Technology
Infrastructure
The Infrastructure is the collection of core features that a world needs. These features are not reasons for players to choose one world over another, they are just fundamentals that support the world, like the registration process, or the buddy list. Players are much more interested in the worlds theme, games, avatars, narrative, quests, and environments.
The infrastructure reduces development time, improves speed to market, and lets the team focus on what makes the world fun and unique.
MU Server
The MU Server (Multi User Server) is what makes it possible for players to send a message from their computer and it appear on everyone else's. In its simplest form the MU Sever routes the messages between players. A single MU Server can support a few thousand players, the limiting factor is usually the number of messages the server needs to send and receive, which varies per game.
As the number of players increases we introduce more servers to distribute the load.
GAML
The GAML (Game Application Markup Language) is our proprietary language for creating gaming experiences in the environments, such as quests, collectables, and mini games. Each world has its own custom GAML files that define the gaming experiences. GAML makes the process of defining those games faster, cheaper, more powerful,and more easily updatable.
When a player moves around the world events are fired, in fact when the player does almost anything (collides, uses, picks up, enters, talks to, and so on) events are fired. An event is a notification that something in the world has happened but what makes a game fun is what happens because of that notification.