What a journey this network master server creation has been. I've learned more in the last week about things I would rather not understand than I care to admit. Right off the bat though I have to say mad props to Vis2K and the indie community around his uMMO offering. Vis and Paul specifically have made massive contributions to the network layer for Unity3D in the HLAPI-CE network package. Amazing work that I wish some triple A network transports would take note of. Based on the changes over the last couple of months they have made at optimizations and simplification the network transport is looking absolutely outstanding.
For the FL/Kingdoms project we took the HLAPI-CE layer and added it to our basecode. My goal this week was to have a master server spinning up multiple instances and have players be able to move between them.. Well, mission accomplished! Some big help from Fhiz and LordOfWorms pushed us through a couple of glitches in my coding (not a huge shock there) and we now have two fully functional interconnected instances running off the master server.
This may not sound like earthshattering news to anyone but at it's core it is foundational to supporting multiple physical servers across the network/cloud. The MasterServer will monitor for load balancing, server crash/recovery/restart and DB/login server availability. This will add not only a level of stability to the project but allow us to grow the world in sizes and dimensions simple not availabile in a single zone game.
As an outcome of the updated MasterServer we have a fully integrated MySQL server backend. This gives us the power of nearly infinite DB capacity and querry performance over flatfiles or other txt based data storage. All in all it was a marathon day on the coding front. Pretty sure I have 18 hours in at this point (it's just after midnight heh) but what a great feeling to get here. The next sprint will be the cleanup of the login server but compared to todays challenges I expect that to go much quicker.
Stand by for more, I expect this to be a very productive weekend!
Mark
