How do the devs of a huge MMORPG such as Runescape port the entire game to a mobile device?
In: Technology
The game used to be around back in the 90s and was built to work on old computers. New mobile devices are more powerful than those old big computers. Sure the game has grown some over time but its backbone was made to run on dial up and ancient computers.
The other part is all about how to make a multiplayer, live game work across multiple different platforms. I’m not great in that field but hopefully I answered part of the question haha
A multiplayer game has two main parts: the client – which runs on your device and handles graphics, sound, input etc – and the server, which handles most of the actual game logic, account logins, trading, microtransactions etc.
The client of MMORPG is typically relatively simple: the server tells the client what should be shown to the player, the client tells what the player did (e.g cast a spell, picked up an item, click to move to a different location), the server responds with what changed, and so on. To get RuneScape on mobile devices, Jagex only had to port the client, and to make sure all interfaces work correctly on a small touch screen. It’s still a lot of work, but the amount of the content in the game doesn’t change the amount of work required for porting that much.
It’s an extremely simple game to run, relatively speaking. RuneScape was released in 2001 and the computers it was originally meant to run on were quite primitive compared to today’s machines.
It’s also important to understand that MMORPGs aren’t fully hosted on your computer or mobile device, the only data that’s on your device is what’s necessary to gain access to the main servers that host the game itself.
Corrected dates.
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