Realm Crafter - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 72

time, in the same game world. This means that you need to be able to create
your game on a machine that is accessible by people over the Internet.
DuetothescaleofagamethatcanbemadeinRealmCrafter,thetechnical
requirements are a little more complicated than a normal game-creator
system.

MMOs require two network technologies, which in MMO terms are classified as
the client and the server. The client is the player ' s machine and the server is the

machine that the client ' s PC connects to in order to access the MMO data.

The server needs to be a Windows-based operating system, running a
database to store the MMO information, which can be MySQL. The server
also requires a static IP address; this is an Internet number that indentifies the
server to PCs around the world. I will go into more detail about this later in
this chapter.

You may be concerned about the cost of setting up a server to run your MMO. I
will show you ways of keeping the costs as low as possible. The aim of this topic
is to be able to create an MMO and allow a few friends to play online initially.
Once you have your MMO up and running, you can then decide if you want to
allow more players to have access to it, and how to keep the costs as low as
possible.

The term server means different things to different people. In the context of the
MMO, you are going to create a server, which is a machine that will accept
connections/logins from other PCs and store the MMO data. This type of server
is common in networked computer games where one PC is the server and the
other PCs connect to it to play the game.

When you connect to a company s website on the Internet, the pages of the

website are stored on a server. A server is a more powerful computer and can
allow multiple connections at the same time. Such servers run server operating
systems such as Linux and Windows. These types of servers are more expensive
than PCs but do allow scalability.

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In this topic, you learn how to set everything up on a PC so you do not need to
worry about buying a server. Realm Crafter will work perfectly on your PC and
allow a limited number of users to have access to it. If you later want to increase
the number of people connecting to your MMO, you can also purchase a server