Interview with Mike O'Brien and Pat Wyatt - Guild Wars Forums

Francis Crawford · Jun 09, 2007, 10:06 PM

From the "nice work if you can get it" department:

I had an opportunity to interview two of ArenaNet's founders and lead developers. My angle was unusual -- pretty hardcore technology, especially in areas that were analogous to business IT. The write-up is split across several blog posts:

http://www.monashreport.com/2007/06/...of-guild-wars/
http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-...of-guild-wars/
http://www.monashreport.com/2007/06/...rs-game-notes/

The last of the three is the one that may be of interest even if you don't care about technology, with notes on an auction house (we're not getting one) and cartographer titles. But all three may offer at least a little bit of insight into what's going on in the game we play.

Lord Sojar · Jun 09, 2007, 10:21 PM

interesting information you have there francis. thanks.

The Great Al · Jun 09, 2007, 10:58 PM

interesting, thanks!

semantic · Jun 09, 2007, 11:49 PM

14 million lines of code... Just trying to do a quick calculation here... Uh, anyone know the standard conversion between lines of code and pizza?

topdragon147 · Jun 10, 2007, 12:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semantic

14 million lines of code... Just trying to do a quick calculation here... Uh, anyone know the standard conversion between lines of code and pizza?

Not quite, look again:

Quote:

There are 4 ½ million total lines of code.

Darksun · Jun 10, 2007, 12:08 AM

4.5 ... that's less pizza than 14.. That's all I know.

Rhedd · Jun 10, 2007, 03:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darksun

4.5 ... that's less pizza than 14.. That's all I know.

But the exact same amount of Mountain Dew.

One of the great mysteries of the universe...

Miral · Jun 10, 2007, 03:20 AM

that’s a lot of BLOB-banging.

ischuros · Jun 10, 2007, 03:33 AM

I'd bang that blob

semantic · Jun 10, 2007, 03:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darksun

4.5 ... that's less pizza than 14.. That's all I know.

That hardly rates breadsticks then. Maybe breadsticks, but definitely no dipping sauce.

Longasc · Jun 10, 2007, 03:43 AM

A BLOB ate the auction house.

Still: Does not mean that there are no other ways to trade items and improve trade in general. Even Ingame Mail only (WoW style) would make my Guru Auctions much easier.

zwei2stein · Jun 10, 2007, 05:37 AM

~30 kb for chatacter info? including maps and storage... quite little actually.

This kinda kill off most "it would be too much data" arguments against various game improvements.

---

"We think it would be too hard" is strange reason for not implementing something so desired.

Sooner or later they will have to implement it anyway (for GW2 or something else), and having previous experience doing similar thing will help them a lot.

Besides, i cant seriously see hypothetical ex-anet emplyee explaining "didnt do it because i thought its too hard" to his new employers.

Francis Crawford · Jun 10, 2007, 10:43 AM

As noted in my post, they did find the need to go to a new level of DBMS scaling to implement the storage increase. I'm not totally sure WHY, given that it seems like there's less data even in the expanded account BLOB than in a typical character BLOB, but that's what they said. Anyhow, I really don't think these guys' future endeavors are going to be restricted by the acuteness of their OLTP SQL programming skills. That's rather unnecessarily snide.

As for why they haven't just hired addtional staff with the requisite skills, bought the hardware and software that would be needed, etc. -- well, you're free to compare/contrast with other enhancements and argue that they made a bad choice of priorities, but I'm not going down that road with you. They evidently made the architectural decision to be VERY simple-minded about their DBMS programming, especially as compared with the sophistication of the technology in so many other regards, and I'm not going to sit here on the other side of the country to say they are clearly wrong not to reverse that decision mid-stream.

Francis Crawford · Jun 10, 2007, 11:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Great Al

interesting, thanks!

You guys are most welcome!

LifeInfusion · Jun 10, 2007, 12:27 PM

Awesome information.

Quote:

There are a number of different categories of servers. These include: Authorization/log-in, game update download, actual gameplay, database cache, DBMS, several secondary game functions (e.g. guild membership, tournaments), and watchdogs overseeing the rest.

I have long suspected this.

SirJackassIII · Jun 10, 2007, 12:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zwei2stein

~30 kb for chatacter info? including maps and storage... quite little actually.

This kinda kill off most "it would be too much data" arguments against various game improvements.

Actually, I read it as "each BLOB is 10-30kb in size, and a character is built up out of several BLOBs, meaning that a character would be considerably bigger than 10-30kb, let alone an account.

If it were a mere 30kb/character, and assuming that the 3 million accounts sold are each individually and 4 char slots each, their database would be ~35 GB, which isn't that much. Now,w hen looking at the possibility that a character is 10 Blobs, it's 350 GB, still not that much but quite big for a normal user already. If it's 100, then it's a 3500 GB storage, which is pretty big.

Correct me if I'm wrong though.

*Inde* · Jun 10, 2007, 12:57 PM

Very nice information Francis. I've posted a link on our homepage. So thanks for the heads up!

Silly Warrior · Jun 10, 2007, 01:00 PM

I enjoyed reading how the Cartographer title works, pretty simple actually.

And they spelled out how Auction Houses wouldn't be possible, too much data to hold. Although we already sorta knew this, but I think this is the first time in an interview they shown how it wouldn't be possible.