This chapter of the book describes the experiences in developing Project DarkStar, as a response to the changing needs and requirements of massively multiplayer games in terms of scaling and performance. I like the way a paradigm shift in programming for standalone PCs to a large number of servers and clients has been explained in a retrospective kind of way. Among the various services provided in the DarkStar protocol stack, I liked the way communication services has been designed and developed. By not revealing the actual endpoints of the communication between client and the server (A practice common in many peer-to-peer systems), the issues of scalability and changing the system components are handled well.
The Data Service has also been defined well, and the requirements of the Data Store though different from that of a regular database are clearly defined. Moving on to the question of testing the performance of such a system, I think this paper
"Marios Assiotis, Velin Tzanov: A distributed architecture for MMORPG. Netgames '06: page 4" describes one method. Overall, the paper is a good example of a system which allows the development of distributed, threaded games while providing a simplistic programming model.
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