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Grid computing plays games

David Becker CNET News.com

Published: 04 Jun 2004 12:35 BST

Sojourn went with Butterfly.net to run the network components of Glympse, the company's online game, which should debut later this year. Cerra said he had doubts about whether the technology that IBM and Butterfly's founders had developed for military projects and business uses would translate to the game world, but at least he knew the technology would be bulletproof.

"A lot of the technology in Butterfly.net came out of the Star Wars missile defense research," he said. "There's a wow factor there, but the question becomes, 'will this actually work for a game?' They showed us it would."

Bigger sandboxes
Outsourcing also allows developers to benefit from advanced technology that can improve the game experience. Butterfly.net touts its capability to accommodate larger online worlds, since players aren't bound to a single server.

Sun is promising similar improvements from its Sun Game Server technology, currently in development. The system will store game logic and databases on a central server connected to smaller servers accessed by players, as opposed to the typical approach of replicating all game content on each server available to players.

The approach will not only boost reliability and scalability, said Chris Melissinos, Sun's chief game officer, but allow players to experience bigger online worlds by not restricting their interaction to the 3,000 to 10,000 players a single game server can host.

"The way online games are run now, you experience things in shards," Melissinos said. "You can be looking at the same things as another player, but you're in a different shard and so you have a completely different experience."

"Sharding" is a commonly accepted technology limitation now, he said, but "I'm not so sure consumers are going to be willing to put up with that in the next generation of online games."