On the use of Java Server Side Technologies for the Design of Dynamically Redeployable MMOGs

The number of players participating in Massively Multiplayer Online games is going beyond the millions, an efficient software architecture is needed to manage these huge digital worlds and cope with the dynamically changing loads at the server side. These virtual environments are more and more dynamic and sudden increases in player density in a part of the world have an impact on the load of the server responsible for that section of the virtual world. In this paper we discuss a novel way to support this kind of application by dividing the virtual world into smaller parts, called microcells. These microcells can be reassigned dynamically to the available servers to optimize the load distribution and thus improve the game performance. In order to implement this architecture we evaluated JAIN SLEE and J2EE as a middleware platform for developing an MMOG, focusing on the low latency behavior of the application server.