Wish Technology Article
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When Marc Laukien and I met under the large yellow stripped tent at the Mutable Realms booth at E3, I was impressed by his amiable and easygoing attitude. His attitude belied his technical skill and achievements. Marc graduated from the Technical University in Munich, Germany and he later formed a company called ZeroC to foster a middleware clustering technology called ICE (Internet Communications Engine) that would aid him in launching Mutable Realms. Much like the Nevrax NeL engine, software aficionados can obtain ICE free under the Gnu Public License or purchase a commercial license from ZeroC. For WISH, Mutable Realms combines ICE with Verari Rackserver hardware. The Rackserver is a cluster of PC blades. A PC blade is essentially a low profile PC on a board that slides into a telecommunications rack. The ICE software controls the cluster and a dedicated network provides the pathway between nodes. The design allows for a very large and scalable online world. The implementation of WISH gives the player a nice experience. Unlike a lot of the commercial MMORPG clusters currently implemented, there is no (skip) or pause when traversing boundaries. In addition, for such a large world, Marc and the WISH team spent a lot of time on pathfinding so that the creatures could not only find their way in tight areas, but also follow you across boundaries. The illusion created makes the player feel as if the backend architecture exists as a single server. Also, if one of the blades should crash, the load disperses to the other blades making the cluster fault resistant, an important aspect to large scale MMORPG model.
