Devs, please humor us nerds

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Saelemdar, Feb 11, 2020.

  1. Saelemdar Journeyman

    Inquiring minds (ok, mine) want to know what it takes to run EverQuest.

    -Windows Server or Linux?
    -Xeons? The new AMD Epyc kicks major .
    -Virtualization? If so which VM?
    -Given the low pops, can you run them on a few processor cores on a virtualized server? I would imagine Povar could run on about 4 cores and a few GB of memory at this point.
    -What kind of load balancing is done? Besides Europe, do you have any servers at all outside of San Diego?

    Many moons ago I visited SOE HQ (and I shan't say why) and got a tour. I saw the command center, a room that resembled the Houston NASA command center, with a giant two story wall where everything was projected: each server's load, network utilization, traffic, etc. Basically yoiu could look at this wall and see the whole operation. It was really cool.

    Then I saw the server room, where ProLiants had each server printed on the case. This was in the era of 32-bit, single core servers. I'm sure that room is severely consolidated now what with the decline in the player base (my visit was during OOW) and considerable advancements in hardware.

    So, while we have this downtime, give us AnandTech types something to chew on. Please?
    Windance, Nennius and Prathun like this.
  2. Snack Augur

    Containers on CentOS - my guess. I don't know enough about game server architecture to be sure, but I would imagine the heavy lifting is done client side (rendering and visualization).

    The server side stuff just has to be a bunch of data points. NPCs have a location, heading and velocity. A Gribble has 35-40 mobs to keep track of and a couple accomplishment varibles? Combat is a string of rand() calls based on the inputs from the player. I would imagine most instances/missions could be run on a very small footprint. It just spawns a container for you to use for 10-90 minutes.
  3. Cloud the Third Augur

    Devs try to ignore hardware as much as possible. Sure we know what our software is running on to some degree but that is a different department that is in charge of it.
  4. Kaenneth [You require Gold access to view this title]

    I doubt you will get answers; any such information would help hackers target DDOS attacks to known vulnerabilities and such.
    Celephane and svann like this.
  5. Snack Augur

    EQ players, on the other hand, forced a patch cause we ran a DDOS attack on Ada's mom.
  6. Herf Augur


    If the game has any security built in at all, it must have server side generation and confirmatiaon of NPC movement, etc. No one sane would trust a game client to do that.
  7. Cloud the Third Augur

    Hmmm not sure if they ever fixed it but EQ was the first of this type of game and there used to be alot of hacks that took advantage of the fact you can use the client to tell the server to do things that should not be valid.

    So that has always been a huge problem with EQ is they didn't validate what the client told the server.
  8. Snack Augur


    Yeah, the server is dictating what the NPC is doing, but it's just passing the client info and the client renders that for you. What I'm suggesting is that a mob is just a collection of data server side (model, skin, location, heading, velocity, loot, max hp, current hp, buffs, agro list, etc).
  9. Snack Augur


    I agree -- they've fixed a lot of them. I'm sure there are some out there that still exist I remember reading about some of the early ones.
  10. Zanarnar Augur

    I do believe combat and important calculations are server side. Rendering the world is client side for sure but I don't think its fair to say that running a world as big as EQ with all those tens of thousands of NPC's spawned all over would be something that uses few resources.

    If I had to take a guess; I'd say each world server is 8 to 10 VM's. One for the overall world server; and the rest to spread out the Zone load onto. Maybe even one or two dedicated to just running instances of zones.

    I'd also bet, based on the games age, that its a WIN32 program on the back end, and is running on some fairly recent version of Windows Server (likely 2012 or 2016 after this datacenter move). I'm not even going to guess at what they're using to store data on the back end; but I'd guess they're moving things over to either MSSQL or ORACLE as they can.

    Of course, I agree that they are unlikely to actually answer this thread. No real gain and the knowledge would help bad-actors as was pointed out earlier. Its fun to think about it though.

    (FWIW my EqEMU world that just I play on is running across 2 HP DL360's and that world doesn't have a fraction of the NPC's or zones of a live server since it ends at OOW)