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To shard or not to shard
As massive as we like our MMOs to be, the realities of modern networking have made sharding, the creation of identical game worlds hosted on separate servers, a practical necessity. Last week, Awen, Jumpgate Evolution community manager, elaborated on why the NetDevil team was looking at sharded server architecture. Understandably, players maintain that the ideal MMO minimizes sharding to allow players to interact with the greatest possible population of other users.As Awen explains, this isn't exactly possible with Jumpgate Evolution. While their spaceserver architecture--which is similar to EVE Online in that different regions of space can be hosted on different hardware and scaled to the server load--is technically capable of handling most of the challenges of going unsharded, the central-state server on which all the non-combat activity is managed, does have a physical limit. In a game that is focused on real-time space simulation, their focus is on minimizing latency, and that's why they're going to use sharding.
JGE gets new site design, re-apply for closed beta spots
The MMO gods giveth and they also taketh away. As the NetDevil team moves ever-closer to turning Jumpgate Evolution into a marketable retail product, they've undergone a fairly extensive site re-redesign, bringing them under the umbrella of publisher Codemasters. According to community manager Awen, the change was necessary in order to consolidate user information in one place in anticipation of the upcoming beta and retail releases. Unfortunately, this had the unintended side-effect of rendering the old JGE forums (and ostensibly the old beta applications) obsolete.If you want to get your name back in contention for the beta, you have to sign up for CodeM account, which can be done on the beta sign-up page. The forums are slightly more complicated, and require logging into the Codemaster forums first to get a display name. We'll be honest here, it's a bit of a cumbersome system, and we're not surprised in the least that JGE's dedicated community didn't take kindly to the change. Still, you gotta do what you gotta do if you want your launch to go smoothly, and they clearly thought this was a necessary step.
