Customer Reviews

Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2 (Charles River Media Game Development) (v. 2)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Designing and developing massively multiplayer (MMP) games are very difficult endeavors that often require large teams and time/money investments. This book provides useful knowledge that can help identify and avoid potential development pitfalls.

The articles in this book are separated into three sections - design, engineering, and production techniques. Therefore, it isn't just for programmers - numerous development team members will find value in the book's articles. I think it's important for developers to read most or all of the articles - even those that aren't specifically intended for their position. This practice can increase understanding and communication between the members of interdisciplinary teams.

In each article, a member of the MMP development community explains his or her experience with a particular topic - telling stories in online games, automated testing, anti-cheat mechanisms, etc. While some of the technical essays supply pseudocode, most articles present examples from existing games and other ideas. Don't expect to build an MMP engine or even detailed designs based solely on the information in this book. Instead, these articles will provide insight and advice on many issues you will encounter as you plan and develop an MMP project.

Some of the essays feel a bit "thin", and the authors don't seem to sufficiently explain their topic. In some instances, the topics are simply too complex to fully examine in one or two articles. Nonetheless, the subjects in this book are important for developers to consider. For readers that want to delve deeper into a topic, most articles provide references to related information.

This book is intended for "intermediate/advanced" game developers (specifically those in the MMP industry), and my rating is based on that audience. For those unfamiliar with MMP games and/or software development, it will be difficult to appreciate the articles in this book.

Game development has become a big if not major part of today's programming environment. And the big massively multiplayer games (MMG) represent the peak of game development software. Finally, the authors of the articles in this book are people actively engaged at the leading edge of programming MMGs, they're the heavy hitters of the MMG world. Here is what it's really like, here is the depth of skill it takes to build one of these games.

This book is broken down into three major parts:

Design Techniques - 11 Articles from Why People Play to Examining the Gap between Theory and Reality.

Engineering Techniques - 15 Articles From Testing to Rendering Massive Quanities in Real-Time.

Production Techniques - 8 Articles from Project Management to Mass Market for MMP Games. Of particular interest in this section is the article on how a small company, CCP Games, used guerilla marketing techniques to bring EVE Online to the market in the face of competition from the big guys.

This book offers a very nice overview for multiplayer game developers. It is split in three parts: First part has about 10 articles answering the question, what people play multiplayer and how to bind them. Second part contains about 15 articles about the technical aspects such as how to reduce message transfer with thousands of players to 1-2kB per second. The third part describes how marketing can be done.
Very nice book !
The only thing is that there is no red line between the articles, since every article was written by independent author.

To the game developer, the theory behind MMOGs can be a mystery. Often it is hit-and-miss and many developers can and do get it wrong. Great games can turn to dust because designers made critical mistakes.
This book does NOT have all the answers!
But it does pose a lot of questions and provides learned and thoughtful chapters written by some of the best game people in the business.

Part one covers design techniques with eleven chapters in game theory.
Part two explores engineering techniques including automated testing, data collection and analysis and anti cheat mechanisms.
Part three gets into production techniques with eight chapters covering subjects from project management to providing online support.

Its become my Bible of MMOG dev.

The book is unlike typical computer graphics books that focus mainly at the source code level. Alexander has compiled an impressive set of essays, drawn from game programmers at several companies. It is an industry-wide summation of publicly available ideas for state of the art coding, circa 2005.

Look, if you are hoping for tips on solving a specific coding problem, this may not be the best choice of books. Instead, the articles are more useful at the architectural design level, for a new multiplayer game. Some topics seem quite novel. Like applying graph theory to study and design a game. Including at the large ["macro"] level where you might be building a community, with economic facets. Graph theory also permits a way to classify different MM games, providing a unified and consistent view. Not the sort of thing you might expect to run into in a gaming text. But the complexities of building a MM world can be staggering.

There are many more essays, touching on numerous aspects. You need to be an experienced game developer to fully appreciate this book. Which is not to say that the ideas here cannot ultimately find expression at the source code level. Just that you need to take a high level view.

there is very little detailed technical content in this book -- i mean, if you are a software developer, then a lot of this feels like fluff. i wanted a leg up on coding, and this isn't that book. it does provide a certain high-level overview, but it's not sufficient for "game development." for example, the discussions of server architect are interesting, but largely represent a kind of "we did this and were successful" summaries. if you wanted to move into this field, this book isn't an "open sesame." if you haven't thought much about the field and just want to get a feel for what the issues are, then the text is interesting but expensive.

I just love all the titles of Charles River Media (Delmar Cengage Learning) about game development. Always didatic and with great contents, every book that I get from this amazing company let me exited to pass through every detail until the end. Just amazing!

As an experienced online game producer with one reasonably successful title under my belt I really felt that this book offered less in terms of game development knowledge than what can be freely and easily found on the internet.

The book itself is a collection of essay-length chapters written by different authors regarding various aspects of online game design. I found that the length of these chapters is generally too long for simpler subjects and too short for more complicated topics.

The authors aren't heavy-hitters from Microsoft, Sony, Blizzard, etc. Not that there aren't some great minds behind some of the articles, but I really felt that the majority of the articles were written by authors that didn't have nearly the amount of knowledge regarding these topics that I would expect. In particular there are a few articles from authors (some whose companies have a less than stellar reputation with their users) that contain some patently bad advice.

Overall, I'd say the book is hit-and-miss, with more misses than hits. There are a few worthwhile articles, but not enough to justify the cost of this book. You'll get almost as much from reading the chapter list and spending some time thinking about the topics covered as you will from actually reading the chapters.

I wouldn't recommend this book to a person of any level of experience in online game development. There are far better books on this subject out there.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS THE SAME REVIEW AS THE SEQUELS BOOK, THAT IS BECAUSE I CONSIDER THEM TO BE EQUALLY AS GOOD AS EACH OTHER.
DON'T BUY ONE BOOK, GET THEM BOTH.

As a games programmer I wanted to branch out into a MMG and this book was one of 4 that taught me everything I wanted to know.

This book is split into 3 main sections; each section has several chapters about differant aspects of the MMP's. If you have any interest in MMP games you cannot help but to find most chapters helpful.
I will admit that some chapters bored me and I skipped them, but the amount of helpful chapters there were more than made up for it.

Each chapter has been written by a differant person and quick searches on google makes you realise that these people really do know their particular areas of expertise.

James