Have you ever played a multiplayer game online? And have you ever wondered or thought beyond to see what might be the technology behind or how everything works?
Most online games adopt a client-server model. Typically in the online game server community, players install their version of a game in their computer, and these versions would be connected to game servers using the internet, for transmitting information. A Player’s inputs like key presses, mouse movements, clicks would be sent as inputs to the game servers via the internet, and the game server processes the information and sends back an updated state of you and your co-players.
Online Game Servers
When you are trying to play a game, you would enter your login information and credentials. Usually, multiple different servers are required to play these multiplayer games. In this stage, a login server collects your credentials, validates it with the information it possesses and once you select the character from the available list, on a successful validation it takes you appropriate server.
Also, online game servers typically work in such a fashion that failure of one doesn’t stop the player from playing his game. So it basically exists as multi servers distributed all throughout the world, that allows you to access it from anywhere and everywhere meanwhile maintaining an unobstructed path for gamers. Online game servers are pretty sophisticated these days; we can access and use them 24/7 without any problem, even the Best Knight Online Server is reaching everyone these days.
Once the gamer information is validated, he is connected, and the server keeps sending data about every action of the gamer to ensure he is online. If observed that there has been no response, the character you entered as, would be kicked from the game.
Online Gaming Experience
In a client-server based game, the game servers try to maintain balance using server-side advanced tricks to make everything balanced for associated players. The gamer activity takes subsequent time to reach the online server. Also, the server would take its time to translate this data and then share it with each of the other players in the game. However all such sending of data, the processing of it, happens so fast, and no one ever notices. This state is affected when the online game servers experience high latency.
Suppose your key press was to fire at the guy opposite to you, your device puts a period stamp on that order. Server processes by reading the time stamp, analyzing it and even though it has just passed, the server bounces back to the present and registers the hit, regardless of where the other player may be currently.
When an input of one player clashes with another, the server will accept one player’s input as true and it rejects the others as false. Going by that, a low-latency player would send data to the server faster than a high-latency player, which gives an edge to the lower-latency client as their input would be first received by the server. Online game servers that use the feature of lag compensation will even it out by rejecting some data from the high latency gamers.
However it is important to note that latency could also arise from players side- keyboard, mouse or internet speed and the overall general responsiveness – the time between player input and response from server – could be affected by various different elements- gamer or server CPU load, client update rate, and server tick rate etc.
Dedicated online gaming servers are built, tested for issues and then transported to the Data Centres. It ensures that from the server side, gamers have a flawless gaming experience and better quality. They use best practices in the gaming community to connect the data centers directly to the International Internet exchanges through several physically diverse routes.
The closer the vicinity of the players to the server, the better the latency and hence the whole gaming experience.
