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Building a massively-multiplayer game on Microsoft Azure

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Every now and again, a really intriguing opportunity comes along that’s just impossible to resist. Age of Ascents is one such case. In the spring of 2013, Illyriad, a small UK games company with an existing massively-multiplayer real-time strategy game, approached Microsoft and said:

“We want to build a game that could host the world’s biggest on-line space battle. We think Microsoft Azure is the right platform to do this, but we aren’t sure how to design it. Can you help? ”

Of course we said “yes”.

Illyriad wanted to create a truly amazing looking game. Nothing new, right? What was different about this request is that Illyriad wanted the game to be browser based, allowing players to drop in and start playing, irrespective of their device, and without the need to install plug-ins, both of which are core requirements for casual gaming. They settled on JavaScript for the client side logic, WebGL for rendering the graphics—because it can use GPU processing, and they were using a Web socket for two-way communication between the browser and the back-end cloud system.

Illyriad was planning to build a game of a size and scope never before seen and Microsoft Azure is a great fit for online games such as this because it offers game developers a low cost, highly scalable, distributed computing platform, combined with a set of rich services to build upon that reduce development costs and on-going software maintenance work.

During the early stages they worked closely with Microsoft through a number of architectural design sessions to flesh out some of the key architectural aspects of the project, specifically around the scale out design that the game needed and how to implement it in a robust and predictable fashion.

The final stage of the development process took place at the Microsoft UK offices, where the code was refined, the system was put through stress testing and a TED program manager and Microsoft Technology Center team leader helped cut the code.

The server side logic was developed in C# and deployed into Microsoft Azure Platform as a Service VMs to enable fast and easy deployment. It was then stored on Microsoft Azure to persist the data.

The game needed to be highly responsive, so it was critical that this game could be partitioned across a number of data centres around the globe, with high bandwidth and low latency network access. Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager provided geo-routing to the closest data center and the Microsoft Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) cached data at edge nodes so players had the best gaming experience possible.

The final design consisted of five core services running on the Microsoft Azure platform:

- A gatekeeper service to check for an available free slot in the game, securing a web socket upon entry

- A routing service to manage data flowing to and from the browser via a web socket, as well as handling SSL off loading

- An interest management service to perform the physics engine calculations on spaceships and any other users interaction objects

- A high latency service to consolidate data across the whole universe and update users about far distant events

- A backplane to connect each of the routing/interest management clusters

Unlike most other systems, where the designers have some idea up front of how many users they need to support, with Age of Ascent the focus was on understanding how many users a particular configuration could support. The team focused on the concept of “scale units” as the smallest unit of deployment and tested how many users a given scale unit could support.

During a large scale public beta, when all the scale units were stood up around the globe on 748 cores, the system coped with an amazing 267 million application messages per second across the system. This would have handled in excess of 100,000 concurrent users in a single contiguous battle.

What started with a great idea became reality with Microsoft Azure and WebGL: a multi-massive online game realized with a small team in just a few months, and demonstrated through the scalability of Microsoft Azure. Illyriad CEO James Niesewand recently shared his company’s experience at Cloud Gaming USA but the architecture used can also be applied to non-gaming scenarios.

Do you have a great idea and need a platform to give it breath? Read this whitepaper and get started with Microsoft Azure.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 04, 2014
    Hello, This is really great ! :) What about bandwidth usage ? Can you share some data about how many MB / GB / TB are sent from Azure to users ? Thanks, Etienne

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2014
    The system is designed to use all of a machine’s bandwidth and it automatically reduces the number of updates a player receives when the server is running out of bandwidth. We did a huge amount of work to reduce the number and size of messages we were sending out; at one stage we calculated that for every bit we shaved off the update message size, we would reduce our total bandwidth requirements by 1GB per second across the server estate. This reduced the cost of the system and it also allowed us to host more players per server.

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2015
    Hey John, I'm working on a site leveraging the Azure Stack but I'm a newb and I'm a bit uncertain that some of my architecture is coming off as overkill (or underkill) in some parts. Is there a good resource to have someone coach me thru the finer points of when to leverage the certain tech to a best practice? The Cloud design patterns? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Tom.

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2015
    Thank you admin for sharing this content..gaming business is really awesome...you can even prepare games very quickly from here..: http://goo.gl/IvUyTL really helpful.

  • Anonymous
    October 30, 2015
    Hi John_Shewchuk, I like your idea, especially you want to build the game by using Java and graphic rendering in WebGL, since Unity3D is not anymore supported in Chrome browser.  WebGL can provide awesome graphics and make the game irresistible for playing. Is the game finished and ready for use? I would like to host the game on http://flashgamewinner.com/ with your approval, and with your team of course...