start out saying hello and that I hope you will enjoy Ghostees. We’re very excited to bring you this new game, and our developers are hard at work to bring you the very best gaming experience possible.

Today we are going to cover some of the background lore of the game, covering the Otherwhere and its connection to the human realm.

Otherwhere

The Otherwhere is a world that coexists with the normal human world, intersecting it at certain places and times but otherwise only perceivable through its influence. In the Otherwhere the dreams, fantasies, and beliefs of the human world are given form and life. As to whether they are given their existence from our dreams, or our dreams are caused by their existence…no one knows.

The Seasonal Realms

For some unknown reason, the cycle of existence of the human world and the Otherwhere are linked. Our seasons are linked to specific regions in the Otherwhere, and as our world goes through its changes the Otherwhere comes into and out of alignment with us. The alignments are closest at certain times, and these times have been traditionally called “holidays” by the humans barely aware of their origins. In the modern era we have forgotten their meaning, but the Seasonal Realms of the Otherwhere are still there, affecting us.

The Aisling

The Aisling, or “Dreams”, are the natives of the Otherwhere. They each express a theme or archetype called an Essence that defines the way they look, the personalities they have, and their abilities.

Essences

These are the living manifestations of our fascinations and stereotypes that have arisen over the course of human existence. We birth them from our minds, and they change as we change, but it is not a one-way street. Our worlds are interwoven, and if their nature changes, so too do our dreams, hopes, and fears. As they live or die, succeed or fail, so too does that realm of our imaginations.

The Autumn Realm

In the 21st Century world, human understanding of the Otherwhere and its seasonal influence has faded, only to be replaced by more “rational” explanations for the holidays. Where once the night of October 31 was a festival that acknowledge the power of death and the coming winter, it came to be a night of monsters, ghouls, pranks, and ghosts. The Autumn Realm followed suit and came to manifest as Halloween, with Aisling as old as dreaming itself remade as vampires, mummies, and witches.

Next Time:

Next time I will give you a sneak peak into the realm-spanning war between the Technocrat’s Great Plan and Grim Jack’s misfit crew of monsters, the Terata. Stay tuned!

I wired up the foundation for server audited and filtered chat. Essentially when a player sends a chat message, it routes through the server first to be filtered. The server can modify or completely reject the text. If the text passes the server gauntlet, the server drops the text to the auditor service and then broadcasts the message to all applicable players.

Next I needed to take the World View class and create various layers for the visuals to appear on. Actually, two layers were already there (background and content layers) but I needed to add an overlay layer and made the decision to bundle them together in a unifying container. This caused some wierd offset calculation issues that I won’t bother explaining but caused me an hour or two of head scratching to figure it out. The talk bubbles show up on the overlay layer so they won’t be obscured an voila, I have chat.

I’m using the new Flex Builder 3 as my Flash development environment. There are some good bug fixes but actually not a ton of new stuff except the profiling capabilities. This is the sole reason I upgraded. I gave these features a whirl and found some nice optimizations.

We received our character meshes a couple weeks ago but yesterday the first two textured characters arrived. The meshes were so well done that the characters and their details are easily distinguishable but I was frankly shocked and how great they look with high quality textures.

The most obvious piece is the game client. This is the part that everyone sees. It is a Flash based application that runs in your browser written with the Flex 2 SDK. Some of us use Flex Builder and some like to just build from the command line and use other text editors.

The client itself is made up of many pieces that get downloaded on demand to reduce the initial download size. The Ghostees world is very large and would take a very long time to download if you had to get the whole thing at startup. Static content, such as artwork and images, is delivered from CacheFly. CacheFly is a content delivery system designed for very high speed and 100% uptime availability.

One distictive feature of Ghostees is the smooth scrolling of the world rather than going “screen-to-screen” as is more common in other virtual worlds. The way we accomplish this is by downloading the pieces of the world that are nearby only when they are needed and we can discard pieces that are no longer needed to save memory. The browser caches the previous downloads for us so subsequent requests to download world pieces are much faster.

The client talks to a variety of servers to not only get content but also take direction and negotiate transactions. Each server has a distinct job so that the overall application can be spread out. One of the most important servers that I’ll talk about in another post is the Map Server. This server is responsible for any given portion of the world. The Map Server is where everything “lives” and the client is just a viewport into it, responding to direction given by the server. In all cases the Map Server is the authority to what is going on in the world.

To take care of the inevitable network latency, one of the client’s jobs is to smooth this out. The client makes predictions of what the server is going to say and will initiate actions based on those predictions and uses the server’s message as confirmation. If the server issues a different message than expected, it is up to the client to smooth out the discrepancy.

Other servers include the Authentication, Chat, Auditing, Exchange (not mail but game currency), the API, Inventory/Shopping and a Mini-Game Server per Mini Game. All of these could run on a single box if that’s all we needed but the system was designed to scale out based on demand. The goal is to be able to pack as many people into the world as we can by distributing the work and keep the experience as fluid as possible.

But won’t a Halloween based virtual world be too seasonal? We would be swarmed with players for a month and then we would have a ghost town on our hands…literally! I think there are kids out there that are sick of the sticky sweet worlds of Penguins and really want something different. True but how can we smooth out the inevitable spike we’ll see during the holiday?

Simple. Do all the major holidays as expansions. As a holiday approaches let’s build a road to connect the Halloween town to the Christmas town. People that don’t want to be ghosts can be elves. This also smoothes out the load across the year and hopefully appeals to a wide audience. Who doesn’t love holidays anyway?