A brief overview of possible solutions for online multiplayer games

Online multiplayer games are becoming extremely popular, and along with other commercial games they can attract thousands of users around the world.
Use of Macromedia, pardon, Adobe Flash to create of browser-based multiplayer games is a convenient and inexpensive solution that allows building games relatively fast.
As we can often see, our clients can’t make up their minds which technology to use for developing the server-side part of their applications. To make the choice easier, we prepared a short review of existing solutions.

Analysis of each and every solution would take too much time and space, so we will just concentrate on three most popular ones. Those are widely boosted Adobe (or Macromedia?) Flash Media Server, recent Red5 and popular SmartFoxServer.

Flash Media Server
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver

In a nutshell, Adobe offers the unique combination of traditional streaming media capabilities and a flexible development environment for creating and delivering innovations.

FMS is:

streaming audio/video content

recording streams from clients

live stream publishing

shared objects and event broadcast

server-side JavaScript as scripting language

Hardware Requirements:

Pentium 4, 3.2GHz (Dual Xeon or higher recommended)

1 GB of RAM

1 Gigabit Ethernet Card

As you see, FMS is designed rather for video and audio conferences, than for online gaming. Way too much it is cumbersome and particular what hardware you use. Server-side JavaScript applies great restrictions on the Server’s technical capabilities.

FMS doesn’t feature in-built room support and developer has to seat users into the rooms manually. Of course, it’s just a small fry, but such trivial details are especially valuable for rapid application development.

The greatest disadvantage of FMS is its price – $40,000 for enterprise edition. This price is unreasonably high and you’d better buy yourself a new Cadillac DTS for same kind of money.

Red5
http://osflash.org/red5

This open source solution is a recently appeared alternative to FMS. You shouldn’t be scared by its beta status – today many advanced technologies have this label on them, which doesn’t prevent them from working flawlessly. For you, this means stable income.

Version 0.4 of Red5 doesn’t already yield to FMS with respect of functionality.

Today, Red5 is:

streaming audio/video content

recording streams from clients

live stream publishing

shared objects and event broadcast

AMF remoting

Java as scripting language

Hardware Requirements:

Pentium 4, 3.2GHz (Dual Xeon or higher recommended)

1 GB of RAM

1 Gigabit Ethernet Card

On this configuration Red5 can handle 600-1000 concurrent connections. CPU-load will be around 60% or so.

A great advantage of Red5 is possibility to use Java (and it means we can use JRuby / Groovy) for writing server-side part of multimedia application. This gives us cart blanche to implement any fabulous ideas such as billing to track how long player is online.

The most attractive thing about Red5 is its price. Red5 is free. So you’d better go and buy a Cadillac DTS if you’ve got dough. Just like FMS, Red5 is designed for audio/video streaming at first hand. But its potentialities for game development are also very great. We think that Red5 is suitable for building very complex multiplayer games like MMORPG with 1000-1500 online players.
For simpler games, this tool is too complex, though.

SmartFoxServer
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/

A budget solution for rapid development of multi-user applications and games.
Small and simple SmartFoxServer can do just one thing – broadcast game events but it does its job very and very well.

Zone support allows having many different games on one and the same server.

In-built room support reduces time for the application development.

Server side extensions can be created using Actionscript or Java

Hardware Requirements:
SmartFoxServer can’t do streaming of audio/video, and thanks to it can run on even old machines – you can’t say this about FMS or Red5.
(http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/benchmarks.htm)

A great advantage of SmartFoxServer is its professionally written and well documented API. It already contains many handy things that you should usually write for each game separately (like kick/ban user from chat and so on). We, as developers, value such dribs and drabs. They fasten the development, hence save your money so that you could eventually buy yourself a Cadillac DTS.
In our opinion, SmartFoxServer has a very well-balanced price – 2000 Euros for unlimited number of connections.

Conclusion

We believe that for solving any task you should use a suitable tool. For example, to cut bread we prefer a kitchen knife, not a surgical scalpel.
Therefore, we recommend SmartFoxServer for games of low and middle complexity, and Red5 for really complex stuff.
Utilization of FMS for building multiplayer games is pointless in our opinion due to great problems during development of server side part of applications and its awfully high price.

But actually, popularity of your game depends not on a server technology, but on an IDEA. Game industry is full of precedents when technically perfect games collapsed thanks to bad gameplay and mediocre plot. Thus, we recommend you to concentrate on the IDEA for your game, and let us, specialists, solve all the technical issues.