How are video game servers created and why do some work better than others?
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A server is essentially just a normal computer that is always connected to the network (in that case the internet) in order to provide it’s service. As a result of that dedicated servers might have less priority on external hardware like keyboard, mouse, monitors and less focus on graphic cards and whatnot but instead have more processing power and more focus on connection speed and so on. So “normal” computers with different priorities in specs.
And they just open a game for others to join. I mean in the earlier days players would host their own online games, though that means that if you had a shitty computer or internet connection everybody would suffer from that, so now bigger companies might have dedicated servers that do nothing else but hosting games for the players to join.
And hosting a game technically just means that you run the game locally and have port open so that other players can get information to and from the game. So idk let’s say you want to play chess then you’d make a move on your board, send that move to the server, who would update the positions on it’s board, send an ok signal to your opponent, they would make a move send it to the server, who again would validate it and sent it back to you and so on. So each of the players and the server would run their own version of the game and would just sent updated positions to each other.
And I just used chess as an example because it’s simplistic in it’s user interface, but the same works for MMORPGs, FPS, Racing, Strategy and whatnot. It’s all just game state updates being sent from one computer to another.
Edit: Though obviously the more players you host and the more complex the game the better the spec of your server should be if it wants to keep up with everything that is happening.
There are various kind of game servers that will serve different purposes, and it depends on the way the game is setup.
With some games, the server is doing a lot of the logic. In a game like World of Warcraft, your client is just sending instructions to the server about what movement you’re doing and what abilities you’re using, and then the server handles all the logic of the effects, like deciding how much damage you did to an enemy.
With other games like Destiny, the servers are handling connecting players together, but then the players directly connect to one another and handle their interaction that way. One player gets randomly chosen for their client to handle stuff like enemy AI logic, reducing the need for persistent servers. Servers will still do things like handle “I killed an enemy” events and generate rewards, but they do so asynchronously to the actual gameplay.
Some of these kinds of servers have more load that will scale up with more players, and you can’t really use any kind of autoscaling very well without adding another layer on top of all of it. The ones that can scale nicely will tend to do better.
This has as many reasons as there are games out there. Each game implements different techniques to manage traffic and processing load.
Different games/modes require different methods of handling data, some more demanding than others. FPS games for example have “Ticks”
Ticks are the rate at which the game updates. this is especially important for fast paced games. CSGO for example running on official servers have 64 Ticks per second, which means it sends information to all palyers 64 times in a second.
Some will argue this is bad, since 1-2 ticks more could be sufficient to be faster than your opponent. So some Custom servers bump this limit to 128, making them far more accurate, but more demanding as well. (hence its not a thing on official servers).
of course as others have mentioned, games implement either thin or thick clients. Which means that the load is either on the clients side or the server side. Now both of these methods can be a disadvantage on their own (for the performance of the client or the server, or anti-cheat issues).
In addition, traffic matters as well. Servers that are hosted farther away will perfrom worse than the ones closer, or the ones farther away will actually perform better, due to low load.
Its a ton of variables that play into this, all of which can either better or worsen for some individuals.
A server is a normal computer that’s always on. The video game server is a piece of software running on the server that the players can communicate with, uploading and downloading any changes to the game state.
You should try hosting your own server on your computer, Minecraft Java is a easy place to start. If you don’t have a computer you can leave on all the time, you could get a Raspberry Pi, which is a small, cheap, low-power computer.
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