Manycraft: Scaling minecraft to millions

Abstract

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.

Yardstick

“…Entities are all non-block objects in the game, including players, creatures, and certain physics-aware block-like objects such as sand and gravel 7 . Some entities, such as cows and wolves, are controlled by virtual agents that respond to other entities and to the terrain.…”

“…Considering only Minecraft-related work, relatively few performance studies exist to-date [7,8,5], and no benchmark has been proposed. In contrast, Yardstick extends and complements these studies, and proposes a benchmark.…”

“…Because Minecraft acts as a distributed simulation and database with high-frequency updates, it is not trivial to understand its performance and scalability. Relatively few performance studies focus on Minecraft-like services [7,8,5], and no public benchmarks for Minecraft-like games exist. Addressing this knowledge and tools gap, in this work we design, implement, and use Yardstick, a benchmark for Minecraft-like services.…”

OneSim

“…Messages have an appdata field to carry data specific to the virtual world to scale. This allowed Kiwano to be successfully employed for Manycraft [5], a distributed architecture to scale Minecraft, and HybridEarth [3], a social mixed reality world covering the whole planet.…”

“…Taking inspiration in Manycraft [5], an implementation to scale Minecraft, we have designed OneSim, a distributed architecture to run OpenSim [2] on top of Kiwano. In this architecture, where each user hosts a node, there is no limit in the number of users.…”