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savemmo

Saving data in MMO

What are your thought about saving data (such as character stats, achivements, items) on a MMO game? Clearly you want as little dataloss as possible if(when) the server goes down for some reason.

  • Saving the character whenever something important has happend? Seems jumpy, performancewise?
  • Saving everything once very X Hours? Causes a few seconds freeze, but could be accompanied with a nice "The world is saving"-message.
  • Maybe having a save-timer for every character, where you queue the character for saving every once in a while, and the server works on this queue whenever it is not busy?

Out of these three i think the last one is a pretty good solution, but i might have overlooked something. But what are your thoughts, how are the "big boys" doing it?

Solution

  • Saving the character whenever something important has happend? Seems jumpy, performancewise?

    Not in the least. Compared to everything else that has to be done for such a game, this is utterly trivial. Any decent database engine will handle that. That's what they're built to do.