SMASH to Planet Earth ... ??

While not finished by a long shot, we can now communicate between TCP/IP clients and the SMASH framework. The integration is not yet 100% complete, but one can now authenticate from any TCP client against the accounts table and create a chat client (CC: the player proxy). Any chat as of yet joins prefixed chat channels, this needs still a lot of work, like a channels DB, with authorizations to join, chat, listen, member list, password and so on, but at the very least you can now chat in 'general' and broadcast to any connected "player". This also works across nodes, so you can connect to different SOX servers that run on SMASH and even if the CC was created on a different node and still persists, as expected, the SOX thread correctly communicates with that CC, phew !!!

So, what's next ?? Now comes first of all a light test, after creating a scripted Delphi client, we will now do some tests over Apocalyx and create a VERY simple game world. After that there will be some very heavy work where we need to create a character selection / creation something and a channel table with all kinds of authorizations, cheers !!! This will be fun. And also upcoming then is a command parser, to enable the server to start validating stuff, because up to this point each client will decide positioning and capabilities, which is obviously not acceptable. During this step we will also have to implement a physique server, current thoughts are to put an Apocalyx client to do that, but to omit texture rendering and represent clients only as cubes (for line of sight), so we could verify very precisely physical conditions in the game without reinventing the wheel, but much lighter than a client side reproduction, let's see how that works out.


Stay tuned, a graphical test client is just around the corner.

Sunweaver

First benchmarks

We have conducted the first couple of test series on a single-core notebook (sc), a dual-core notebook (dc) and the PS3, where creating 10'000 users takes 1:11 min., 0:22 min and 0:42 min respectiviely. We then proceeded to send chat messages between the 3 systems and the results are similar in ratio. What is very apparent is that the PS3 displays the text relatively slowly, so in my opinion given that the CEL processor should be very superior to the dual-core it seems that the display is what makes it slow. We will conduct a modified test series, without the display part to check on performance. There is also the aspect of the hard disk performance, but the both series, user creation and chat showed more or less the same difference and user creation requires hard disk access, while chatting does not, so the difference of the 5400 rpm on the PS3 and the 7200 rpm on the dc do not seem to make that much of a difference.

Last not least, it may be that Erlang is not really optimized for CEL processors and maybe it does not distribute the processes correctly, but our personal appreciation is that the display is the bottleneck.

We will see what happens next.

Sunweaver

PS3 + YDL + Erlang = ready for prime time

Ok, it's been a long Sunday, but I did manage to install Yellow Dog Linux on my Playstation 3 successfully. It took much longer to backup the PS3 than it did to configure YDL. After that I installed VNC Server to remote control the machine and let me tell you, that the Gnome Desktop is a beauty. Installing Erlang was as simple as downloading and compiling it, so no new really on this end, either. In other words, the server platform is ready for deployment, I will now go ahead and run the SMASH framework on it to compare speed ratios among my test systems, let's see what happens next. This is for me a major milestone, given that THIS PS3 will be the mother of all SMASH development nodes. I will have some time next week as well to push the conection between the socket server (Mr. SOX) and the SMASH framework, so I definitely hope to have some empty game world that people can actually connect to by next week. If that holds true, we might do a very first game world logon, maybe, maybe, maybe.

Oh and by the way, some may ask, WHY Linux and PS3 at all ??? Very simple, the thought process behind that is, that I want to be able to provide a server frame work taht is inexpensive and powerful, because regular servers are definitely more $$$ heavy and not everybody will be able to afford buying Windows Server licenses, so nothing beats Linux moneywise and a U$500 PS3 server should make a nice duo. Now, that much said, many people are scared of Linux, because it's not exactly intuitive, well, given that we only need a DVD install and later on a simple download + install of Erlang, that should be fairly simple to do for everyone and ALL the others tasks can be done thru native Erlang, no more touching of the PS3 is required, I am planning on adminstrating everything from a more comfortable platform, without losing the power of the solution.

Stay tuned.

Sunweaver

What's next ??

Alright, it's 2008 and I finally have some time to come back to the SMASH project. One of my goals was to buy a PS3 and install Linux on it, so at last I got me one and I will install Yellow Dog on it this weekend. Why a PS3 ?? The processor of the PS3 has internally 6 cores that are ready for use and it is said to be a very powerful server, so I will set up Erlang on it and see just how fast it goes. Erlang recognises multiple cores, so this should prove to be a powerful combination, a dual-core versus single-core scores about 40% speed increase, so 6 internal cores should make quite a difference. I will post how it went, both installation and benchmark.

I am also working on the TCP/IP server and I should soon have a first first alpha server up and running where people can connect to (probably a pretty empty world).

See you soon.

Sunweaver