Alistair Riddoch and James Turner

Technologies For Building Open-Source Massively Multiplayer Games

Open Source and Free Software have so far failed to make inroads into the games industry where intellectual property is still seen as essential for successful business. The WorldForge project aims to break into the massively multi-player portion of the games market, where subscription payments outweigh software sales revenue, and a development model based on Open Source or Free Software can work.

Through solid software engineering principles, reusable code, and Open Source peer-reviewed development, WorldForge has developed protocols, tools and frameworks for developing large scale on-line game worlds.

The Atlas protocol provides a solid, scalable, extensible and game-independent protocol for on-line games, and aims to provide for generations of on-line games to come. The STAGE server framework provides a solid base on which games can be developed using the Atlas protocol.

An introduction to the Atlas protocol is given here, with an explanation of its strengths for game development and demonstrations of its use in a working game, followed by an overview of the STAGE server framework's development. The challenges of large scale game servers are discussed, including database, networking and performance issues.