The MMO Test - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 90

3. Click on the Toolbox tab on the Project Manager dialog box.
4. Double-click on the Test Server (Normal) option.

This will bring up the Realm Crafter Professional Testing Server dialog box, as
shown in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1
The Realm Crafter Professional Testing Server dialog box.

Realm Crafter Professional is aimed at giving MMO creators the ability to scale
their MMO over a number of servers. If you are going to make an MMO for a
few friends, you can do this on a single server. However, when you start to
consider the number of users you could have using an MMO, the biggest
problem most companies have is insufficient scalability. A lack of scalability
causes users to suffer poor performance or to be unable to access a server because
it is too busy. Many new MMOs suffer this problem when they are first launched
because buying too many servers can be costly, and it s difficult to predict the

number of concurrent users who will access at one particular time. The original
Realm Crafter had only a single server, and so if you were looking at trying to
make a professional MMO, you would be limited by the amount of users who
could access a single server. The way Realm Crafter Professional solves this is by
creating a number of servers; you can improve performance by adding servers.

'