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http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25307
Platform services was the next group detailed, incorporating technologies for all of the games across the company, Macintosh development, QA, localization, and QA for in-house elements. There are some 245 people in this department, one of the largest in the company. Brack drilled down into the QA group, noting their sometimes inglorious role to test every patch and gold master. The size of their workload continually grows. World of Warcraft kicked off with some 2600 quests. They added 2700 quests in the Burning Crusade expansion and another 2350 quests in the Wrath of the Lich King drop. A total of 7650 quests in the game makes it very challenging to maintain and track all of the game's content. The QA group has tackled some 180,000 bugs since the game launched.
Localization translates and culturalizes World of Warcraft into 10 different languages, and Pearce notes that there are actually more people playing WoW outside of the English language servers than inside. The capability to do all of this work in-house is incredibly important, and as a result they have no 'partial' localizations. It's not just translation and localization, they view a new language as an ongoing commitment to all the players on those servers. They actually have a dedicated producer working with this group to ensure that they have all the resources they need. Choosing to launch in a new language is a decision they don't make lightly, and Pearce points out that this group currently tracks 360,000 text strings and some 2 million words.
The technical services group is dedicated to getting every patch to the players. Patch 3.1 pushed some 4.7 petabytes of data to the players. Brack points out that they actually have to do some 10 patches for any given patch they do because of the numerous languages they support. QA has to test every patch they release, and there are actually 126 types of patches (streaming, universal, incremental) that all have to be updated and supported. A monumental task, Brack says.
The Blizzard Online Network services group is Pearce's next focus. A huge group, they have data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. He points out the picture of the GNOC in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers.
International offices handle local market conditions, games that are released in other countries, and the occasional censorship issue prompted by a government. They also handle local marketing as well, ensuring it meets with regional sensibilities. There are hundreds of people in all these offices across the globe. Brack went on to talk about the customer support staff, a group with 2,056 game masters, 340 billing managers, and a host of other background staffers. These tireless staffers also work from locations around the world, ensuring that any local variations in culture (or the game) are respected.
Pearce then focused on the Online Services team, a group that includes the important gaming service Battle.net. Pearce gave a quick overview of the many new features coming to the service such as Battle.net-wide friends, integrated billing, and a number of other new features. Online Services specifically handle login technologies and billing elements for World of Warcraft. There are now 12,000,000 Battle.net accounts, and they look forward to the eventual seamless integration of that community and the WoW community.
程序代码量有 550 万行之多，程序开发人员有 32 位，当然都是顶级工程师。平台服务部有 245 人，其中 QA 部门自从游戏上线后处理了 18 万个 BUG，惊人！程序差不多似乎千锤百炼了。
《魔兽世界》目前使用大约 13250 台刀片服务器 ，75000 个核的CPU ，内存使用超过 112TB 。服务器数其实并不是特别庞大(国内有些游戏公司，比如盛大，服务器数量也差不多这样)。 不过相信随着接下来几款重量级游戏升级版本的推出，服务器数量会暴增。数据大约有 1.3 PB。服务器分布在 10 个 IDC ，不到 70 个人运营，人力产出很惊人。维护战网的人有 150 个左右。这里面有个有趣的观点是，游戏公司对于服务的可用性要求的看法与电子商务公司的并非一致，只要不是每周都有问题，一个月遇到一次问题似乎不大。算不上致命的问题，应该是用户忠诚度更高的缘故吧。看看国内的戏剧性起伏就知道了。
另外，据我了解，魔兽计费的数据库是采用的 Oracle RDBMS 。2006 年的时候大概是跑在 RedHat 上，单个 DB 超过 1T 的数据，且据说要迁移到 HP 平台。但还不了解如何跨多个 IDC 同步 DB 数据
我在想 九城->网易 真是不小的工程啊~
[ 本帖最后由 zglloo 于 2009-11-29 21:36 编辑 ] |
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发表于 2009-11-29 19:49:45
发表于 2009-11-29 20:57:35