[Beowulf] clusters in gaming

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 05:43:04PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I've been looking at Second Life recently, which does most
> things server-side (in fact, running a distributed world
> with game physics) unlike games like WoW, where the intelligence

Why?  Is there some compelling underlying reason they can't make use
of all those desktop cycles like other massively multiplayer games do?

> What I didn't like is that most of the game is purportedly
> based on a byte-compiled language, with some long-term plans

What language?  Some ad-hoc thing of their own?

> to switch to .Net (Mono, actually), which should result in
> much improved performance. Current performance is 
> rather ridiculous, even high-priority simulations like
> private islands only tolerate few 10 avatars before severe
> performance degradation, and even crashes.

> Can things be compiled in realtime by passing code snippets
> in conventional compiled languages, or is this always limited

Well, sure, I think that's been done, although I don't know if
anyone's using it for real in a production setting.  Here are a few
links to related subjects - tcc, CriTcl, and LuaJIT:

  http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/tcc/
  http://wiki.tcl.tk/2523
  http://luajit.luaforge.net/luajit.html

But why would you think that just-in-time compilation of C or the like
would be central in fixing Second Life's performance problems, rather
than just doing a better job of software engineering in general?

I know nothing about Second Life, but from your description, if
they're looking to change programming languages, Erlang (or something
like it) might be the best fit.

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/