Newswise — At any given moment, 150 000 people are immersed in one or another online fantasy game created and maintained by Sony Online Entertainment, in San Diego, Calif. The company's biggest games, EverQuest and EverQuest II, are played by a total of 600 000 people around the world, and are often considered the archetypes of a successful online game, spawning a subculture of obsessed players for six years and reaping millions of dollars for Sony.
How do you keep that many people playing together all at the same time? Lots and lots of computers. Fifteen hundred servers in clusters from the Netherlands to Japan, in fact, as David Kushner reveals in "Engineering EverQuest" in the July issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine.
"We're looking at transaction rates that rival the Visas and Wall Street brokerage houses," Sony Online Entertainment's chief technology officer, Adam Joffe, told Kushner. "Thousands and thousands of transactions per second." Joffe and his team of 45 engineers do daily battle against software bugs, hardware glitches, and determined hackers to keep EverQuest and the other games in operation. They even managed to keep EverQuest running as wildfires closed in on the San Diego headquarters and the offices filled with smoke in 2003.
One key to EverQuest's success has been the constant expansion of the richly detailed medieval world its players inhabit. To keep the company's computing needs from spiraling out of control, Joffe put an advanced scheme to work on the EverQuest servers. Called just-in-time computing, the technology continually allocates computing resources based on user demand. As players explore new places in an EverQuest world, those places come into being within Sony's servers just in time for the player, and old locales not occupied by any players essentially disappear.
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