| Architecture Overview The fundamental difficulty with creating a massively multiplayer game is bandwidth costs. These are quite simply crippling - many companies end up making big losses in this area. The problem is that most games of this sort run from a central server. We do not believe this would be the best route for Uplink Online. For one thing, we cannot afford to run a large game server or pay for the bandwidth. Certainly a central server would be needed (to store agent profiles) but the game world itself does not need to be. Each Server is a seperate area from another Server - there is no data between. This means individual Servers could be set up all around the world, and connected together on a global Uplink Online network. Clients would then connect into this system - the processing and gameplay is handled by this distributed system rather than a central computer. Clients still have to connect to this game world - for this we would need Gateway systems. These are the entry point to the Uplink Online world, and there might be 4 or 5 of them around the world. They would be responsible for keeping track of who was playing, and where they had connected from. It would also be possible for Clients to create new Server systems and add them into the Uplink Online network. Indeed, many players of the game would want to do this. Many of the later missions would require your own Server system. Of course, you'd have to defend it. Running a server would be harder than running a client, but would open up new possibilities. |