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Abstract

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Minecraft is a popular game with more than 20 million paying users and many more playing the free version. However, in multiplayer mode, only a few thousand users can play together. Our measurements show that, even reducing the landscape, i.e., the map, to a uniform flat land, a server cannot host significantly more users.For a common use case, when players cannot modify the map, we have designed and implemented Manycraft, an architecture to scale the number of users. Minecraft protocol messages are of three kinds: control, entity and map. In our approach, Kiwano, a distributed infrastructure for scaling virtual worlds, takes care of the entity related messages while the others are processed by a Minecraft server assigned to the player.

In today's virtual worlds, even in the massively multi-player games, the number of avatars together in a virtual place barely reaches thousands. Regarding the billions of users dwelling the web, this is astonishingly low. In this paper we identify spatial indexation as the bottleneck that impedes scalability and we propose Kiwano, a distributed system to scale up to millions and more. In order to split the load, Kiwano dynamically divides the space in zones, each having a server maintaining a spatial index of all moving objects within the zone. This allows to timely compute which objects are in the neighborhood of any avatar. Thus, knowing its immediate environment, the client is able compute the local scene.