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.
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